.Yamato Thinking

As you may have noticed in various magazine and website articles, the race for longer laptop battery life really started to heat up in 2007. Engineers at Yamato took on this challenge by rounding up members for “Team Minus 2W” — fully determined to further increase ThinkPad’s appeal and competitive strength in the market.

Taking off 2 watts of electricity consumption goes a long way for a 6-cell battery: it adds 2 more working hours for the X series, and 1.5 hours for the T series. As a result of our team effort, we received very positive comments from our customers and magazine reviews which complimented the long battery life of our 2008/2009 laptops. Today, we will take a peak at the effort behind the improvement.

There is no single brilliant solution to reduce power consumption in computers. Rather, improvements have to be made in every single aspect of the laptop. This requires a power improvement that allows each component (such as CPU, memory modules, etc.) to run on minimum power, while still maintaining the component’s normal functionality. For example, an optical drive is not a device that requires 24/7 power, but standby power is still consumed when media is not inserted. As a solution, our team utilized both software and hardware methods to cut off the electricity by detecting when media is not in the drive. Drive power is activated only when the eject button is pressed by the user — therefore minimizing the electricity required to manage the device. This is a great example of the grand task that our engineers faced; overall power consumption has to be improved, while performance and user convenience must remain absolutely unaffected.

Our software, which provides many convenient features, must also be redesigned and improved with power consumption in mind. For example, programs that require specific chips to run a routine check on a certain device normally require that chip to be constantly “on”. If the same software is designed to listen for a certain trigger event (which activates the routine check), this chip no longer has to continually stay up — it activates only when triggered by the event.

Using this coordination of software and hardware, power savings is accumulated. This “On Demand” approach (giving power when needed, and minimizing power when demand does not exist) is implemented on each component with great care, finally resulting in overall power conservation for the entire system.

Throughout Team Minus 2W’s efforts, awareness for power consumption became a universal trend throughout every department here in Yamato. We must also add that this design would not have been possible, if not for the combined efforts with our LCD / HDD / ODD / memory and OS suppliers.

Recently, whenever we are applying new technology in our development, someone almost always makes a comment such as, “Hey, we can save little more power this way…”. And although our efforts are not visible on the surface, the team’s experience is a great asset. We are certain that Team Minus 2W’s sprit will live on in future ThinkPads.

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 18th, 2009 at 08:50 and is filed under Technology | 技術解説. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.