Laptop battery-life debate rages on

All-day battery life

"We're very excited to have the conversation about this," said Sobon, as she repeatedly expressed her dissatisfaction with "flawed battery benchmark" measurements.

Meanwhile Jonathan Seckler, AMD's senior manager for product marketing development, said Microsoft had been unfairly blamed for a lot when it came to battery sappage and that it was actually down to the hardware to become more power-efficient.

"You're not going to see incremental improvements in battery life over the next year from us," Seckler added, "you're going to see exponential improvements."

"This is something we're putting a lot of effort into," confirmed AMD's senior director of ASIC/layout design, Joe Macri, adding "It's a goal to get to a more realistic set of measurements."

"We haven't yet given you the experience that you want [when it comes to battery life]," admitted Macri. "You can have the thinnest, lightest computer, but if you're still carrying around this power brick, what's the point?"

"We are going to give you computers that last all day," Macri chimed in. "All-day compute is a mantra we have and we're going to achieve it sooner than you think," he said, adding that "all-day computing" was not going to be an empty promise because "buzz words don't sell, buzz words don't give you a good user experience."

Sobon pointed out that AMD's newer platforms had already made an improvement in terms of battery life, with most getting five to six hours on idle.

But Sobon said she still believed people were being deceived about battery life claims and called for better active-versus-resting-time measurements to be thought up as soon as possible.

What we think

We agree that battery life should be reported with reference to three scenarios: near-idle (web-surfing, for example), mid-load (watching a movie), and full-load (playing a game). The trouble for AMD is that a side-by-side comparison of a company's otherwise-identical AMD- and Intel-powered notebooks - Acer, for the sake of argument - usually shows battery life in favour of Intel.