AMD calls to stop lies about battery life

laptop amd

Processor and tech giant AMD has called into question exactly how long the laptop industry can continue to market ridiculously over estimated battery life figures.

Anyone has looked into buying a laptop in the last few years knows exactly what the problem is. Ask a guy in store or check the box and you’ll see a battery life statistic that is normally quite comical. It tells you nothing at all about how long your new laptop will last under ‘real’ conditions, despite the fact there’s plenty of great benchmarking programs the manufacturers could use to give consumers a real idea.

For now, it’s all about staying as far away from the ‘real world’ as possible. Battery life estimates are best case scenarios based on using the lowest CPU, least intensive tasks and all but turning off the actual screen. All that ’9 hours’ battery life claim tells you is the laptop isn’t likely to turn itself off during that time – providing you make it nearly unusable and turn off any of the useful features – not exactly practical.

AMD are getting fed up with this though, and have called for some actual regulation – a bit like what we saw with hard drives a few years back when they were busy trying to confuse consumers about the size of a drive.

AMD warns that if the industry doesn’t get a grip soon then it will either end in forced regulation from a consumer group or a lawsuit.

The idea is that laptops will list a ‘resting time’ and ‘active time’ showing how the battery operates under real conditions. We hope this happens soon so we don’t have to rely solely on third party battery tests in order to figure out how long our laptops will really last.

Posted on June 23, 2009 | Filed Under Tech