Introduced in ATI's v8.19.10 proprietary display drivers for their RADEON series was support for PowerPlay. For the uninitiated, ATI's PowerPlay allows the user to specify various "power-states", or rather various frequencies and voltages at which the card can operate. The purpose for these various performance levels is ultimately to allow mobile users to save on battery life through running at reduced speeds when not performing strenuous 3D tasks. As we had shared at Phoronix upon the public release of ATI PowerPlay for Linux, the technology does indeed work as expected by specifying the power-state to conserve the battery along with generating less heat. However, what we had failed to share initially were the battery results with specifically how much energy is conserved through downclocking the graphics rendering capabilities. Today, however, we have prepared a set of tests to demonstrate its advantages. To begin, the laptop used through the duration of testing was IBM/Lenovo ThinkPad R52. The R52 (with a few modifications) features a Intel Pentium M 750 (1.86GHz), IBM R52 18494WU (i915PM + ICH-6M), Toshiba Slim MK1032GAX 100GB ATA-6 16MB cache HDD, DVD+/-RW Drive, Intel PRO/Wireless 2915ABG, Atheros AR5212 (NetGear PCMCIA), 2 x 1GB OCZ DDR2-533, and finally an ATI Mobility RADEON X300 graphics with 64MB of video memory. Comprising the software side of things the notebook computer was loaded up with Fedora Core 4 and the 2.6.14 kernel while the ATI drivers used were v8.20.8.
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pyroCPU
Jan 9, 2006, 03:09 AM
