Brent I believe you are correct; cellphones regularly broadcast in order to participate in the network. A steerable antenna could cut power usage by a large factor - maybe even by an order of magnitude - but it would need to be able to constantly reorient itself as it gets shifted around the x,y & z axis' while for example being in a pocket while someone is walking.
I think in this case software could help on a couple levels. Obviously a lower powered antenna would be a huge win - and would make the patent owner very wealthy, but absent that. It could be possible, by using algorithmic means to improve and sharpen the quality of an unusably poor signal thereby enabling the use of a much lower powered antenna. Another possibility is in how the mobile unit and the network synch. The network could buffer attempts to contact the mobile unit for a short duration (from the human perspective, but an eon of time from the machine perspective) without it being excessively noticeable to the users. The mobile device would thus limit its communication back to the cell network to a shared configuration ping schedule. The network would know when to expect a ping and if there was anything in the mobile devices in buffer it would at that time make the connection. The second option of course relies on a controlled degradation of the service that is kept below the level where users begin to notice the delays; by sharing a configured schedule both the cell network and the mobile device would have advance knowledge of when the next synch point would be (something on the order of every seven seconds) enabling both sides of the networked handshake to optimize for that synchronization sequence point. A third option is to ramp up the number of base stations by several orders of magnitude and go to a much lower powered signal - the antenna would still be the main power draw perhaps, but overall energy would be saved because the transmission signal strength could be much lower (because cell base stations would be much more numerous). -Chris From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of meekerdb Sent: Friday, September 20, 2013 11:47 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: What gives philosophers a bad name? Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't it worse than that. Doesn't the smartphone (or cel phone) radiate even when you're not talking, so that the system knows where you are if someone calls you? The only improvement in efficiency I could suggest is electronically steerable antennae to reduce the required radiated power. Brent On 9/20/2013 8:08 PM, L.W. Sterritt wrote: Chris, Brent and meekerdb, While we have been considering optimizing the efficiency of circuitry and software, we neglected that while talking on the smartphone, 1/2 of the total power budget goes to radiation from the smartphone antenna - about 2 Watts as I remember. That will drain a typical smartphone battery in less than 3 hours, and there is not a lot we can do about it, except use the phone for all of it's other functions and don't talk too much! LWSterritt On Sep 20, 2013, at 5:24 PM, meekerdb <[email protected]> wrote: On 9/20/2013 4:40 PM, Chris de Morsella wrote: Current software is very energy efficient -- and on so many levels. I worked developing code used in the Windows Smartphone and it was during that time that I had to first think hard about the energy efficiency dimension in computing -- as measured by useful work done per unit of energy. The engineering management in that group was constantly harping on the need to produce energy efficient code. Programmers are deeply engrained with a lot of bad habits -- and not only in terms of producing energy efficient software. For example most developers will instinctively grab large chunks of resources -- in order to ensure that their processes are not starved of resources in some kind of peak scenario. While this may be good for the application -- when measured by itself -- it is bad for the overall footprint of the application on the device (bloat) and for the energy requirements that that software will impose on the hardware. Another example of a common bad practice poorly written synchronization code (or synchronized containers). These bad practices (anti-patterns in the jargon) can not only have a huge impact on performance in peak usage scenarios, but also act to increase the energy requirements for that software to run. I think that -- with a lot of programming effort of course (which is why it will never happen) that the current code base, and not only in the mobile small device space, where it is clearly important, but in datacenter scale applications and service (exposed) applications as well -- that the energy efficiency of software has a huge headroom for improvement. But in order for this to happen there has to first be a profound cultural change amongst software developers who are being driven by speed to market, and other draconian economic and marketing imperatives and are producing code under these types od deadlines and constraints. There's a lot of bad design in consumer electronics, particularly in user interfaces, because the pressure is to get more and newer features and apps. Eventually (maybe already) this will slow down and designers will start to pay more attention to refining the stuff already there. If there is a theoretical minimum that derives from the second law of thermodynamics it must be exceedingly far below what the current practical minimums are for actual real world computing systems. And I do not see how a minimum can be determined without reference to the physical medium in which the computing system being measured is implemented. It is determined by the temperature of the environment in which entropy must be dumped in order to execute irreversible operations (like erasing a bit). But you're right that current practicle minimums are very far above the Landauer limit and so it has not effect on current design practice. The current practice is limited by heat dissipation and battery capacity. In fact how could a switch be implemented without it being implemented in some medium that contains the switch? The way to completely avoid Landauer's limit is to make all operations reversible, never lose any information so that the whole calculation could be reversed. Then there's no entropy dumped to the environment and Landauer's limit doesn't apply. Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
