The battery of laptops has been improving in recent years thanks to the use of processors and graphics cards with more power and more energy efficiency. Some devices can exceed 20 hours in duration, but with gaming laptops it is fortunate to reach 4 or 5 hours in duration. For this reason, Microsoft is preparing a new and spectacular novelty called EcoQoS .
EcoQoS is a new level of Quality of Service (QoS) that developers can include in their apps to offer better energy efficiency and battery life, reducing fan noise , eliminating thermal throttling and increasing lifespan. battery. This tool is a further step in Microsoft’s goal of being carbon neutral by 2030.
EcoQoS: up to 90% less processor consumption
Adding this function in Windows 10 is very important, since there are currently more than 1,000 million devices that use the Microsoft system, where both desktop computers and laptops would benefit from the function, consuming less electricity in both, and less battery in seconds.
Microsoft details that, when a chip reaches its highest frequencies, consumption increases exponentially. Thus, a chip at 3 GHz can make the battery last 5 hours, but at 3.5 GHz it can drop to only 2 hours. That’s why Microsoft’s new feature dynamically configures the processor to provide a better balance between performance and energy efficiency without skyrocketing consumption.
The feature is available to Insider users who have Build 21359 or later installed. Developers can mark their processes via the API as compatible with EcoQoS, and Windows will apply the appropriate energy efficiency to it. The functionality is ideal for background processes such as program updates, sync engines, indexing functions, etc. Those types of processes that suddenly shoot up CPU consumption while we are doing almost nothing and that is so noticeable in laptops.
According to the company, the reduction in energy consumption can be up to 90% . In addition, to perform the same task, the CPU consumption can be less than half.
First EcoQos Compatible Processors
EcoQoS will not be available for all Windows computers as it is only supported on 10th and 11th Gen Intel Core processors for notebooks, AMD Ryzen 5000 for notebooks , and ARM notebooks with Qualcomm processors. However, they say they will also add desktop and laptop processors in the coming months.
Along with this feature, Microsoft announced a few days ago Eco Mode for Task Manager, where users can choose to limit the performance of a specific app by right-clicking on the process and hitting “Eco Mode.” Thanks to this, the consumption of that specific app is reduced.
The arrival of both functions is expected to occur at the end of the year with 21H2.