UMPC Buzz mentioned Dynamic Display Power Optimisation (D2PO) in a news item last month and at the time I didnt have time to do any research on it. Having just put the UMPC product database live, its now time to take a look at D2PO and other technologies to see how they could improve the battery life of UMPC’s (and laptops) in the future.

Firstly, that D2PO story. D2PO is a display control technology rather than a display technology itself. (as far as I have found out in my research - I don’t work in the display industry and I’m happy to be corrected at any point. Any LCD experts out there care to comment?) An LCD controller has been developed by TMDisplay that can reduce the power needed to control an LCD panel by up to 30%. It does this by dynamically changing the way a screen is updated according to certain image characteristics. For example, as I write this journal entry, only small areas of my screen are changing every second. The screen is updating at a high rate and at every update, each pixel is being set to the required colour. Thats an overhead. By changing the way that the refreshes are done (actually by reducing the updates) power is saved. At the moment, D2PO is beging developed in conjunction with Intel but, like other technologies, i’m sure that versions of D2PO will filter through very quickly to other CPU manufacturers under different names.

The first question you should be asking though is - how much power does a display controller use? Good question. It turns out that the controller used by TmDisplay in their test was using over 1 watt of power. That’s a lot. As much as the average utilisation of a Pentium-M or VIA C-7 ULV 1Ghz processor.

What does it mean for UMPC battery life? Lets take previous research and say that a UMPC device is going to use about 8 watts under average use. If we reduce that by 0.3 watt (30% of 1 watt), we’re talking about a 4% power reduction. Taking more research figures, that translates to about 6 min extra battery life on the best figures that we have.

6 minutes is not an amazing improvement but its the measure of improvement that we’re going to be seeing across the board for CPU, Battery, Disk, Display, Wireless radio and system control over the next year.

Here’s a summary of power-improvements we could see over the next 12 months.

• CPU and chipset power will be reduced by about 20% (based on some Intel Core Duo figures.)
• Battery life will be increased by about 10-15% (based on often quoted firgures for improvements in current battery technology)
• LCD display and controller power will be reduced by 10-15%
• Wireless chipset power will be reduced by 10-20% (based on higher integration and improving silicon technologies.)
• Disk power will be reduced by 10% (possibly more if flash memory prices keep on falling and users are happy to swap-out content as they need it - do you really need to carry 100 hours of video around on your device?)
• System control (power-saving control mechanisms and API’s) will reduce overall power requirements by 20-30%

Can I make a prediction here? Carrypads law states that power requirements of mobile devices will reduce by 20% a year!

Taking our average load figures, here’s what we get in real terms:

• 2006 - Average UMPC life 2.5 hours
• 2007 - Average UMPC life 3 hours
• 2008 - Average UMPC life 3.6 hours
• 2009 - Average UMPC life 4.3 hours
• 2010 - Average UMPC life 5 hours.

Lets put a marketing twist on those figures because just like all manufacturers do, we could use ‘minimum load’ figures:

• 2006 - Average UMPC life 4 hours
• 2007 - Average UMPC life 4.8 hours
• 2008 - Average UMPC life 5.75 hours
• 2009 - Average UMPC life 6.9 hours
• 2010 - Average UMPC life 8.3 hours.

..and hey presto - you reach the Intel target of all-day (another marketing twist of 8 hours!) of battery life by 2010.

I wonder how much the devices will cost in 2010 - we’ll leave that for another Carrypad prediction!

Steve/Chippy.