Tweaked Apple TV Offers 'Significant' but Nearly Invisible Power Savings With More Efficient Chip Designs

[ipedro]

Tiny chip, ultra low power consumption. iWatch.

Apple has often used AppleTV as a low risk testing ground for upcoming products. At just $99 and in a niche market, they can afford to make mistakes. This clearly has worked out for Apple though. Really impressive chip!

 

[terraphantm]

Awesome.

But seriously, it matters in a larger scale than one individual consumer. It matters over the scale of all consumers. Plus, if everything in my house were made with power efficiency in mind, my electric bill would be greatly reduced. Most electronics are more wasteful than they could be, because wasteful is immediately cheap, and immediate is all people pay attention to.

So small savings DO MATTER. Don't discount them as insignificant. Look at the bigger picture than your own personal space.

At the end of the day, it's still a very small percentage of overall usage -- whether you're discussing at the individual level or on a worldwide scale. Financial and environmental impact would go unnoticed. You'd have a much greater impact by reducing the power consumption of the heavy weights (Kitchen appliances, HVAC systems, TVs, etc..) by 10% than you would by cutting the Apple TV's consumption by 100%

 

[TMay]

Apple is in a somewhat unique position where synergies between software, hardware, CPU, and industrial design allow finely tuned optimizations for size (smaller/denser), thermal dissipation (cooler) and power consumption (less). In order to get really good at design, a company has to create a culture that values these optimizations, even if the results offer limited benefit in a particular application, in this case the ATV.

This optimization is an advantage that Apple holds over its competitors, and why Apple is so wedded to incremental evolution of a product after a disruption, such as that created by the first iPhone, and why Apple keeps iPhone models in production long after they have been supplanted by newer generations.

It's just the smart way to make products, but for some consumers used to rapid change, it garners responses of "boring" and "meh". Such is the maturing market for smartphones.

 

[macFanDave]

Sure, for the plugged-in AppleTV, this improvement gets the slow golf clap.

What this could be used for is a battery-powered completely wireless AppleTV. Imagine being able to travel with your Apple TV and being able to watch TV your way on any hotel TV, or being able to bring it to a friend's house. Or maybe they'll stuff the whole works into an iPad.

The mind boggles for people who have an imagination.

 

[2IS]

Sure, for the plugged-in AppleTV, this improvement gets the slow golf clap.

What this could be used for is a battery-powered completely wireless AppleTV. Imagine being able to travel with your Apple TV and being able to watch TV your way on any hotel TV, or being able to bring it to a friend's house. Or maybe they'll stuff the whole works into an iPad.

The mind boggles for people who have an imagination.

Well if you're taking your Apple TV with you to watch in a hotel or friends house, they'll obviously have an outlet since they have a TV, a "wireless" ATV isn't anything special in your imaginative examples.

 

[AaronEdwards]

Sure, for the plugged-in AppleTV, this improvement gets the slow golf clap.

What this could be used for is a battery-powered completely wireless AppleTV. Imagine being able to travel with your Apple TV and being able to watch TV your way on any hotel TV, or being able to bring it to a friend's house. Or maybe they'll stuff the whole works into an iPad.

The mind boggles for people who have an imagination.

That's nothing new, I got a Raspberry Pi for some projects, and while it requires about 2-3.5 Watt, it's a bit more versatile too. I have been running it from an external battery pack and I doubt that I'm the first one to do so.

But I really don't see a reason to power an Apple TV with a external battery pack, if you are going to use it to watch something on big screen TV, then the battery pack won't be able power the TV. If the TV is powered, there will be a power outlet. So, you could bring the power adapter instead, and then you won't run out of power. And if you're not going to watch it on a big screen TV, an iPad would be a better choice.

Now, being able to run a 1.6 oz (45g) computer for 5 hours or more, that's a lot more interesting.

 

[yellobello]

Equally hypothetical that would mean the 5 million Apple TVs Apple sold in 2012 fiscal year would then consume 11,818,182 KWh.

U.S. nuclear power plants have net summer capacities between about 500 and 1300 MWe. Amount of electricity generated by a 1,000-MWe reactor at 90% capacity factor in one year: 7.9 billion KWh—enough to supply electricity for 690,000 households.

Result: 7.9 billion KWH/690,000 households= 11,449 KWH/household
=> 11,818,182 KWh/11,449 KWH/household= 1,032 households.

Amazing energy saving ....

Hopefully my calculation is correct!

 

[AaronEdwards]

Equally hypothetical that would mean the 5 million Apple TVs Apple sold in 2012 fiscal year would then consume 11,818,182 KWh.

U.S. nuclear power plants have net summer capacities between about 500 and 1300 MWe. Amount of electricity generated by a 1,000-MWe reactor at 90% capacity factor in one year: 7.9 billion KWh—enough to supply electricity for 690,000 households.

Result: 7.9 billion KWH/690,000 households= 11,449 KWH/household
=> 11,818,182 KWh/11,449 KWH/household= 1,032 households.

Amazing energy saving ....

Hopefully my calculation is correct!

Seems correct, but then, if 5,000,000 households decided to turn off one 40 watt lightbulb for 1 hour each day that would otherwise be on, that would save enough electricity for about 6,500 households...
Not to mention the power savings if 5,000,000 households instead of putting appliances on stand-by actually turned them off.
And those examples doesn't require 5,000,000 households to spend $99 to save about 2kWh every year....

 

[macs4nw]

Clearly just a testbed for something else. Exciting!

Any thinking human being would have to come to the same conclusion.
Longer battery life for certain devices? Exciting indeed.

 

[AppleSauce007]

Apple's reasons for introducing a brand-new chip design for the relatively low-volume Apple TV remain unclear, with AnandTech summarizing some of the recent speculation that Apple may be trying to shave costs by stripping out unnecessary components of the A5 or testing the new chip ahead of a broader rollout in other products.


I think the plan is to refine the apple TV into a low power module that can be easily integrated into portable outdoor panels, TV sets, connected cars, busses, trains, airplane entertainment systems, etc...

 

[nsayer]

That IS significant!

If you leave your iTV on 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year, when you are away for vacation, and all night long, you could save over 5 kiloWatt hours per year with the new model.

But you don't do anything of the sort. The vast majority of the time, your AppleTV is sleeping (you can tell because the front panel light is off and there's no video output). I don't believe they compared the sleeping power consumption of the two, but I can't imagine there's a significant difference. It's probably some single- or low double-digit number of *milli*watts for each.