AMD’s chief marketing office, Nigel Dessau, wrote on his blog recently about laptop battery life standards. He notes that in other industries, a product’s “time of usability” is generally noted by more than one figure: with cars you have city and highway Miles per Gallon, with cell phones you have Standby and Talk Time run-times, and so on.

Nigel is calling for a similar “Idle” and “Heavy Usage” metric for laptops, to better educate consumers as to what they are buying into. He even goes as far as to run tests on various Intel and AMD based systems using his proposed benchmarking suite, to highlight the differences.

While Nigel’s post doesn’t specifically call-out Intel, he does include test results for Intel systems and shows the drastic difference in battery life between the different test methodologies. A Wall Street Journal blogger covering Dessau’s post contacted Intel for their feedback:

Intel doesn’t seem too inclined to converse about the topic in this fashion. “There are many ways to measure battery life,” a spokeswoman for the company says in an email. “We believe the best way to determine how to measure battery life is by making proposals and debating it in industry consortiums and not via blog post.”

Ouch. Apparently Intel doesn’t really care about the post, perhaps because they haven’t seen competition from AMD in quite some time. Hit the links below for more details & the actual test results between AMD’s proposed benchmarks.

How do you consumers view battery runtime figures? Are they a big factor in your purchasing decisions? Are they detailed enough for you?

AMD blog post

WSJ blog post