Comment by canpan
5 days ago
The GameBoy Advance could run 2D games (and some 3D demos) on 2 AA batteries for 16 hours. I wonder if we could get something more efficient with modern tech? It seems research made things faster but more power hungry. We compensate with better batteries instead. I guess we can and it's a design goal problem, I also do love a screen with backlight.
> It seems research made things faster but more power hungry
No, modern CPUs are far more power efficient for the same compute.
The primary power draw in a simple handheld console like would be the screen and sound.
Putting an equivalent MCU on a modern process into that console would make the CPU power consumption so low as to be negligible.
As a consumer product example: e-ink readers. (Of course, it helps as well that the GameBoy had no radios etc...)
E-ink use energy when changing state. A 30fps 3D game would require a lot of energy. Also, e-ink is electromechanical in nature, so there would be a lot of wear as well.
Yes; yet... I thought the efficiency per compute has to do more with the nm process shrinking the die than anything else. That and power use is divided by so many more instructions per second