4 ms·
Keeping WiFi and BT on usually means you're keeping the PCIe and USB links on (or at least waking up frequently), which means you're also preventing the process
by wtallis 4y ago
Keeping WiFi and BT on usually means you're keeping the PCIe and USB links on (or at least waking up frequently), which means you're also preventing the processor from staying in a low-power state where all the IO is power-gated. Once the display is powered off, getting the rest of the components to be properly asleep can reduce idle power by another order of magnitude.
- astrange 4y ago“On” is a UI state though; the actual power state of the hardware is up to it, and its idle power usage can be managed by things like offloading idle tasks to the wifi SoC so they don’t have to communicate with the rest of the machine. That’s more well known for performance (where faster Ethernet interfaces do increasingly more offloading) but it works for power savings too.
- yjftsjthsd-h 4y agoYeah, if you're offloading things to the wifi SoC, then you're giving it more power than I want to be spending when the machine is supposed to be asleep.
- astrange 4y agoThe power use could be something like less than 1% battery a day though - I have smart home thermostats that are “on the network” all the time but run on battery for months, and that’s a much smaller battery. That’s a reasonable thing to think about if you’re a wifi driver engineer. It’s not reasonable if you’re a hobbyist responsible for a single install in one laptop. It’s not really advancing the state of the art here.
- wtallis 4y agoIt sounds like you're speaking mostly about how hardware could work, without regard to how current PC hardware actually does work.
- astrange 4y agoThis is how the laptops being discussed in the article actually do work. If PCs don’t work that way complain to Broadcom or nearest motherboard OEM. They have much worse problems though, like only just getting efficiency cores.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]