Quote from: Jesse on July 25, 2020, 01:02:02
Everyone needs to stop with the PWM nonsense. It is annoying and hardly saves any battery life at all.
16:10 should be mandatory for laptops, and matte screens as well. Save your glossy reflective crap for touchscreens.
Also, an AMD cpu option would have stretched battery life. Every manufacturer should be dumping intel for AMD right now. They might only be better for a year or so, but while they are... USE THEM.
I don't think PWM is used to save energy. Perhaps thanks to its inherent simplicity, it might be more efficient. I think simplicity is the main reason why PWM is used. LEDs are not trivial to dim. It's a semiconductor device. But there is no excuse for a low frequency PWM. Well, I imagine higher PWM frequencies are also less efficient thanks to switching losses. But I doubt that's the reason for anyone choosing a 200 Hz PWM. Our brains can notice events in the 5 ms range. We might be able to ignore it, but it probably requires processing.
Drivers/ BIOS play a significant role in endurance. I'm pretty sure that the Latitude that recently managed almost 19 hours in the Wi-Fi test did so thanks to a relatively aggressive driver/ BIOS optimization. Decently sized battery helped, of course. And that was with an Intel processor. It's not even the first time an Intel powered laptop managed an outstanding time. This generation of mobile Ryzen is better. But that doesn't necessarily translate into endurance. Under high load, it translates into more performance in a given thermal envelope. But you might be draining battery just as fast, just managing to do more in the process. Under high load, consumption is dominated by CPU and GPU. Under low load, it's a death by thousand cuts. All the small things add up. And suddenly, keyboard backlight can rival CPU for consumption. Intel's mobile processors do have a decent power management.