271–280 of 329 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
As far as I know they still use the Darwin kernel in iOS. Which means it scales from desktops and servers all the way down to phones... That seems pretty general purpose to me.
The Darwin kernel scales down as far as an HDMI adapter SoC[1] [1] https://www.panic.com/blog/2013/03/the-lightning-digital-av-...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It might be a guess, but it's one that we know is almost certainly correct. Windows has an enormous amount of legacy code, and behaviors that were perfectly fine even just a few years ago now can devastate battery life. Windows is an eminently pluggable system, fully able to take advantage of low power states in hardware, ACPI, etc. Fundamentally there is no reason for it to be a power pig. But it is, because the cho…
> "almost certainly correct". Yes, that's why I wrote it's an obvious guess. > Windows has an enormous amount of legacy code, and behaviors that were perfectly fine even just a few years ago now can devastate battery life. Ok, you seem to know this. Can you tell us now EXACTLY what legacy code is there in Windows that causes the "busy-loops" and bad battery performance? > But it is, because the choices made in it wer…
Yet the empirical evidence is that on the same hardware, with the same capacity to preserve battery, and on similar workloads, Windows yields a much worse battery life. Which has to come down to the operating system not sleeping when it should sleep, and doing more when it could do less. Anyone who has ever programmed ever knows that the primary cause of such work is polling.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It might be a guess, but it's one that we know is almost certainly correct. Windows has an enormous amount of legacy code, and behaviors that were perfectly fine even just a few years ago now can devastate battery life. Windows is an eminently pluggable system, fully able to take advantage of low power states in hardware, ACPI, etc. Fundamentally there is no reason for it to be a power pig. But it is, because the cho…
> "almost certainly correct". Yes, that's why I wrote it's an obvious guess. > Windows has an enormous amount of legacy code, and behaviors that were perfectly fine even just a few years ago now can devastate battery life. Ok, you seem to know this. Can you tell us now EXACTLY what legacy code is there in Windows that causes the "busy-loops" and bad battery performance? > But it is, because the choices made in it wer…
Because Apple have custom ACPI methods for cutting power to unused components and Windows doesn't know how to call them.
Sony manage to get pretty amazing battery life from their new Vaio Pro 11 and 13 models. I am really tempted to get one as it does pretty much everything I want from a high powered laptop and the price is pretty good in my opinion.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I seriously doubt it's x86 baggage. You don't pay a battery life penalty for code you don't execute.
True. What is fun is that you could imagine a technology where you would (powering down some unused memory chips), but I don't know if this would be worth it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don’t know much about semiconductors, but Apple started shipping x86 Macs when Intel had just switched to the Core architecture. I can imagine that Apple didn’t bother to write for technologies that were present in earlier Intel chips. Apple has only shipped Intel-powered computers with Core and Xeon chipsets (the first gen AppleTV ran on a Pentium M, though). “The Core microarchitecture is a major architectural re…
http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-8/what-is-pae-nx-... Microsoft didn't bother either. SSE2 and PAE requirements mean a Netburst or later Intel Chip. (or K8 or later from AMD). So Windows8 requires a relatively modern chip, and ignores the earlier ones. IIRC, Windows 8 and 8.1 take advantage of the new P-States in Haswell / Clover Trail. (And connected standby on Clover Trail definitely shows that Microsoft…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sony manage to get pretty amazing battery life from their new Vaio Pro 11 and 13 models. I am really tempted to get one as it does pretty much everything I want from a high powered laptop and the price is pretty good in my opinion.
Though they did that by adding an additional battery.
I see and agree with the larger point he's making, but a 42% increase in a single generation strikes me as huge , not just "decent." And this? If you want a device that delivers maximum battery life for light web browsing, there's no question that you should get something with an Apple logo on it. Except the top two champs on the Anandtech chart - champs which are way ahead of a fairly close pack - don't have such lo…
That being said, the 13" MBA has the best battery life out of everything on that page. I also imagine the Shield is somewhat compromised for web browsing, given it's been optimized to be a gaming machine.
The issue has to be engineering. Is it a case of too much distance between the HW and SW people?
> The issue has to be engineering. Did... did you just invent the technology version of Fr Jack's "That would be an ecumenical matter."
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's interesting to compare this to what I have read (and experienced) about Linux vs. Windows battery life on laptops. Maybe things have changed in the last few years, but it used to be that Linux delivered far worse battery life than Windows.
As of my last experiences, it still does.