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Letter: Get rid of D-RAM!

Is there a simple solution to short notebook battery life?

So it would appear that Centrino does little for battery life - no great suprise there. Since when has such huge marketing campaigns told the full truth about any product - 'Lies, damed lies, and statistics' as you say.

There's only one real solution for battery life; get rid of dynamic memory (kill the power and it's gone) and replace with battery backed static ram. And start developing asynchronous processors that draw almost zero power while not processing.

A look at the idle time of most PCs and laptops with task manager will indicate 99% of CPU time is sat in a loop doing nothing.

Just imagine the power savings and heat reduction possible. Sure, there's still the current drawn by the LCD backlight, but organic displays could soon put an end to that too.

Still, I guess a processor running at 0-MHz much of the time would be a problem for the marketing departments.

Richard Hewitt

email to spamtrap999@yahoo.com will be forward to Richard.

Comments? Mail me at guy@kewney.com or phone 020 8809 0492 in the UK (+44) area.