LG's Shuriken Self Refreshing Panel Aims to Improve Notebook Battery Life by Up to an Hour
by Anand Lal Shimpi on September 14, 2011 1:26 PM EST- Posted in
- Displays
- Intel
- IDF 2011
- Panel Self Refresh
- Trade Shows
We've been hearing about self refreshing panels for years now and today Intel demonstrated one such panel using LG's Shuriken panel. The premise is simple: there's a small amount of memory contained within the panel itself that stores a copy of the current frame being displayed on the screen. If the screen is static, the display is fed from its internal frame buffer rather than from the PC's GPU allowing the PC (both CPU and GPU) to go to sleep. In the demonstration Intel showed power savings of 500mW, which could add up to an extra hour of battery life depending on the usage model and notebook.
The demonstration didn't include any quick animations but even when watching a photo slide show the Shuriken was able to run entirely off of its own internal frame buffer. Check out the demo in the video below. Intel expects to see displays with panel self refresh available in notebooks within the next 2 years.
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quiksilvr - Wednesday, September 14, 2011 - link
0.5W = 1 hour battery life? On a phone I can see that, but on a notebook? Highly unlikely.CZroe - Wednesday, September 14, 2011 - link
If I had a 16-cell battery on the tiniest little netbook, like I've seen available for the Acet Aspire one, it probably could. It's a bit extreme considering the standard battery is 3-cell.DarthPierce - Wednesday, September 14, 2011 - link
yea... not gonna happen.If you think get say a 5 hour battery life out of an 80WHr cell, that means the laptop is using 16 watts. If you subtract .5W you get 15.5 watts which gives a battery life of 5 hours 9 minutes 40 seconds.
Less than 10 additional minutes of battery life is nowhere near an hour.
DanNeely - Wednesday, September 14, 2011 - link
I'm guessing this is on ivy bridge/next generation atom ultra-portables. IB is supposed to be much lower power than SB while idling; and IIRC atom based netbooks use about 5 of their 10W idle power consumption on the LCD. With high end netbooks getting >10hrs of runtime now, and next generation CPUs cutting the non-display fraction of idle power significantly getting an extra hour isn't unreasonable. The gain would ofc be much smaller on your 14" general use, or 17" gaming laptop/mobile workstation.DanNeely - Wednesday, September 14, 2011 - link
Correction: Haswell, not ivy bridge for the major power savings.MrSpadge - Wednesday, September 14, 2011 - link
Contemporary laptops can idle at 5 - 7 W and approach 10 h of run time. For these I can see the claim of "up to 1 h more" be true. Not if you're running a discrete GPU, though.MrS
JarredWalton - Wednesday, September 14, 2011 - link
With both AMD and NVIDIA doing dynamic switchable graphics (not that AMD doesn't have plenty to improve with their implementation), we're now down to ~6W idle power draw on dual-core SNB laptops. With a 56Wh battery, that works out to 9.3 hours of idle battery life for 6W, and if they can drop that to 5.5W we'd be at 10.2 hours. So you're right about the numbers. Of course, other less-power-optimized laptops only idle at 10-11W, so those wouldn't see as much of a gain.silverblue - Wednesday, September 14, 2011 - link
...but I'm just wondering why it wasn't considered before. Anything to reduce GPU power and PCI-Express bandwidth is a good thing. Perhaps the next step would be to evaluate frame-by-frame on the PC and transmit only the amended data... though I could be going way too far with this.Zandros - Wednesday, September 14, 2011 - link
… that it would be beneficial to blink the caret less often then.Zandros - Wednesday, September 14, 2011 - link
I also guess that people will hate animated ads even more.