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190

Featherweight Laptop - Runs All Day Long.

190 points posted to Laptops by nelson 04/25/07

Radical departure from conventional laptop design:

Cheap ultra low power processor (less than 1 watt) that runs lighter weight, less computationally intense version of applications and the OS.

Solid state disk drive.

LCD display can use ambient room/outdoor backlighting. Screen is readable outdoors in direct sunlight.

Small, lightweight battery.

(Apologies for previous post - Text got chopped off because part of it looked like an HTML tag!)

jmxz
04/25/07		 Nice.
I'd happily trade off CPU performance for very low power like 24-hours.
Intel does make some extremely low power chips:
http://www.gadgetell.com/2007/03/intel-working-on-low-power-chip-for-iphone-c...
The formerly intel StrongArm/Xscale chips (which Intel sold to Marvell) would also be good choices; as would MIPS chips.
barius
04/25/07		 It exists, it's called the OLPC.
raskren
04/26/07		 I don't think anybody makes a 1 watt TDP x86 CPU. Xscale uses the RISC instruction set, not CISC like most desktop chips. All your software would have to be recompiled including the OS.

Furthermore, you also have to deal with other components of the PC requiring power, video backlight, hard drive, chipset...

If you want a Featherweight laptop go get a PocketPC or SmartPhone.
nelson
04/26/07		 The idea is to use ambient light for backlighting, except when we are working in darkness, and replace power-hungry hard disk drives with solid state drives that require very little power. A very low power chipset would also compliment the low power CPU.

The main hurdle is that Microsoft, Apple, and other software developers design their operating systems and applications around the latest, fastest, (and most power-hungry) CPUs.

But for 90% of what we do on a laptop (just about everything except for games and video editing) we can get by quite nicely with much less CPU horsepower.
msbucklin
04/26/07		 nice thought, but we are not there yet technologically. Batteries need to get better.
nelson
04/27/07		 This is primarily a software problem rather than a hardware challenge because we are trying to run exactly the same software on our laptops as our desktops.

If our software used more of a RISC mentality and just got the job done with the simplest and most direct approach, laptops would not need supercomputer performance in order to edit text, read email, browse the web, or update spreadsheets...
nelson
04/27/07		 The basic Dell laptop comes with a 29 Watt-Hour battery, so if the averge power consumption was 1 watt it would run for more than a day on a single charge.

At 1 watt average consumption (less when idle, which would be most of the time) you should be able to get by on a battery that is half of the weight, perhaps 16 Watt-Hours, since we also need time for sleep and other vital functions.
 
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