TI Shooting For All Day Battery Life in 2013

[exfileme]

Texas Instruments is reportedly working on a chip that will enable all-day computing thanks to intelligent caching, better memory access and an all-around improved SoC design.

TI Shooting For All Day Battery Life in 2013 : Read more

 

[house70]

kinda disappointing... from the title, I was hoping there was some breakthrough in battery technology. Instead, got some promises of better memory management. OK, but not good enough.
Thing is, you can not make something out of nothing. As long as the batteries remain the same, an increase in processor power will mean decrease in battery time, even with all the memory management accounted for. The brick wall will be hit sooner or later.

 

[CaedenV]

Get a big enough battery and you can get an i7 to run all day on a battery. Conversely if you make a crappy enough processor then it will run all day on a 9V brick. Somehow my bet is that this will be the latter rather than the former.

 

[JamesSneed]

Yes its so confusing TI is hyping some marvelous chip when they are trying to sell the division. Why would they ever do that? If I were to believe the article its because they may not sell the division off. That has got to be the reason.

 

[becherovka]

Increase processor power does not mean decrease in battery time if its a smaller die 20nm chips have large power saving over current 45nm(?) just like PC die shrink = less watts. Batteries are improving just not fast enough.

 

[outlw6669]

Because shaving a 1.5W SoC down to 0.5W is totally going to make up for a power hogging WiFi/3G radio and display -_-

 

[danwat1234]

Ok, so next can TI please upgrade their TI-83, 84, 89 and 92 calculators for the 21st century by putting in a CPU that runs faster than 12MHZ!?
Thanx

 

[schmich]

[citation][nom]house70[/nom]kinda disappointing... from the title, I was hoping there was some breakthrough in battery technology.[/citation]
From just a random announcement? Battery breakthroughs are so hard because you can't just excel and do better than Li-ion in just ONE area whilst being worse in others. You might have a breakthrough in holding more energy than Li-ion but then if you're worse at any of the following you can't exactly bring it to market:
have a poor charge life cycle so the battery dies after 100 of recharging
expensive material making it economically infeasible
not as tolerant to temperature so loses charges as it gets warmer (esp. inside a mobile device) or colder (go skiing)
slower in charging
is more volatile and therefore note safe

I'm sure there are many more but you get the point that it's hard to get a breakthrough because your technology must be all-round good for the other capabilities as well.

 

[blackened144]

[citation][nom]danwat1234[/nom]Ok, so next can TI please upgrade their TI-83, 84, 89 and 92 calculators for the 21st century by putting in a CPU that runs faster than 12MHZ!?Thanx[/citation]
Why do you need that? Im rocking the 16 year old Ti-82 I bought in 8th grade and its still playing drugwars just fine..

 

[blader15sk8]

The CPU/SoC's are barely the problem for mobile computing. We already have chips that are "fast enough" and consume little power, and are constantly consuming less with die shrinks and improvements in technology, so this is really more of a PR announcement than anything. Where we REALLY need to see improvements is in two areas, one of which has already been mentioned, and that is in battery technology. The other is a HUGE power drain.. LCD/AMOLED screens. Even if my phone is in an idle state 90% of the time, if I check what has been consuming most of my Samsung Fascinate's battery it is the screen.

 

[danwat1234]

[citation][nom]blackened144[/nom]Why do you need that? Im rocking the 16 year old Ti-82 I bought in 8th grade and its still playing drugwars just fine..[/citation]

For me it's a big turn off that just about all the money spent on purchasing a TI calculator is the software, the hardware is worth about $5.

I really don't see why they don't put in a 100MHZ processor that usually clocks at the normal 12MHZ or whatever speed to save the batteries, but can clock up when graphing or doing other heavy calculations.

It is totally ridiculous that graphing a simple y-mx+b equation isn't instant.