John Williamson wrote:
lid wrote:
tony sayer wrote:
I posted about the Toshiba battery. 20 years ago cell phones
resembled a brick because of the battery size. Within a few years
the battery was minuscule. There was little advancement over the
years in batteries as the "pressing" demand was not there. Arguably
there was always a demand. Amazing what they can do when they want to.
Yes battery tech to some extent, but a lot of cleaver tech in how they
use the battery nowadays to get long service times;!...



I'm willing to bet that more progress was made in reducing power
consumption hat increasing capacity.

My first cellphone had a lead acid battery that held 24 watt-hours, and
needed charging every day, and would only talk for an hour or so. I had
to carry a spare battery with me on a long day.

My current one has a battery about a fiftieth of the physical size,
which holds 5 watt-hours, and will run the phone for three or four days
on standby, or talk for a couple of hours.

The same physical size battery would now run the original phone for a
week or the current phone for a month or more. Admittedly, the old phone
could only be used to talk or as a very slow modem, and the new one is a
PDA as well as a phone and a fast modem, so uses much more power on
standby than a modern equivalent of the old one. I'd say the order of
magnitude is about equal between power saving and battery improvements
over the last fifteen years or so.


Its actually massively in favour of power saving and not in favour of
batteries.

A lead acid car battery is only slightly better now than 60 years ago..
they are still the same size, shape and weight.

The lithium batteries of today last a bit longer in total lifetime than
those of 10 years ago, but they are no smaller and lighter.


OTOH my Atom based server is blindingly fast compared to an IBM PC of 25
years ago and use almost no power at all.

with mobile devices, the difference is even more marked - a friend who
worked at Acorn on the original ARM designs said 'we had no money to
develop large chips: so we did the best we could with the amount of
silicon we could afford. Basically we made it run bloody fast. It was
about 5 years later when people noticed we had more MIPS per watt than
anyone else, and tge business really took off..'