OLPC upgrades

[Martin Langhoff]

On Sat, Jan 31, 2009 at 3:18 AM, Frank Ch. Eigler <fche at redhat.com> wrote:
> Mitch Bradley <wmb at laptop.org> writes:
>
>> [...]  It's also worth pointing out that the new low-power x86
>> processors, Atom being the poster child, are still stuck with
>> power-hungry support chips - memory and display controllers.  That
>> might change "soon", but for now it's still the case.  [...]
>
> According to the ACPI battery gauges under Fedora 10, my Fujitsu U820
> UMPC (Atom Z530, Poulsbo GMA500 MCH/graphics) takes around 6W *total*
> during light webby operations.

Those aren't super accurate. However, what Mitch is talking about is
the fact that Intel has paired the low-power Atom with a chipset that
could only be described as powerhungry. AFAIK it draws roughly the
same as the Atom CPU at full blast but has no way to scale down or
sleep.

So when you're "idling" the cpu will go down into deep sleep modes and
save power, but the northbridge/southbridge have no concept of sleep.
That sucks [battery].

cheers,




m
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