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AMD — "We're Not Entirely Honest" About Batteries
Slatterz writes "In an apparent attack of the bleeding-obvious, an AMD rep has come clean and admitted (on behalf of the industry) that notebook and phone battery life figures are completely unreliable. AMD's senior vice president Nigel Dessau says that 'we are not being entirely honest with users about what PC battery life they can expect to actually experience.' He says AMD will now use a combination of idle time (where the machine is left to sit idle, and timed to see how long it takes for the battery to go dead), and 3DMark06 to measure battery life. Great in theory but some of the industry already bases battery figures on a two-test measurement, and the results are still wildly inaccurate."
"We're Not Entirely Honest" = We've been lying
This happens in every industry. Every industry picks a low baseline to measure their product by and then shows how high their product scores over that. I really never assume that things like "battery life, sound clarity, brightness, etc" will be THAT accurate because the bottom line is the manufacturer wants to sell this to me and the better he makes his product sound the more likely I am to buy it. I don't hold any ill will towards people who do this. It's called marketing and it happens all the time.
It's only really useful in comparison with other models. Your actual mileage (or battery time) can and will vary depending on usage and maintenance.
If you recall, AMD's performance rating was an important step forward for the CPU manufacturer industry at that time. Intel was pushing for higher and higher clock frequencies with longer and longer pipelines - something that made little sense.
Performance ratings allowed consumers to effectively compare AMD and Intel chips side by side in ways that are useful.
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Precisely. It's the same thing with contrast ratios on monitors, they're relatively meaningless because they advertise them in completely different ways. Dell or LG might advertise the best contrast ratio possible, whereas Apple is usually more conservative about their estimates. Apple gets slammed because their prices are higher and the contrast ratio stats look worse unless you read on how the contrast ratios are calculated. Yet, having used equivalent Dell and Apple monitors on the same computer, I've found the Apple ones are actually the better display (in part because there were some of the first ones to use S-IPS panels).
What's needed is are some regulations regarding how computer parts are advertised, but that would require a federal government that takes an interest in protecting the consumer, not protecting corporate profit.
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It's all well and good being able to charge a battery in 4.5 second, but it's not going to help you when your battery has run out and it's at least 2 hours until you're near a plug socket again.....
3) Advertise "minimum" battery life
What is wrong with that? Then I can expect at least 40 minutes of battery life and anything more than that is nice.
What's wrong with that? What's wrong is that you're telling the customer a number that by and large they aren't interested in. What they want to know is if they can watch a full DVD without recharging. If they can work on their Excel spreadsheet for the entire 6-hour cross-country flight if the plane doesn't have plugs. You tell them "minimum 40 minutes" and they say "Whoa! That's not long enough to do anything!" and you say "Well it's just the minimum, under typical usage conditions it will last much longer," and then they ask "And how long is typical? Long enough to watch Casino Royale on BluRay?"
What's your answer? Hypothetically you should be able to actually say whether it'll last long enough to watch the movie, but how do you answer that question in general? What is "typical"? That's what people really want to know, the minimum number doesn't really do them much good except to say that if they really load down the laptop, it won't last long. Which makes the product look bad, and is still by and large not that helpful.
It's not an easy question, more difficult in many ways than talking about performance. Considering that power has only become a major concern for commodity chip makers in recent times, I'm not surprised that their battery life estimates aren't very accurate. Of course, whatever estimate they do use, no matter how accurate, will be measured in a way that makes their parts look good. That won't change, ever. I'm sure that's part of your motivation for the minimum time metric -- there are far fewer ways to screw with it. Which is nice, but not sufficient by itself.
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>>This happens in every industry
This is a bit different from a breakfast cereal saying "now even tastier" or a soap promising "more suds!" The first is subjective (personal preference) but the second is objective -- it can be quantified and proven/disproven.
In this case with batteries, rather than taking an actual measurement of performance, the industry is building an estimate from a combination of measured behavior + a calculation based on a performance variable. It's no different than the automobile industry stating "EPA Estimated MPG city/highway" which is not based on a dynamometer test or actual performance measurement but instead is calculated based on the amount of CO2 which exits the exhaust pipe of the car! Is it any wonder, then, that hybrid cars which shut off their gasoline engine when stopped and at low speed/light acceleration, would give grossly inflated figures? Well, they did (and do), which explains why real-world MPG is often far less than this calculated (not even simulated) performance.
In short, they're both lying and it's obvious. Yet companies wonder why consumers are so cynical and therefore difficult to reach with advertising.
What is needed is real-world testing -- dynamometer ("rolling test track") testing for autos where the wind resistance, temperature, barometric pressure, etc. can all be carefully controlled. Similarly with computers, a pure performance-based measurement is needed which should account for idle time, network activity, etc. Just as an automobile is not tested at full-throttle for 3 hours, neither should a PC, but instead a variety of benchmarks (gaming, web browsing, spreadsheet, word processing, ???) could show performance figures for various activities.
In short, manufacturers, we want real numbers free of hype.
Give us "real" numbers like how long the battery will last sitting in a drawer or under "full load" in a particular device, and how long the battery will last under a variety of scenarios.
An "emergency" phone user is more interested in how long they can leave their phone in their glove compartment before recharging.
"Light" users want to know standby time and how many minutes of standby time they lose for every minute they talk.
"Heavy" users are more interested in talk time and how much "talk time" they lose if they leave their phone on but not charging overnight.
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What is wrong with that?
It gives me, the customer, absolutely nothing to work with. There's a reason we don't calculate "miles per gallon" (or km/l over here) for the "pedal to the metal" case.
In an ideal world (you know, where everyone knows basic math and nobody is fooled by politicians' campaign promises) you'd have a bunch of measurements at various loads and simply print a curve that tells me what I need to know because I have a somewhat good feeling for where my average use scenario is on the curve.
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Incorrect. I would respond, "That is the minimum time under the heaviest possible load it can be put under."
And they'd say "Okay, is playing a DVD the heaviest possible load, so I couldn't even play half of one movie? Or will I be able to play my movie? What about working on my earnings report?" and then you either have to refuse to give them any other number and lose the sale, or start talking about "typical" usage.
I'd like to kindly point you to my initial post where I quite clearly said "fully load" and not "typical load"..
Yes, I noticed, and I'd like to point you to my post where I clearly understood what you are talking about and said "That isn't very useful to the customer". Just because the minimum battery life has the useful property of being easier to quantify without hand-waving and assumptions doesn't mean it's actually the more useful number. Customers want to know if their lap top will last on a cross-country flight doing what it is they usually do.
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1) If a customer doesn't know how much load playing a DVD is, they don't care about advertised battery life.
O_o Seriously?
You think knowing the % CPU utilization of watching a DVD (or BluRay, if this makes you feel better) is a pre-requisite to caring about the question "Will my laptop be able to play a full DVD between recharges?"
And I suppose anyone who doesn't know engine timings and torque curves wouldn't care about the question "Can I get to Grandma's house without refueling" too. That's weird, because I care about MPG but know very little about the engine physics that inform it. Should they scrap the "city/highway" MPG usage models, and instead tell you what MPG you'd get with the accelerator floored the entire way?
You're being ridiculous. Obviously people will care about being able to do the things they want to do without knowing exactly how much load on the system that actually entails.
Of course, even if I accept this premise, you're still not giving them the information they want. Okay, so I know that the fully loaded laptop life time is 40 minutes, and I know that my DVD player uses 5% of my processor. Now what? What's the scaling factor so I can do the math? Oh right it's not that easy, even if you're an electrical engineer. I know what it is you said I should know, and you still can't answer the question I care about.
2) Minimum is a more useful number because it always applies. Typical usage figures can be plucked out of thin air because it varies too much.
Easy to figure out is not the same as useful. Minimum is rarely useful because it rarely applies to what the person is actually doing. When the "typical" numbers can be 6x higher than "minimum", and what people really care about is "typical" for all the difficulty of defining what that means, then no minimum isn't that useful.
Sure the minimum should be specified. That does not get you out of the tricky problem of estimating 'typical' battery life, because that is what the customer wants to know, and for good reason. If you refuse to give them anything more useful than minimum, then you lose sales because you can't or won't answer the questions they care about.
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