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RE: Crusoe versus StrongArm, Super H, etc.

From: BitGeek <BitGeek@mac.com>
Date: Fri Jan 21 01:12:22 2000
Newsgroups: comp.sys.wearables

On 1/20/00 8:29 AM, Chris Thompson said:

>Another factor that makes this less than earth shattering, in my opinion, is
>that the CPU typically only accounts for 20% of the total power budget of a
>system. 

In what system are you talking about?  A desktop? A laptop? A newton?  
You'll get radically different answers for these three radically 
different environments.

I find it hard to beleive that a 10 watt pentium in a PC laptop is only 
%20-- that means that the total budget for hard drive, display, etc, is 
50 watts.  How can you get 3 hours on a 45 watt-hour battery if you're 
drawing 50 watts?  Obviously, you're drawing 15 watts.  (Correct me if 
I'm wrong, but Intel's mobil pentiums take up 8-10 watts)  If you reduce 
your usage on a 400MHz laptop from 15 watts (with a pentium) to 6 watts 
(with a Crusoe) your battery life goes from 3 hours to 7.5 hours in a 45 
watthour battery.

Ok, so its a 2.5 times improvement.  I think that's enough to make it 
killer in the marketplace.  (And I think a lot ofp eople will build 
devices that only add 2 watts to the CPU's 1 watt and last 7 hours on a 
21 watthour battery.)

BitGeek

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