[ltp] Is 21W good or too much for a dual core duo thinkpad?

[Marc MERLIN]

On Mon, Oct 15, 2007 at 03:59:07PM -0700, Marc MERLIN wrote:
> Power usage (ACPI estimate): 24.4W (3.2 hours) (long term: 25.5W,/3.1h)

So, I did get this down to 21W or so with the ati power mgt tool, but I
compared with my T42p, and the reason why it lasts 4.4h with a smaller
battery is that powertop shows 15.8W / 4.6H with nohz+ all powertop
recommendations on the T42p.

That's a full 5W fewer than my Z61p with LCD backlight to min, wireless
turned off, ethernet unplugged and aticonfig --set-powerstate=1
Turns out the ubuntu fglrx package I had already had the code to do this,
but disabled powerstate switching by default for some reason. 
I had to re-enable it in /etc/default/fglrx. Makes me wonder why it was off.

I even got my T42p (1600x1200 LCD) to drop down to 12.3W by turning off the
lcd with radeontool (xorg driver, not fglrx)
"radeontool light off" does nothing on my Z61p, but a simple
"xset dpms force off" does turn off the screen and saves another 4-5W.

The good news is that switching to a 2.6.22.1 kernel with noticks and other
stuff recommended by powertop + aticonfig --set-powerstate, I went down from
28W to 20.5W, which is a _lot_ obviously, but I'm hoping more can be done
since windows seems to say that it can do 5H+ on that hardware.

So now, I have to ask: is 21W expected for a T7200 CPU (dual core duo 2Ghz)
throttled down to 1Ghz 95%+ of the time (according to powertop)?

Thanks,
Marc
-- 
"A mouse is a device used to point at the xterm you want to type in" - A.S.R.
Microsoft is to operating systems & security ....
                                      .... what McDonalds is to gourmet cooking
Home page: http://marc.merlins.org/