Replies to post #874 on Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD)

[spokeshave]

wbmw: Re: "Spokeshave, any idea how often these products are in idle power?"

I think so. The way I understand it, these products spend the vast majority of their time in "sleep" mode, waking occasionally to listen to the Base beacon to determine if there are pending data. If nothing is pending, then it goes back to sleep. If data are pending, then the device requests a send, and the time between the request and the receive is idle. In other words, idle is when the device is "awake" and listening, but not transmitting or receiving. I would expect that, of all the states, these devices spend the least amount of time in "idle".

[DewDiligence]

>> …any idea how often these products are in idle power? I suspect it is probably the majority of the time, especially when doing things like browsing the Internet. <<

Only if users spend a lot of time reading pages that have already been downloaded. If users bounce around frequently from page to page (as I do), I would think that relatively little time would be spent with the radio in idle mode. Dew

[neye_eve]

idel vs tx/rx vs sleep

I don't know if it means anything, but the 802.11 linksys card in my computer is pretty much *always* blinking it's little green light, as opposed to the solid red light which stays on when simply signifies that it's "on".

As long as my machine isn't in sleep/hibernate, that green light is blinking whether I'm surving or not. This *may* have to do with the software I have installed which keeps track of the connection strength. Also possibly worth noting is that even when the little green light is blinking, but I'm not surfing, the WinXP network monitor shows 0% utilization.

I have no idea if I just contributed anything meaningful or not! :-)

neye