Arguably the biggest challenge for mobile devices today – be they netbooks, smartbooks, tablets or smartphones – is battery life, and ARM thinks it has found a major obstacle to prolonging it: Wi-Fi.
ARM CEO Tudor Brown was speaking at The Future of Wireless conference in Cambridge this week, and The Inquirer reports Brown as saying the power required for wireless communications is extremely wasteful. He gives the example of chip designer Atheros, which claims Wi-Fi on a laptop is just 1-2 per cent efficient. In real terms, this means a draw of between two and eight watts for transmit powers between 20 and 200 milliwatts – a proportionately huge waste.
“Between us, we have a duty to drive down the power we are using… we need to do a lot better,” said Brown, who referenced a 2007 consultation paper on this issue which stated: “Arguably what is needed are wireless access systems that can support multimedia service data rates at two to three orders of magnitude lower transmission power than is currently used.”
Wi-Fi wasn’t the only sector which came in for criticism, however, with Brown also pointing out that radio base stations account for twice the power consumption of other network equipment. Meanwhile he said server farms are responsible for a remarkable 2.5 per cent of the entire US energy bill, and this rises to 5 per cent when their cooling is also taken into account. Given that Facebook and YouTube farms now consume more power than small cities, one might ask if cloud computing in the consumer smartbook/netbook world is a green activity.
In short, few would disagree with Brown’s argument: greater efficiency in any aspect of technology or life in general is only ever a good thing. The key is how we go about achieving this, and while Brown didn’t offer any insights into how Wi-Fi might whip itself into better shape, as the famous doctrine goes: the first step is admitting you have a problem…
Gordon
