Power-saving ideas for laptops at IDF

The most sought-after location in San Francisco's Moscone Center this week? Along the wall, next to the plug.

The crowds that hovered around the electrical sockets during the three-day Intel Developer Forum are telling evidence that something more needs to be done to keep an untethered laptop PC going for longer than a few hours. To tackle this, Intel is obsessed with reducing the power consumption of its chips. Other companies, however, are working on hoarding energy by extending battery life and by inventing power-saving displays.

Intel hopes to see laptops with eight hours of battery life as a standard feature by the end of the decade, said Kamal Shah, Intel's Mobility Enabling Initiative manager. New laptop chips, such as Merom, will continue to improve performance without consuming more power than their predecessors, but help is also needed from other companies that contribute technology to a laptop, he said.

One Intel partner, Toshiba Matsushita Display, unveiled a new LCD design that can switch between progressive scan mode and interlaced scan mode, said Hiroyuki Echigo, senior manager for business development at TMD. The business is a joint venture of Toshiba and Matsushita, known primarily for its Panasonic-brand products.

A display operating in progressive-scan mode refreshes its image much more frequently than one in interlaced scan mode, used by most televisions to show pictures. Progressive scanning results in a more detailed image, but consumes much more power than an interlaced scan, Echigo said.

TMD's technology, known as dynamic display power optimisation, allows the display to use progressive scanning to display rapidly moving images in games or movies, but to use interlaced scanning to save power when browsing a static Internet page or typing up a document. TMD developed the LCD panel technology, and Intel contributed a graphics controller and software that identifies the best scanning mode for the image data.

Intel said it is also working with the battery industry on more powerful sources of energy. One company, Sion Power, is working on technology that uses lithium sulphur as the primary ingredient in a battery, as opposed to the lithium ion ones found in most laptop PCs.

Lithium sulphur batteries can store much more energy than lithium ion models. However, batteries built using that technology are heavier than lithium ion and only last as long as 60 recharge cycles, said Mark Jost, vice president of marketing at Sion Power. Sion hopes to lighten the load and extend the recharge cycles of lithium sulphur to the standards set by lithium ion, but the company does not expect to begin production of lithium sulphur batteries until the first half of 2008, he said.