Toshiba is announcing that they’re working on RAM technology that is 27% more efficient when active, and up to 85% more efficient when in standby mode. It’s going to achieve this by predicting when and how the RAM is going to be used next. This would allocate resources in a more efficient way, which means less power consumption.
While we’re not going to get much better battery technology anytime soon, we do keep getting more efficient processors, displays, storage and memory. “Unfortunately”, just because these things do get more efficient, doesn’t necessarily mean we’ll see an improvement in the overall battery life of the device, because usually that efficiency gets cancelled out by the higher performance the manufacturers are adding to that technology.
So processors get more efficient, but they also get more powerful and have higher clock speeds. Displays like the HTC Super LCD 2 was 40-50% more efficient than the original, but since they put twice as many pixels on it with the 1080p resolution, they pretty much cancelled that out. Storage and memory also get more efficient with time, but they also make them much faster. The efficiency improvement only really applies when compared to the old technology at the same performance level. But they all raise the performance until it cancels out that improvement in efficiency, because that’s what the market wants: better CPU’s and GPU’s, better displays, faster memory.
If this sort of technology trickles down to lower end devices, where they won’t focus as much on speed and performance, it’s possible those devices could get more battery life, like the Cortex A7-based devices we’re going to see this year. But those phones also have only 1200-1500 mAh batteries in them, while a high-end phone can go for double that these days. So it’s good to keep that in mind before buying a lower end phone thinking it will be more efficient than a high-end one.
In the end the only thing that can get manufacturers to make devices that give you say double the battery life they give you now, is to keep asking for that kind of “feature”, until they put their main focus on that, instead of always focusing on making new technologies better, faster, stronger.
[Via Engadget]