eReaders, CPU die-shrinks and battery life.

[Solitaire1]

Originally Posted by HarryT

What percentage of the battery power of an eInk reader do you think the CPU accounts for? I suspect it's pretty minimal - the screen is by far the greatest user of power. The CPU enters a very low-power "sleep" mode between page turns.

I had a Sony PRS-500 (their first e-ink ereader). It had great battery life with one exception: using it as an audio player. When I used it as an audio player it would update the e-ink screen once per second (to update the seconds on the time display and the playback position on the progress bar). In about 30 minutes I went from nearly fully charged down to about 1/2 of a charge. Due to this (and that it was a very basic audio player), it was the only time I used it as an audio player.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by Solitaire1

I had a Sony PRS-500 (their first e-ink ereader). It had great battery life with one exception: using it as an audio player. When I used it as an audio player it would update the e-ink screen once per second (to update the seconds on the time display and the playback position on the progress bar). In about 30 minutes I went from nearly fully charged down to about 1/2 of a charge.

Modern eInk display controllers have the ability to update only a small part of the screen, which should greatly alleviate this type of problem.

[Solitaire1]

Originally Posted by Solitaire1

I had a Sony PRS-500 (their first e-ink ereader). It had great battery life with one exception: using it as an audio player. When I used it as an audio player it would update the e-ink screen once per second (to update the seconds on the time display and the playback position on the progress bar). In about 30 minutes I went from nearly fully charged down to about 1/2 of a charge. Due to this (and that it was a very basic audio player), it was the only time I used it as an audio player.

Originally Posted by HarryT

Modern eInk display controllers have the ability to update only a small part of the screen, which should greatly alleviate this type of problem.

Something that I think might have alleviated the problem was to have a small LCD screen (like on a digital watch) to display items that change (such as the playing time) while using the e-ink display for items that don't change that often (album art, artist, album title, song title, track length). A small LCD display probably wouldn't consume much power (considering that a small battery can power a digital watch for years) and could also be handy for e-book uses (such as displaying the current page number).

[Hrafn]

Just a brief note to mention that the 28nm i.MX7 (discussed earlier in this thread) has been launched and that the dual-core version of its does feature an EPD controller:

In addition to differing in the speed and number of its Cortex-A7 cores, the dual-core i.MX7D is the only one to offer a PCIe x1 expansion lane, as well as an E Ink compatible ePD controller for e-reader devices. The latter supports power-sipping color or monochrome displays of up to 2048 x 1536 pixels at 106Hz.
[linuxgizmos.com]

[ottdmk]

Interesting. I wonder if anyone will build a high-end reader around this chip?

[Jason90]

According to Goodereader page turns will be handled by the processor now instead of in software which apparently is going to give us faster page turns and also less/no ghosting,oh and it's 3x more power efficient than the i.mx 6.

Seems to be a massive improvement all round,can't wait to see if the voyage 2 comes with this new cpu.

Last but not least it is also supposed to support upto 2048 x 1536 resolutions,that would make for a worthy kindle dx successor ...fingers crossed