AMD is crying foul over battery tests run by computer makers and consumer electronics publications, according to a report in the New York Times. The chip maker claims that the standard benchmark used, MobileMark 2007, unfairly gives an advantage to Intel CPUs.
From the article: “Intel is advantaged in this environment because they have optimized their architecture to have better battery life when the computer isn’t doing anything,” AMD’s Patrick Moorhead said.
Well, isn’t that a good thing in general? Shouldn’t AMD be trying to make its chips use less power when they’re not doing anything?
But here’s the thing: We don’t use MobileMark to test battery life, and systems with AMD chips still see worse endurance than those with Intel chips. Read on for our results.
We took a look at seven different AMD machines we reviewed over the past several months, and how they fared on the LAPTOP Battery Test, which continuously surfs the Web over Wi-Fi until the battery is dead.
In the ultraportable category, the HP dv2’s endurance was almost half the category average.
We tested three thin-and-light systems: the HP dv3, the HP tx2z, and the eMachines eMD620. With the exception of the tx2z, all were below the category average.
We’ve also seen similar results with AMD mainstream notebooks, one of which (the Gateway MD2601u) we gave an Editors’ Choice despite its short battery life.
Finally, in the desktop replacement category, which is not known for stellar battery life to begin with, the Toshiba P305D–also an Editors’ Choice recipient because of its overall value–fared poorly on battery life.
This is not to say that systems with AMD CPUs are inherently bad–in fact, AMD chips beat out Intel chips in some respects, as we proved in our face-off last year. But to claim bias where none exists, well…
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