The x86 Power Myth Busted: In-Depth Clover Trail Power Analysis
by Anand Lal Shimpi on December 24, 2012 5:00 PM ESTWireless Web Browsing Battery Life Test
For our final test I wanted to provilde a snippet of our 2013 web browsing battery life test to show what its power profile looked like. Remember the point of this test was to simulate periods of increased CPU and network activity, that could correspond to more than just browsing the web but interacting with your device in general.
Those bursts of power consumption are the direct result of our battery life test doing its job. That the tasks should take roughly the same time to complete on both devices, making this a good battery life test by not penalizing a faster SoC with more work.
Note that the W510's curve ends up lagging behind Surface RT's curve a bit by the end of the chart. This is purely because of the W510's garbage WiFi implementation. I understand that a fix from Acer is on the way, but it's neat to see something as simple as poorly implemented WiFi showing up in these power consumption graphs.
I always think about GPU power consumption while playing a game, but going through this experiment gave me a new found appreciation for non-gaming GPU power efficiency. Simply changing what's displayed on screen does burn an appreciable amount of power.
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yyrkoon - Tuesday, December 25, 2012 - link
same OS, different HAL.Krysto - Monday, December 24, 2012 - link
Good job comparing a last-gen chip like Tegra 3 with Intel's latest Atom chip, Anand. Just because Microsoft is too slow to adopt a cutting edge ARM chip for Windows, doesn't mean Intel is now "toe to toe" with ARM.Compare Nexus 10 and iPad 4 with Clover Trail in GPU performance and price, and then let me know how it went.
croc - Monday, December 24, 2012 - link
People that tend to use terms like 'fact' also seem to be such complete tools...Barnassey - Monday, December 24, 2012 - link
My main thing is why is anand comparing a QUAD core cpu to a DUAL core With hyper-threading cpu? Of course the hyperthreading cpu will use less power.Reikon - Monday, December 24, 2012 - link
Because the dual core CPU still outperforms the quad core one?Barnassey - Monday, December 24, 2012 - link
No because the power consumption will be different. Thats the point im trying to make. Plus anand has shown hes a little biased over the years.r1cky4n - Monday, December 24, 2012 - link
a single atom core is not equivalent to a single a9 coreThe important metric is performance/watt, not watt/core
sseemaku - Tuesday, December 25, 2012 - link
So you want them to disable one of the channels in memory controller and reduce the cache size to match tegra3 for a fair comparison?tempestglen - Monday, December 24, 2012 - link
It seems that "GPU Workload" and ""Photo Enhance" CPU consumption on summary table are inconsistent with diagrams.tempestglen - Monday, December 24, 2012 - link
It also seems that Kraken test diagram of total platform power is just same as cpu only diagram. I guess anandtech posted a wrong picture.Merry Christmas!