Microsoft targeting portable power
By Rick Merritt - EE Times - May 06, 2004 (8:49 AM EDT)
SEATTLE — Microsoft Corp. detailed a new mobile concept for a low-power disk drive as part of a broad push toward more aggressive power management in its future Longhorn version of its Windows operating system.
Also at its Windows Hardware Engineering Conference here this week, it showcased a new battery startup and said it would enable location-based services in Longhorn.
"Next year we will make more revenue from notebooks than desktops in the developed world. That's going to drive a market dynamic to design the best mobile products we can make," said Clark Nicholson, a program manager in Microsoft's Windows hardware group.
Nicholson's group is working with two hard disk makers on a program called Piton, defining a drive that incorporates a 128-Mbyte NAND flash write buffer. The buffer would leverage a new Longhorn kernel feature called superfetch that aggressively reads files and caches them in system DRAM to reduce disk accesses and increase systems performance.
One source said superfetch will drive Microsoft to require a minimum of 1-Gbyte RAM on Longhorn systems.
The flash write buffer could reduce the power consumption of hard disks by as much as 85 percent, or about 1.7W, Nicholson estimated. "That translates pretty close to an extra half hour of battery life on the typical notebook," he said.
The power savings will come at an estimated bill of materials cost of about $8 in late 2006 when Longhorn debuts, he added. A business manager from drive maker Maxtor who attended the presentation said the extra costs could be "a killer," but Nicholson said it would be packaged as a feature on premium notebooks.
The drive concept is one of many ways Microsoft intends to lower power demands of Windows machines. Under an umbrella program called Power Sense, the company showed a capability to keep a consumer PC in a low-power state so that it can be instantly switched on and off like a TV or radio, yet be available to handle network requests such as preprogrammed TV recording.
In a demonstration, a consumer PC from First International Computer (Taipei, Taiwan) consumed just 0.65 amps in a so-called state zero, about half its normal rate. On the battery side of the equation, Microsoft brought startup Sion Power (Tucson, Ariz.) to the WinHEC show floor. The company is developing a lithium battery that uses sulfur in the cathode. Sion recently announced a milestone, hitting more than 70 percent utilization of the sulfur, something others who have experimented with the chemistry have not been able to achieve, said Vincent Puglisi, the company's director of advanced technology.
Sion is seeking investors to bankroll a pilot production facility it hopes to have running by late 2005, said chief executive Melvin Miller. It is also working with Hewlett-Packard to understand the requirements for bringing the technology to mainstream notebooks.
The company is also working with Microsoft to develop a fuel gauge for notebooks based on technology it developed to track power capabilities on its batteries.
At the applications level, Microsoft said it will build the software underpinnings for location-based services into Longhorn. The operating system will aggregate location information from various sources on the PC and provide the data to authorized applications and services. The software could let notebooks be used as car navigation systems, or let users make flexible links to peripherals, services or other users in their area.
eetimes.com |
