3 ms·

I wonder why tablets like the Transformer has such a good battery life. Are x86 processors such power hogs?

• zanny 14y ago
  Tegra 3 has a TDP between 5 and 20 watts depending on load. For comparison, a mobile Trinity APU has a TDP between 15 and 25 watts. So not really. It is a more complicated set of issues. Battery size, motherboard buses that require power, a physical spinning disk vs flash memory (the latter takes much less juice) the physical screen size requiring refresh, the amount of memory (each channel is another voltage sink). Mostly I'd say its because tablets use massive batteries for longeivty, and laptops forfeit battery size for other features. Also, a benchmarked Tegra 3 gets soundly beat by that Trinity APU in intensive CPU tests. The clock speed on a Tegra 3 in my tablet is 1.7 ghz but that APU can run at 2, and has a more complex pipeline to boot. Mostly it is because a desktop OS wastes a ton of resources. Windowing, composting, and just desktop apps in general are made wasteful because clocks and memory were not necessarily plentiful in laptop form factors, but weren't as precious as in tablets, so the modern web browser or media player needs to "un-learn" 5 years of bloat to work well on a tablet.