Powering up for a debate
AMD is still distressed that consumers are being misled in terms of battery life - a sentiment expressed by several executives at the firm's notebook reviewers' day at its campus in Austin, Texas.
Consumers, said AMD's Leslie Sobon, still weren't seeing the kind of battery life they expected from their machines and remained ignorant about how long they could perform a specific task without running out of juice.
Several months ago, AMD broke ranks in the battery-life debate and began using 3DMark06 to benchmark mobile usage on its products, as opposed to the more generally accepted Mobile Mark 2007, which the firm insists is "not a real usage scenario."
Indeed, it is a bit of a struggle to get an accurate representation of battery life when MM07 benchmarks the notebook in idle mode, with wireless switched off and the screen turned all the way down.
Hence, before something better emerges, AMD says it will finish out Q4 of this year using 3DMark06, which Sobon said provided a "best case and worst case guardrail."
Ideally, however, Sobon said AMD wanted to follow in Apple's footsteps and provide potential customers with battery-life measurements similar to those used for mobile phones.
"Apple's the one who does it best," she said, referring to the firm's clear indication of just how much talk time, video time and browsing time one could expect on the iPhone.
"Ultimately we want to get to ‘you can watch however many movies, or get this much game play on your machine'," She said, adding "that's ultimately what the industry needs."
