Intel Pushing for Better Battery Life with a 40 Percent More Efficient GPU

Battery life on our phones and tablets are a pretty largely talked about topic. You see a ton of screenshots floating around forums, Twitter, G+ and others that show terrible life and outstanding life. Usually the outstanding life images are from a highly-modified device that has been rooted, flashed with a custom ROM and kernel. That isn’t for everyone though. Plenty of users just want a solid device out of the box that lasts 12 to 16 hours. Sure, there have been some devices that do that, the DROID RAZR MAXX comes to mind, so does the Lenovo Yoga 8. Intel has been making strides in the right direction with they Bay Trail and Haswell chips, but they aren’t stopping with just the processor when it comes to lowering power consumption.

Intel is now demonstrating a 22nm tri-gate GPU that they say is 40% more efficient and offers the same performance as the current GPU plus improves the performance when you need it. The GPU core is also designed to go into standby mode much quicker thus saving even more bits of juice.

“First, it is well known that the best way to reduce power is to reduce voltage, so Intel’s graphics cores are designed to take advantage of our 22nm tri-gate transistor technology which allows high-performance operation even as voltage is lowered.  However even with these advanced transistors, some specialized circuits (such as memory arrays) inside the graphics core can still limit the minimum voltage (called Vmin) which can be used.  Therefore this design demonstrates a new “selective boosting” technique which uses a slightly higher “boosted” voltage for key parts of Vmin-limiting memory arrays in the core.  What does this accomplish?  By dynamically boosting only small parts of the core, the rest of the core can go to even lower voltage – giving dramatic energy efficiency improvements.

There is a whole lot more tech behind it of course. Using techniques like adaptive clocking to reduce safety margin detecting and and keep droops out of the loop and various other things that I am extremely under qualified to even attempt to offer up.

At the end of the day, what is all means in a much more efficient GPU that can deliver the same, if not better, graphics to your devices screen. In short, making your battery last a whole lot longer. Hit up the link below to get the full story from Intel.

Source & Img: Intel Via Liliputing