Why consumption of the battery tends to be high for Windows-loaded machines?

ByJuan Carlos M. Rosas

It was held early in the morning of October 23 in Japan timeApple recital eventAmong them, the power consumption efficiency of the MacBook Air is appealing, but the findings that support it are disclosed in a totally different place. The tendency that Windows machines consume more battery power than Mac OS X equipped machines is beginning to be seen, but why is this situation like this?

Coding Horror: Why Does Windows Have Terrible Battery Life?
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2013/10/why-does-windows-have-terrible-battery-life.html

Web programmer'sJeff AtwoodA few years ago, I became captive of tablet PCs that I did not look at before. For that reason, I will talk with Microsoft's corporate philosophy as follows. "At the time of establishment, they had a vision of" computers at all desks and homes ", but their goal was achieved in the first half of the 2000. Then, what follows Is it an era of computers that can be carried and used everywhere? "

Jeff, now attracted enough to say "computer" synonymously with "tablet", is waiting for the announcement of the new iPad 5 and at the same time arrives the new model "Surface Pro 2" of Microsoft's Surface series which we purchased the other day I am waiting for you. "I think that the latest Intel machine is fearfully speeding up and I think that Surface Pro will be an index to anticipate evolution over the next few years," said Jeff, who is excited.

However, it is also true that Surface Pro is getting rid of quick battery consumption. When I was interested in the degree of improvement as it became a new model with a Haswell processor, I decided to see a graph like the one below.


In this table, it should be most important as a usage pattern of tablet PCBattery operating time when browsing the net with Wi-Fi connectionWe are doing comparison. The bottom two are old and new Surface Pro, which has increased from 4.720 hours in the old model to 6.680 hours and 42% in the new "Pro 2", but in order to line up with other tablet PCs Mr. Jeff thought that driving time of at least 8 hours was essential is felt that this number is "substantial recession".

"But if it has a lifetime of seven hours for browsing the net, it's not bad ... well then, with the i5-4200u CPU and LPDDR3 RAM, the specifications are almost the same, and the display resolution is poor MacBook Air What is going on with the 2013 model of? "Is the next graph.


While the battery capacity is less than 38 Wh of Surface Pro 2's 42 Wh, the 11-inch model of MacBook Air showed over 11 hours of battery life. That is,MacBook Air is running the system with twice the operating efficiency of Surface Pro 2It will be.

Actually, Jeff has encountered a similar case in the past. In 2009AnandTechIn the verification made, I switched between Mac OS X and Windows on MacBook Pro supporting Boot Camp, and compared the battery life of each. The result is here.


As a result, although it was the same hardware, it was possible to use it for 8 hours when using Mac OS X, while about 6 hours on Windows Vista, 6 hours on Windows 7, and a performance difference of over 26% . In addition, MacBook Air 13 inch modelComparison verification between OS X and Windows 8The result is that for Windows 8, which was 7 hours and 40 minutes, Mac OS X has a result of 14 hours 25 minutes.

Windows 8 is the most suitable OS for tablets, But somehow it is supposed to have only 50% performance compared to Mac OS X, which is the desktop OS. If it is said that the difference which was 26% as of 2009 is spreading to 50%, this can only be said that performance is deteriorating.

Jeff discussed this matter on AnandTech's Anand Shimpi on Twitter, but why is such a difference occurring?I could not make a conclusion.Likewise, I asked similar questions to multiple PC vendors, but nobody was able to explain satisfactory explanation about this result. Why is there such a difference, despite running their own OS on hardware built by Microsoft itself, not third party products? Jeff says, "Please tell me why this result is occurring, at this point Apple's products will be the best choice if the main uses are net browsing."

In addition, "AppleTimer CoalingIt is superior in the control of this, so such a difference is born "Although comments such as those coming from the source entries are being posted, it seems that they have not yet come to a fundamental answer yet.