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Microsoft Teases Multi-Day Battery Life For Upcoming ARM-Powered Windows Devices (techspot.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the carrot-and-stick dept.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechSpot: Microsoft late last year announced a partnership with Qualcomm to bring the full Windows 10 experience to ARM-powered devices. Terry Myerson, Executive Vice President of Microsoft's Windows and Devices Group, promised at the time that Snapdragon-powered Windows 10 devices would be efficient in the power consumption department. We're still waiting for the partnership to bear fruit but in the interim, new details regarding efficiency (and a few other subjects) have emerged. With regard to battery life, Pete Bernard, Principal Group Program Manager for Connectivity Partners at Microsoft, said that to be frank, battery life at this point is beyond their expectations: ""We set a high bar for [our developers], and we're now beyond that. It's the kind of battery life where I use it on a daily basis. I don't take my charger with me. I may charge it every couple of days or so. It's that kind of battery life."

8 of 72 comments (clear)

  1. Charge every few days by Bert64 · · Score: 5, Funny

    Charge it every few days because it has so few applications that you never use it?

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  2. Re:It’s multi-day battery life as long as it by youngone · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I was wondering why this would be different from the Surface RT, and after reading TFA I still don't know.
    Also, who are they going to sell these to? The people who bought Surface RT won't want to be fooled again (presumably) and everyone else already has an iPad or some sort of Android tablet, or maybe a Microsoft Surface device which runs x86 and so has access to whatever Windows software the user might need.
    This looks like all the other Microsoft "new market" type efforts. Doomed to failure and then irrelevance, then death.

  3. Rivals the power of a 486! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Funny

    Run Windows 95 for days on end! 49.7 days to be exact!

  4. Good God by Billly+Gates · · Score: 2

    Give it up already. It aint gonna happen. Windows NT has been ported to many platforms and they already tried in modern computing history with WindowsPhone and WindowsRT.

    Unless maybe they plan some sort of weird hybrid device where the OS runs on the ARM but an ATOM (discontinued) or some x86 takes over to run classic apps I see more money lost.

    Even Google played with x86 hardware with Android for x86 with the Asus Zenfone. It failed. Applications/Programs define what hardware/software to run. ARM is stuck on mobile, x86 for content creators and IBM stuff for mainframes.That is just the way it is.

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    1. Re:Good God by jabuzz · · Score: 2

      It's the way it is because through the late 90's and early part of the 21st century Intel was able to to deploy a fab advantage over the competition, which was further compounded when AMD came up with a 64bit version of the x86 instruction set that allowed x86 to finish eating the workstation and server market.

      The thing is that x86 is a dog of an architecture and it was only able to win through the deployment of capital to create a fab advantage. That fab advantage has in the last couple of years evaporated into thin air. There is now room for those better architectures that managed to weather the storm in niche markets to come out of hiding and take on the monster that is x86 again.

      The strongest of those is ARM because in the last ten years it's niche has exploded to dwarf the x86 market.

  5. Re:Device? Since it won't be a phone ... by Farmer+Tim · · Score: 2, Funny

    Ah, but this is Microsoft...the only product they could build that wouldn’t suck is a sexbot.

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  6. Re:It’s multi-day battery life as long as it by AmiMoJo · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I highly doubt it will get days of battery life in any realistic scenario.

    There is no magical way to make common tasks 2-3x more efficient. There are no magic RAM chips that draw 25% normal power, no special GPUs that decode video using half as much energy as every other one. Did someone invent a super efficient LED backlight?

    And people expect their Windows devices to stay connected to networks and more active than a phone, so that Skype calls can come in etc. Android and iOS sleep for to to 15 minutes, with no IP connectivity and delayed notifications, to save power.

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  7. I already get 2 days of battery life by Togden · · Score: 2

    I have a 7" phablet. It has a 5AH battery, it lasts about 36 Hrs with normal use and about 18Hrs with heavy use and it was nowhere near as expensive as similar power phones because no one wants one. I personally cant understand it, I'm of average size (5ft 10) and I find its far better than the average phone in almost every single way.