On Wed, Jun 25, 2014 at 3:52 PM, Steven D'Aprano <st...@pearwood.info> wrote: > Taking it with a generous grain of salt is one thing, but outright > rejecting it is a bit harsh. I understand that HP has actually > demonstrated the Machine, so unless they faked the demo, the basic facts > are probably more-or-less correct.
Like all benchmarks used in advertising, it's going to focus on what the machine does well, regardless of how closely that parallels real-world usage. Legit ones attempt to ensure that there's at least some correlation, but even then, it's impossible to be totally fair. So "more-or-less correct" may be true, but I still take *all* such benchmarks with the aforementioned salt. >> Also, mobile phones don't waste most of their power doing "calculating" >> and "handling" terabytes of data, but the RF and display consumes the >> most of power. Therefore, even if you could scale the CPU down your >> phone would still not go 2-3 months on a single charge. > > Fair point. > > But given how much smart phones get used for playing games these days, I > think the savings would still be considerable. Plus, most of computing is just doing the same thing over and over again. The improvements done to the CPU might well be able to be applied, in a different form, to other parts of the device. Sure, the screen has to emit light, which costs power; but if computation is cheap enough, it might be possible to calculate exactly how much light is falling on the screen, and back down the brightness automatically when you move into shadow. Engineering is generally about trading one resource for another, so gains in one area can result in gains in others too. Of course, it's always possible for beautiful engineering to be destroyed by stupid politicking. But here's hoping. ChrisA -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
