Turbo Battery
Intel Turbo Boost Hits Laptop Battery Life
Intel Turbo Boost hits laptop battery life
Laptop users with a new system based on Intel's latest Core i5 and Core i7 chips may need to take care of what applications they choose to run when using it on battery power.
The Core i5 and i7 processors introduced at the start of 2010 ship with a feature called Turbo Boost technology, designed to improve performance. It does this by ramping up the clock speed of the processor whenever the operating system calls for maximum performance, as explained by this excerpt from Intel's web site;
However, it turns out that that Turbo Boost does this even if the laptop is operating from battery power, which can dramatically shorten the battery life of the system, depending upon what it is being used for.
I found this out while testing some laptops for review that use the new Core i5 and Core i7 chips. In order to gauge toshiba pa 3250 battery life, I use a benchmark tool that keeps the system busy while simultaneously tracking how long the laptop has been running on battery power.
Few laptops live up to the vendor's claims on battery life (as a general rule of thumb, take the maker's quoted life and halve it), but one laptop in particular kept showing a battery score so much shorter than the specified figure that further investigation seemed appropriate.
Looking at the processor, I downloaded an application available from Intel, the Turbo Boost Monitor application, which gives a visual indication of when Turbo Boost is active.
Using this, it was easy to see that the benchmark - which uses OpenGL to display an animated graphic - was causing Turbo Boost to kick in and up the speed of the chip from 2.53GHz to 2.79GHz.
Unfortunately, it was staying at this speed all the time, which seems to be the reason why the laptop was only able to last for about 1 hour 30 minutes on battery power, when the specifications quoted a life of up to 8 hours.
Sadly, Turbo Boost is not configurable by the end user. Some laptops may allow you to turn it on or off in the Bios, but this was not the case with the evaluation laptop in question.
Quoting from Intel's web site again;
Of course, users should expect that running demanding applications will shorten battery life, but it is entirely possible that Turbo Boost will kick in if you are simply watching a DVD on your laptop, for example, and a battery life of 1 hour 30 minutes will not be long enough to see the entire movie in many cases.
So, while it may seem blindingly obvious that something like Turbo Boost would affect toshiba pa3399u-1bas battery life, that just leaves the question of why on Earth Intel decided this would be a great feature for a laptop chip, and why is there no way to control its behaviour, other than disabling it in the Bios?
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