Battery Life Finally Becomes a Positive for AMD

There’s been lots of talk about how new chips from Intel and Advanced Micro Devices are good at chores like handling video. But one of the biggest stories for AMD may turn out to be battery life.

The Sunnyvale, Calif., company’s chips for laptop computers have often lagged Intel’s in power consumption, which influences how long a portable PC can run between charges. But at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show it is AMD that is being most vocal about the energy-efficiency improvements of its new chips, part of a new breed that combine a microprocessor and graphics circuitry on the same piece of silicon.

“It’s just a huge injection of battery life,” says John Taylor, AMD director of client and software product marketing.

How huge? One member of what AMD calls its new “accelerated processing units,” using a chip code-named Ontario, offers up to 12 hours and 15 minutes of battery life; another, code-named Zacate, offers up to 10 hours, 68 minutes, AMD says. Earlier chip combinations based on comparable technology were rated by the company at up to 7.5 hours and up to 7 hours of battery life.

Taylor is quick to point out that these are numbers while a PC is on but “at rest,” as opposed to being actively used, and far more than users will ordinarily experience. There is no standard measurement for battery life under typical usage, so AMD isn’t quick to try to supply more-realistic numbers.

In any case, the direction is good news for consumers of low-priced laptops, which is the market AMD is targeting with the new chip that are formally known by the moniker Fusion and the specific designations E-Series and C-Series. The company says it expects computers based on the new products to be announced by Acer, Asus, Dell, Fujitsu, HP, Lenovo, MSI, Samsung, Sony and Toshiba.

Rick Bergman, the senior vice president and general manager of AMD’s products group, proclaims in a press release that the Fusion chips “are, quite simply, the greatest advancement in processing since the introduction of the x86 architecture more than forty years ago.”