Emerging software technology allows for ways to conserve energy and manage power in audio devices, laptops and gaming consoles, a computer systems engineer said.
Institute for Real-Time Computer Systems engineer Samarjit Chakraborty spoke about multimedia power management options to an audience of about 20 on Monday night at the Boston University Photonics Center.
‘One of the many challenges that designers face is battery life,’ he said. ‘You want to play a game on your mobile phone but don’t want your phone to die.’
Chakraborty said his company has created software that determines exactly how much energy is necessary to carry out each function of the electronic device and adjusts the power level accordingly, he said.
Chakraborty said he proposed creating a new menu for iPods that allows the user to control the frequency at which they listen to their music. Using lower frequencies would lessen the amount of power the device uses, he said.
This would not affect the music quality, he said. He played various clips at different frequencies to prove his point.
The frequency rate of MP3 players is 20 kHz, but most adults can hardly hear frequency components above 16 kHz, so that is 4 kHz of wasted power, Chakraborty said.
In addition, he said, if MP3 players were decreased to a lower kHz level, a listener would hardly notice a difference because iPods are already used in noisy environments and most people’s headphones cannot decode the differences in frequencies.
While some energy in the iPod is devoted to music output, a significant amount goes into components like the backlight, wireless interface and various applications the device offers, Chakraborty said.
Associate engineering professor Martin Herbordt referred to the iPod game ‘Brick,’ in which a ball floats around while knocking out bricks at the top of the screen.
‘In the part of the game where nothing is happening, the software would make sure that no processing goes on,’ he said.
The lack of processing would effectively conserve battery life, he said.
Chakraborty said the concept of lowering frequencies also applies to video applications.
‘ ‘We don’t predict what’s going to happen but while the clip gets downloaded we try to estimate the workload needed for the next few frames and change the frequency accordingly,’ Chakraborty said.
He said the analysis requires less than 15 seconds for an hour-long clip.
‘ ‘There is a widening gap between processor performance and battery capacity,’ Chakraborty said. ‘Battery capacity is not keeping up with algorithmic complexity.’
The Institute for Real-Time Computer Systems, located in Munich, Germany, already has implemented this power management technology in the IBM with Intel Pentium laptop, he said.
There is the possibility for 23 percent power reduction potential in such laptops, which operate on five different frequency levels, Chakraborty said.
BU computer hardware engineering graduate student Nael Musleh said the concept of a lower frequency iPod works.
‘Even when I heard the lower quality one, it’s still good music,’ he said.
BU graduate student Atabak Mahram agreed.
‘I’d purchase one,’ he said.’
Musleh said he wants to work in the audio engineering field because of such research.
‘There is a future for this and lots of research to be done for audio and video games and outputs,’ he said.
