Nithyananda S. Jeganathan

P‐91: Parametric Evaluation of Computer Displays for Optimized Display Data Transmission

Display sub-system is among the highest power consuming entity on a computer platform and the energy efficiency of the display pipeline has a significant impact on the battery life, especially in mobile devices. Traditional display sub-systems expend a lot of energy to maintain the stable images on the screen by transmitting the entire screen contents to display even if there is little or no change in the screen. This paper characterizes the computer generated screen updates for different type of workloads by two independent techniques: HW & SW and presents an analysis of the screen updates. Our data shows that typically only less than 20% of the screen content changes and there is 20–200ms idle time period between active frames. Future display technologies can take advantage of this redundancy in screen contents to save power on the display sub-system.