Microsoft Research and the Georgia Institute of Technology have created WearDrive, a system that uses Bluetooth Low Energy or Wi-Fi to offload processing tasks from wearables to more powerful smartphones.
The researchers tested an Android 4.4 reference smartwatch using 512 MB of RAM and were able to obtain "up to" 8.85x better performance while stretching battery life "up to" 3.69x (i.e. 27% as much energy was used). Large, energy-intensive tasks are performed on the smartphone while small, energy-efficient tasks are performed locally using battery-backed RAM (referred to as BB-RAM throughout the paper). The WearCache system can hold data in RAM until your smartphone is in range, writing to NAND only when RAM fills up.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Gravis on Thursday July 16 2015, @12:05PM
ok... so my big problem with portable devices is that their displays use a fuckton (standard, not metric) of power. seriously, you have a problem when more power goes toward displaying information than actually calculating everything including what to display. what kills me is that they actually solved this problem [wikipedia.org] but wont use it! the reason of course is greed. there is very little competition in displays and it wasn't until apple pushed their high pixel density displays that anyone even tried to compete. add on the fact that it's patented and it's no surprise we have shit displays that eat batteries. this is just one of the reasons i do have a "smart" device.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 16 2015, @01:41PM
Have to wait till patents expire first. But with the TPP and similar, the patents on lots of stuff may never expire.
That's how patents slow progress.
(Score: 2) by Nerdfest on Thursday July 16 2015, @07:47PM
... despite the fact that many of us were *screaming* for high resolution displays for years. The next thing that I think is like this is bigger batteries. I'd love it if manufacturers gave up on the ridiculously thin phones, added a couple of millimetres of thickness and improved the battery life.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Thursday July 16 2015, @07:50PM
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by Gravis on Thursday July 16 2015, @08:38PM
yes, they have been slowly improving the displays but in comparison of power consumption Marisol displays are a quantum leap.