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Software Defined Smart Battery Arrays Extend Laptop Life

Posted by samzenpus on from the going-a-bit-longer dept.

An anonymous reader writes: A Microsoft research paper, titled 'Software Defined Batteries', outlines a radical charging alternative which uses a smart battery system to keep consumer-grade gadgets going for much longer than the current norm, by monitoring user habits. Making use of existing technologies, the engineers place multiple battery control under the duties of the operating system to create a software-defined approach optimized for different scenarios, such as word processing, email or video streaming.

21 of 42 comments (clear)

  1. "Software Defined" Buzzword by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    The batteries are not software defined, their usage is. Get it straight. I understand that its very 21st century to make things "Software Defined", but they just aren't.

    How is this different than dropping clockspeed, or dimming the screen?

    Hint: not all computing activities require the same amount of power.

    1. Re:"Software Defined" Buzzword by dreamchaser · · Score: 1

      The batteries are not software defined, their usage is. Get it straight. I understand that its very 21st century to make things "Software Defined", but they just aren't.

      How is this different than dropping clockspeed, or dimming the screen?

      Hint: not all computing activities require the same amount of power.

      It's different in that they propose multiple batteries, each optimized for different usage scenarios. The software decides which battery is active based on user activity. I would imagine this would be combined with today's standard lowering clock speed, etc.

    2. Re:"Software Defined" Buzzword by bjwest · · Score: 4, Funny

      The batteries are not software defined, their usage is. Get it straight. I understand that its very 21st century to make things "Software Defined", but they just aren't.

      What!?! You mean I can't just sit at my desktop and code out a new battery for my laptop? WTF? This is the 21st century!

      --

      --- Keep the choice with the user..
    3. Re:"Software Defined" Buzzword by leuk_he · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Just as a software defined datacenter still needs lots of hardware. This is the same definition of software defined. There is plenty hardware available, But instead as using it as"just hardware", or "just a battery" you optimize it as it is used.

      e.g. A Li-ion battery has more wear and tear if it is stored at 100% charge. So you only top it off if you expect the user to unplug it soon. (e.g when charging the phone in the night, you to it off an hour before wakeup).

      If there are multiple batteries, with different parameters you can optimize for those parameters. And this is a "free"optimization. You get a few percentage extra capacity in the long run, just by exposing the batteries to the OS.

      But you should not expect big leaps from this. Batteries are used in portable devices, which are weight and space contrained. with other words: they will have minimal specification.

    4. Re:"Software Defined" Buzzword by macs4all · · Score: 1

      "software defined radio"

      Well, I believe that that is the one "software defined" system that actually lives up to the name.

      If I understand it correctly (and maybe I don't), a "software defined radio" is pretty much a DSP and an RF amplifier, and the "modulation scheme", base frequency, etc. is wholly defined in software running on the DSP.

      It's the next step beyond spread-spectrum, as far as being both covert and noise-immune.

    5. Re:"Software Defined" Buzzword by macs4all · · Score: 1

      Just as a software defined datacenter still needs lots of hardware. This is the same definition of software defined. There is plenty hardware available, But instead as using it as"just hardware", or "just a battery" you optimize it as it is used.

      e.g. A Li-ion battery has more wear and tear if it is stored at 100% charge. So you only top it off if you expect the user to unplug it soon. (e.g when charging the phone in the night, you to it off an hour before wakeup).

      If there are multiple batteries, with different parameters you can optimize for those parameters. And this is a "free"optimization. You get a few percentage extra capacity in the long run, just by exposing the batteries to the OS.

      But you should not expect big leaps from this. Batteries are used in portable devices, which are weight and space contrained. with other words: they will have minimal specification.

      There is already a bunch of back-and-forth between battery charge, user-demand, and the OS in a modern OS with advanced energy management such as OS X. I'm not sure what voodoo MS has in mind over and above the Techniques already employed by Apple for their systems. And keep in mind that that whitepaper was written against a version of OS X now two major revisions old.

      This "Software Defined Batteries" is nothing more than Marketspeak for efficiency-tuning techniques like Apple has been doing for years now.

    6. Re:"Software Defined" Buzzword by macs4all · · Score: 1

      "software defined radio"

      Well, I believe that that is the one "software defined" system that actually lives up to the name.

      If I understand it correctly (and maybe I don't), a "software defined radio" is pretty much a DSP and an RF amplifier, and the "modulation scheme", base frequency, etc. is wholly defined in software running on the DSP.

      Right, a DSP, an RF amplifier. Additionally, you are wrong, and the "base frequency" is a hardware module (otherwise any >1GHz transmission would be computationally impossible). So it's not just software. But it already goes wrong at the point where an antenna is not just software.

      Ok, well I just guessed at the implementation; so I got it mostly right... ;-)

      But niggling that a "software defined radio" is a misnomer, simply because it relies on SOME hardware to effect the algorithms in meatspace (and what software doesn't?!?), is being overly pedantic, and completely misses the point; that being, that a "software defined radio" is much closer to describing the actual system than the term "software defined battery" (which is just another name for "Power Management" software) is to describing what Microsoft is claiming to have "invented".

      And you should have used "However" instead of "Additionally". And as I said, claiming that the term "Software Defined Radio" (which basically means that the modulation scheme (and possibly the frequency-hop-sequence?) is derived in Software) "goes wrong" simply because you can't create an Antenna wholly out of software (due in part to those pesky laws of physics), is patently ridiculous.

    7. Re:"Software Defined" Buzzword by KGIII · · Score: 1

      Sure you can. You just have to 3D print it. The technology is already there or just right around the corner - it will be here in six months. This is revolutionary and will change the dynamics! Coupled with a webscale P2P integration process and a community driven knowledge base we will see bottom-up social changes ensuring protection for the marginalized classes and the impoverished alike!

      --
      "So long and thanks for all the fish."
    8. Re:"Software Defined" Buzzword by leuk_he · · Score: 1

      All the innovations described in that paper are power Usage optimizations. Battery is still considered a source that has a number of energy units. For usage optimization that works. However, as more and more of a battery is understood, there are more parameters of a battery you can optimize: charging and storage behavior.

    9. Re:"Software Defined" Buzzword by macs4all · · Score: 1

      All the innovations described in that paper are power Usage optimizations. Battery is still considered a source that has a number of energy units. For usage optimization that works. However, as more and more of a battery is understood, there are more parameters of a battery you can optimize: charging and storage behavior.

      While I don't for one second doubt that there are parameters of secondary (and even primary) batteries that could be (better) understood, I think that charging and storage behavior are actually two of the most "already studied".

      So, as I said, this appears to be mostly marketspeak. Not that Apple is above that, either... ;-)

    10. Re:"Software Defined" Buzzword by leuk_he · · Score: 1

      Oh? Tell me: what OS exposes storage (e.g. discharge when stored) to the user/applications? Can you see the actual charge current in your OS?

    11. Re:"Software Defined" Buzzword by macs4all · · Score: 1

      Oh? Tell me: what OS exposes storage (e.g. discharge when stored) to the user/applications? Can you see the actual charge current in your OS?

      Just because a parameter isn't readily available to the USER, doesn't mean that the OS isn't able to access it.

  2. The reality of battery statistics. by geekmux · · Score: 3, Funny

    (Overheard in the battery engineering department..)

    "I just don't understand it. All of our lab tests prove the batteries last twice as long as consumers are claiming while worki...wait, they spent how long streaming Netflix video?!?!??"

  3. Can I remove the battery that lets it show ads? by Doke · · Score: 5, Funny

    If different batteries are used for different purposes, can I remove the one that plays ads?

  4. Re:Great idea, Microsoft... by Errol+backfiring · · Score: 1

    Off course not. There are way too many organizations waiting for new attack vectors to snoop on user behaviour. In the future, you can tell what somebody is doing by just reading the battery usage parameters. Funny thing is that some battery monitoring standards say that the privacy implications are low (see The Battery Status API in JavaScript for example). This is now going to change for the worse.

    --
    Nae king! Nae laird! Nae yurrupiean pressedent! We willna be fooled again!
  5. Proprietary API ... by PPH · · Score: 1

    ... no doubt.

    place multiple battery control under the duties of the operating system

    No battery for you, Linux!

    --
    Have gnu, will travel.
  6. Power Management Software? by luis_a_espinal · · Score: 1

    The batteries are not software defined, their usage is. Get it straight. I understand that its very 21st century to make things "Software Defined", but they just aren't.

    How is this different than dropping clockspeed, or dimming the screen?

    Hint: not all computing activities require the same amount of power.

    It's different in that they propose multiple batteries, each optimized for different usage scenarios. The software decides which battery is active based on user activity. I would imagine this would be combined with today's standard lowering clock speed, etc.

    Power management then?

  7. I see now by ThatsNotPudding · · Score: 1

    by monitoring user habits.

    So Windows 10 really does have our backs!

    Always LOOKING out for the little guy! Thanks, Microsoft!





    PS And Hello to the NSA!

  8. *WIN-BATTERIES?!?* by ewhac · · Score: 1
    Someone needs to punch this idea in the throat right now before it gets deployed anywhere.

    Need I remind the membership of the decades-long clusterfsck resulting from so-called "Win-modems" whose codecs were moved from hardware into host software and to this day remain completely undocumented? Even people who put down hard cash for a WinModem driver found themselves left to twist in the wind when the 3.x kernel series came out (modems may be mostly obsolete, but FAXes aren't (yet)).

    Now: Who would like to bet that the WinBattery interface will not significantly extend battery life over what we have now, remain completely undocumented (or trapped behind onerous licensing that forbids Open Source implementations), and leave Linux and *BSD users with systems with significantly shortened battery life because they can't control the power interface?

    This is yet another naked attempt to bottle up critical system functionality behind a Microsoft-only wall (because apparently fscking everyone over with UEFI and (In-)Secure Boot wasn't enough).

    --
    Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
  9. Non-average Users by CanadianMacFan · · Score: 1

    So what happens to users that don't fit the profile expected when the manufacturer builds the battery into the device. For example say a laptop manufacture configures the batteries expecting the user to mainly browse the web and work on documents. A typical business user. But what if it gets used by a graphics designer who spends most of the time in a graphics manipulation program. It's going to be less efficient for that user. Are we now going to have to specify the type of battery we need when we buy a computer, smartphone, or tablet and hope that it's main functionality doesn't change during it's lifetime?

  10. Oh yeah, a software-defined approach, just like VW by laserhead · · Score: 1

    a great software company.