Articles about low power

Nvidia was a few years ago a major player in the desktop motherboard chipset market, but Intel managed to push them away, so right now Nvidia is strong in the ARM SoC (System on a chip) market, where the Tegra 2 seems to be the processor of choice in 2011 tablets.You know already of the Kal-El project, a codename for the commercial Tegra 3, the first quad-core processor for mobile devices [see our articles here]. As the official launch date approaches, more info about the hardware architectu...

Only days after Acer's press event announcing company's entry in the tablet arena, some info surfaces the web that the 10 inch tablet powered by Windows 7, due to launch in February 2011, will use an AMD chipset, not the usual Intel Atom, found in the vast majority of  x86 mobile devices sold these days. Apparently Acer will use the dual core C-50 Ontario CPU with built in Radeon 6250 graphics. This combination should give Atom a run for its money, especially since the whole package will consum...

As you already know, the component that draws the most power from your portable gadgets is the screen. Sure it's nice to have a bright and colorful display, but this comes at the expense of insufficient battery life. A new type of display, that was just announced, promises to solve once and for all the problem with power consumption and, as a byproduct, to bring better sunlight legibility and more vivid colors to portable devices.The display is called b, as it uses ambient light (not backlig...

The most annoying thing in current LCD displays is the sunlight legibility, of the lack of it, to be precise. Today it's next to impossible to buy a mobile device with a good LCD display, that can be used outdoors. If you add to this equation 'low power' you limit chances to get one such device to near zero. I say near because this year Pixel Qi proved a dual mode screen can be produced, one that enters a low power grayscale mode when you push it to maximum contrast and luminosity.Unfortunat...

We all know that the biggest component consuming power in today's mobile devices is the screen. We all like nice colors, great viewing angles and such but we don't realize how much this is affecting battery life. E-Ink is one of the pioneer companies that invested a lot in low power displays like their eInk lineup consisting of monochrome displays that don't need power to keep an image on the screen, but only when the image changes.As imagined, those kind of screens are ideal for eBook reade...

I've always complained that the Atom CPU is only good for low power consumption. You can't actually do any work on it because it's too slow. Now Intel seems to really take this problem into consideration with the Atom N550, the first dual core Atom specially designed for tablets and netbooks. The first benchmarks show the new CPU almost doubles the performance of the N450 Pinetrail model in ZIP archiving benchmark. That's because of the two physical cores and the two virtual ones provided by Hyp...

Notion Ink Adam is one of the most awaited tablets of 2010, mostly because of its Pixel Qi screen that allows the device to function in two modes: normal LCD and eReader with backlight off, which reduces screen consumption to around 0.5 watts. Recently there were rumors about the device being delayed by manufacturing problems and lack of investors. Today the founder of Notion Ink announced that there are no problems (they have investors willing to finance up to 100.000 units produced every month...

We've talked about Pixel Qi dual mode screen a wile ago, highlighting its extraordinary characteristics: normal LCD mode and low power eReader mode when viewed outdoors. It seems that Pixel Qi has some production problems, meaning they can't find a factory to manufacture their displays. Another competitor, this time a traditional display manufacturer, has managed to build a prototype similar to Pixel Qi, called CPT transflexive display, one that can operate at 50% the power requirements of curre...