Intel announced new chips for incredible battery life | Hacker News Reader

Intel announced new chips for incredible battery life

cultofmac.com

11 pointsriledhel11 comments

So many problems with the headline and details.

"24 hours" figure seems extrapolated from "All day use". No where that I could find did Intel say "24 hours". Just that slide that says "all day use".

"Unlimited battery life" is based on the assumption that you could recharge your MacBook using ambient light. There was a demo supposedly showing a new processor running off a lightbulb/ambient light. A macbook, however, has this thing called a monitor that would also have to be powered.

I think you are missing the even more important detail. These are all idle power consumption numbers. Intel is just telling us they've found a way to use less power when doing next to nothing. There's no claim you will see a similar magnitude improvement when rendering video or compiling a kernel.

This feature is probably related to some kind of new feature in Windows 8 where tweets and emails would continue downloading even when the laptop is asleep with a low power status LED/display or sounds to notify the user.

It is certainly not an indication we are going to start seeing i5 processors in cell phones in the next three years.

The solar panel demo was actually doing something like rendering video, though I believe you're correct that the panel wasn't powering the display device.

Every new technology generation seems to make claims of revolutionary battery life, and yet it seems we're still hovering around 3-4 hours of practical usage, same as the old Mac Portable from 1990.

I'll believe it when I see it.

And even if there are such savings, Apple will use them to make the battery smaller and the laptop thinner instead of actually increasing battery life.

It amazes me that real-world battery technology hasn't really progressed within the last decade. Much of the increased battery life has been reducing the power consumption of processors.

That said, I'm with you. I really don't listen to these announcements because it's more hype than reality.

You can make a battery with much higher density, but it's not stable. Your battery could last 12 hours, but it might burst into flames before then.

This is why I said 'real-world' technology. I'm aware that there is a lot of testing in labs regarding this but it hasn't made it into the consumer's hands.

What I mean to say is, we may have hit a physical limit with our current approach (and price range).

Also, the requirement to "recharge" the batteries really decreases the energy density. Fuel cells allow more energy density, but making people "fill up" their laptops with fuel never really caught on.

I don't know why you chose to post that blatant Mac fanboy blogspam instead of the original Gizmodo article.

http://gizmodo.com/5839806/intels-next-chip-will-run-your-la...

It is indeed blogspam, the cult article we have here breathlessly implies that only Apple products will get this technology. I've become extremely hostile to the Apple bubble recently as it's gone from massive historical revisionism about certain inventions - and ignorant columnists who don't even use things outside their sphere - to actively using ridiculous patents to stop, to my mind, superior products.

I don't like Cult of Mac, as it is a very classless site, but where did you get the idea that only Apple will get this technology? The only difference I saw between the Gizmodo and the Cult of Mac article was how Apple may use the technology. They even mentioned that Intel demos were running on a PC. It is an Apple blog and I would expect the same of any site this narrow in news.

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