Like our own Rob “Bobert” Beschizza, Jeff Atwood of Coding Horror just bought his first netbook. Like Rob, he loves it. Unlike Beschizza, though, he’s got a bug up his backside about his Acer Aspire’s achilles heel: the power usage of the chipset.
I hooked up my trusty old kill-a-watt to my wife’s netbook and measured almost no difference at all in power consumption between idle and full Prime 95 load. Intel’s Atom CPU is truly astonishingly efficient — a feat all the more impressive when you realize that on most laptops the CPU is, by far, the number one consumer of power. On our netbook, only 1 or 2 watts of the total ~25 watt idle power draw is attributable to the CPU, a tiny fraction of the overall power consumption. I tried turning off wireless and dimming the screen, but I couldn’t get the power draw floor below 18 watts — that’s all attributable to the chipset.
Intel did a fantastic job on the Atom CPU, but they completely phoned it in on the chipset. The next generation of netbooks with more power efficient chipsets should easily double battery life. No question.
Which is an excellent reason to wait, if you’re so inclined.
Remembering the Dynabook [Coding Horror]
Has anyone commented yet on Lenovo’s entry into the netbook space, the IdeaPad S10? Wired seems to have liked it…
(Claimer: I have some historic connection with Lenovo, so I’m a bit biased toward them.)
18 Watts in idle? That is equal to a few higher end pc’s in standby!