Power Consumption in Handheld Computers

While the computing requirements of mobile battery-powered systems in general are increasing, it is clear that advances in battery technology have not kept pace with the ever increasing energy demands of these devices. Researchers are exploring architectural, hardware, software and system level optimization techniques to minimize the overall energy consumption of these computers. An analysis of the power consumption behavior of these devices when running representative workloads will provide a critical and a needed insight that will assist designers in developing low power future generations devices. In this work, and in order to get a better understanding of the factors that affect power consumption in pocket PCs, a series of experiments were performed on pocket computers while being subjected to a variety of operational scenarios. Based on the analysis and observations made from these measurements we were able to relate the consumption behavior of the computer to some of its operational parameters