Posts tagged with Hal Speed

A thought occurred to me as I filled my car up with gas recently. Afterwards I did what I always do: reset the trip counter to zero, which I do because even though the vehicle tells me how many miles until empty, that number is almost never accurate given where (or how) I might be driving.  My car typically indicates 550 miles to empty, while my trip counter on average shows I actually get about 375 miles.

I think we all accept the idea that there is not one answer to the question, “how many miles to the gallon?” We understand you need to ask whether the reference is to city or highway miles.  As a member of my team puts it, there are “guard-rails” between which we know our cars operate.

In the same vein, I think we are talking about battery life all wrong. In our discussions at AMD and our messaging on the subject, we’re going about it in the wrong way.  And we’re not alone – see Rob Enderle’s thoughts on the matter here.

Have you experienced a difference between your devices’ actual battery life relative to what the manufacturer tells you to expect?  I thought so.

I find people often ask what my battery life is on my 3G iPhone, and I tell them I don’t know because I always try and keep it charged. If you ask Apple they will tell you the 3G model has 300 hours of standby time but only about 5 hours of talk time – and less it you activate Wi-Fi, GPS or other features.

Given this, it’s interesting to look at how PCs are rated on battery life. Typically you only get one number ― and most people have no idea what that number really means in terms of how they will actually use the device: is it city or highway, talk-time or standby? More to the point: does this number represent the PC’s battery life with the machine in use, or sitting idle?

Most PC battery time metrics are achieved by looking at how long the battery lasted running a benchmark called MobileMark® 2007 (MMO7). This is a rating of battery life when your PC is running on average less than 5% utilized – or fundamentally idle. Most PC makers don’t even turn Wi-Fi on for this test. Is this realistic based on how you use your PC?

Like highway or standby – most MM07-based battery numbers are the “best case scenarios” in which your machine is doing nothing. Not that the MM07 benchmark isn’t useful; it’s just that it only tells part of the story. It’s just one guard-rail ― shouldn’t there be another? 

If I want to know how long my battery is going to last, I want to know how long it’s going to last with me using it, not with it idle or doing nothing.

For this reason, we propose that the industry needs another test to measure battery life, and we would like to propose adoption of the industry-standard 3DMark06 benchmark. The reason I like the sound of 3DMark06 is that it uses more graphics, it runs on Microsoft Windows XP and Windows Vista, and, most importantly, it runs the machine at a higher overall system utilization than other industry-standard benchmarks.

I asked my team to dig a bit on this and we decided to test some PCs with both MM07 and 3DMark06 and see what the results would be. See the table below with some of the relevant test details. AMD’s Hal Speed is also posting a blog to show you what the test scripts were so you can do this for yourself.

*numbers represent battery life in minutes

As you can see, on similar machines, while the typical idle metric on one machine shows that we may have an underperforming system, when that machine is in use it achieves similar if not identical battery life.

Are we suggesting people should abandon the MM07 idle metric for the 3DMark06 busy metric? Actually: no. Like talk and standby or city and highway, we think both should be cited to provide the buyer with a more informed purchasing process.  Perhaps next time we test using MMO7 we’ll enable Wi-Fi to make it a more realistic, “active,” reading.

In any event, when we talk about battery life in the future, we intend to give both MMO7 and 3DMark06 — and we hope others will follow suit.

Now the cynics and the wiser-than-thou will tell you that we are only doing this because our idle battery life is not as good or that we should use something other than 3DMark06. To them I say:  Let’s engage in a discussion, and if you find a better test on “active” use than 3DMark06, we would love to discuss it with you!  Let’s work together.

The issue is we are not being entirely honest with users about what PC battery life they can expect to actually experience.  Shouldn’t we, as an industry, try and fix that?

We think so.

Nigel Dessau is senior vice president and chief marketing officer at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such links sites and no endorsement is implied.