Constantine, Re: "Doing what?"
Running Windows in idle mode. That allows the Pentium III and 4 to go into lower power modes. And when you think about it, the vast majority of users have their laptops sitting in idle more than 99% of the time.
For example, I am running Windows XP on my desktop, and I can quickly look up on the task manager how many hours my computer has been running the idle thread. It's about 15. When I total up all the CPU time for all the other processes, I get about 7 minutes, which is less than 1% of my computer's CPU time.
Of course, to be fair, I haven't been at my computer for the full 15 hours, but when I am away, I tend to put the machine in suspend (even though it is a desktop system). So although my usage model doesn't exactly match that of a laptop, it has a lot of similarities. As long as users run applications that are light on the CPU (Internet, Office apps, E-mail, etc), their P4-M won't be consuming much more than 2W. It obviously wouldn't be that low if the user were, say, running a DVD movie.
wbmw |
