Industry 'not entirely honest' about battery life

The industry is not being "entirely honest with users about battery life,” according to Nigel Dessau, a senior executive at AMD.

But, thankfully, he has has come up with a plan to try and fix the problem.

In a blog post written by Dessau, he wrote that the battery life totals cited by manufacturers for laptops have nothing to do with the actual time of battery life.

He disclosed that AMD, along with other companies, get their battery performance figures from software called MobileMark 2007.

MM07 is designed to go through a few common software programs but never fully tests the laptop, and in most scenarios the software is run with the computer’s Wi-Fi technology turned off.

Only about five per cent of a computer’s resources are tied up when running MM07, which underestimates the rate of how much the battery is actually being consumed compared to when using your computer for real everyday tasks.

His solution to this problem is to use another kind of software called 3DMark06, in addition to the MM07, to rate a computer’s battery life. Like the city/highway statistics you receive about mileage before buying a car, the 3DMark06/MM07 statistics will give consumers two different numbers to consider when purchasing a new computer.

In Dessau’s blog, he said: “Are we suggesting people should abandon the MM07 idle metric for the 3DMark06 busy metric? Actually: no. Like talk and standby or city and highway, we think both should be cited to provide the buyer with a more informed purchasing process.”

He wrote that he would like the 3DMark06 to become standard because it runs on Windows XP and Vista, and most importantly, runs the computer at an overall higher level than other standard software, which will give a much more accurate estimate of real battery life.

He promised AMD would offer both stats: “In any event, when we talk about battery life in the future, we intend to give both MM07 and 3DMark06 — and we hope others will follow suit.”

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