

Surprising Power Consumption Of Ubuntu 11.04 vs. Win 7 - riledhel
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=windows_ubuntu_pow&num=1

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ori_b
If the power usage really is anywhere near as high as the graph says -- 30 to
45 watts range -- then the laptops aren't going to get much battery life. That
is a lot of power to be using.

I suspect that they were testing on the plugged into wall socket power
profile, where speed is the main concern, and not power usage. Power
consumption changes when the laptop is running off of battery.

Edit: My X200 Tablet runs at about 12 watts on Linux right now, on battery.

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slug
They were plugged into mains power, as the first page says:

"For all testing, the Watts Up Pro power meter was used(...) as the power
meter was attached to each system's power supply."

That meter measures AC power, which means that for laptop use, as you say, the
tests are meaningless.

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dlikhten
That site is a piece of shit slow site, can anyone please sum up because by
the time I page though all 7 pages I will shoot myself.

I'm really curious as to what the numbers are.

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japaget
From page 9 of TFA:

> Ubuntu 11.04 actually performed much better than anticipated. Prior to the
> tests commencing, the expectation was that Ubuntu 11.04 would lose handedly
> across all systems to Microsoft Windows 7 Professional Service Pack 1. That
> was far from the case.

> With similar workloads, for the most part the power consumption is
> comparable between Ubuntu 11.04 and Windows 7 Pro SP1. The only major
> differences came during Flash-based HD video playback being more efficient
> under Windows, power consumption while OpenGL gaming, and in select other
> areas. Ubuntu / Linux actually has the potential to become more power
> efficient than Microsoft Windows 7 based upon the close findings from today.
> Once Active-State Power Management (ASPM) is properly fixed up for Linux,
> there is still a Linux 2.6.35 kernel power regression, a scheduler power
> regression, and more. Just yesterday on my Twitter feed, the Phoronix Test
> Suite and I made a discovery of a possible 8% power savings from an entirely
> different vector. More to come.

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chrisjsmith
Without wishing to trash their efforts, Linux power management is a mess.
Nothing works out of the box and you have to play around with powertop to
optimise your kernel configuration to get even reasonable battery life. Add to
that, the ACPI implementation is buggy as anything.

This, at least in my case when testing on an Acer 4820T, manifests itself as
Windows 7 lasting 6-7 hours on battery (!) with heavy Visual Studio 2010
usage, whereas Ubuntu IDLING lasts about 2.5 hours out of the box and 3.5
after tuning it to bits.

It's ok optimising Linux like this but the whole EXPERIENCE is still horrid.

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lucian1900
The problem is mainly with bugs (often intentional) in the ACPI
implementations of hardware vendors. While they almost always provide hacky
windows drivers, they almost never provide linux patches, or even enough info
for correct blacklists.

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eropple
That's a problem of a failure to code to what is, not to what one thinks it
should be.

As I've said before when this comes up--Windows is, for better or for worse,
the _de facto_ standard. Alternative operating systems (and Linux is very,
very alternative, in this sort of use scenario) that don't recognize and
acknowledge the _de facto_ standard's effective supplanting of the _de jure_
standard are Doing It Wrong.

edit: Swapped my _jure_ s and _facto_ es. Shouldn't post while writing code...

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aristidb
Did you mean "de facto" when you wrote "de jure", and vice versa? Windows is
the de facto standard, and ACPI is the de jure standard; you wrote the
opposite.

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eropple
Er, yes. My bad, was writing a unit test at the same time. ;)

