7. Power Consumption

The AMD Turion Athlon64 ML-34 Lancaster was designed for thin and light notebooks, and uses all of AMD's power saving features, such as Powernow. Let's take a brief look at what happens to save battery power. First, the CPU will adjust both the clock speed and the operating voltage automatically based on the computing power required by applications that are currently running. The more the system has to do, the more the floodgates are opened to deliver the needed horsepower. When requirements decrease, the operating voltage and clock speed are lowered to suit.

The ATI Mobility Radeon X700 has a similar feature called PowerPlay 5.0. When a DC power source is detected, the graphics clock frequencies and voltage are decreased to save power. If less is being demanded of the graphics, then another power management initiative known as clock gating also comes into play. This is also an activity based technique that automatically turns off the clocks of the idle parts of the graphics chip. For example, if the 3D engine is not being used, it is turned off. As each part is shut down, more power is saved.

We encountered some issues with scripts in MobileMark 2005 and are currently working with BAPCo, the creator of the MobileMark test suite, to get these resolved. When we get the scores we will post them here. Based on what we saw in some other tests, the battery has almost 3 hours of life under typical office productivity workloads.