[Finally revealed] The reason why the latest Android Walkman NW-ZX507 has poor battery life
This time I found out why the
Android Walkman has a bad battery, so I decided to write a little.
If you have a bad battery life of this
Android Walkman , it is helpful if you can have a look.
Applicable model
NW-A100 series
NW-ZX500 series
Why battery life is bad
In short, the processor is bad.
This time, there is no statement about the model of the processor adopted by
Walkman, but it is presumed to be the following from the
GPU used .
SoC NXP i.MX 8M Mini
The reason is
Cortex-A53 4-core configuration
GPU is Vivante GC7000 NanoUltra
(Supports up to OPEN GL2.0, power saving type)
Will be.
The manufacturing process is 14nm LPC FinFET.
By the way, many people have never heard of NXP SoCs.
This SoC is mainly used for verification boats and embedded devices, and is rarely
available for
smartphones .
This is the first time I 've been riding
Android with this.
Well, I will write the cause...
1. Underclock is too high
When I examined the
Walkman with AIDA64, I found that it was operating at a high frequency of
1.2 GHz when idle (no operation) .
For
smartphones equipped with the same Cotex-A53, underclocking is kept as low as 100-300MHz.
By doing this, performance is exhibited under load, but battery power is improved by reducing power consumption during idle.
The operating frequency at idle is almost
four times that for
smartphones .
2. The control governor is strange
Some processors have what is called a
control governor . Mainly, it is a set of instructions for how to move clock steps and cores.
Normally, in a 1.8GHz class SoC, it takes about 6 to 8 steps. If it is 4 core class, processing such as core stop is also performed.
With NXP i.MX 8M Mini,
there are only 3 steps, and there is no core stop.
I thought it was silly and checked the data sheet of the processor, but the following items were found in the relevant items
so. There is only one control item in the
kernel (backbone) of this processor .
Min, Typ, Max in the above column are allowable values.
Moreover, it is not defined that it moves only 1 core, and it
always operates with
4 cores .
I think this is a design for embedded devices.
Such devices do not operate on batteries and are often in an environment where power is always supplied.
In that case, it is convincing if you think that it is easy for the developer to understand by not making the control items complicated as for
smartphones .
By the way, the
battery capacity of this
Walkman is 1500mA/h
Actually, it is less than NW-ZX2. Still, I always have a
chipset that runs on a 1.2GHz 4-core .
The battery life is bad, too.