Kill-A-Watt measurements
#1
Power measurements of kernel builds on X cores with make -jX. [Note, the base system is booted off an SD card with the kernel source code located on the eMMC card. Eventually, I will redo the measurements when booted straight from eMMC].

-j1: 10.0W +/- 0.5W (0 ... 07.0W with screen disabled)
-j2: 12.7W +/- 0.5W (0 ... 09.6W with screen disabled)
-j3: 13.7W +/- 0.5W (0 ... 10.2W with screen disabled)
-j4: 14.3W +/- 0.5W (0 ... 11.2W with screen disabled)
-j5: 15.0W /- 0.5W (0 ... 11.3W with screen disabled)
-j6: 15.0W /- 0.5W (0. .. 11.4W with screen disabled)

When the screen is turned on, power consumption is quite constant with a variance of +/- 0.5W. It's puzzling that occasionally no power is consumed for a few seconds when the screen is turned off. Maybe the battery is taking over during these short intervals?

The external power supply can provide up to 15W. Utilizing 4 cores, the system requires from time to time almost all that power and while utilizing 5 or 6 core, the system requires all the time all that power and probably occasionally even more. This helps explaining the sudden drops in battery charge from 100% to 91% on systems under load (there are are a few threads here on this board).


I also noticed weird things going on which are barely explainable [the actual timestamps are rough guesses. Numbers for the sake of numbers]:

t=00min. I stress the system with make -j5. Power consumption 15W
t=10min. I continue stressing the system with make -j5: Power consumption goes to 0W.
t=11min. I stop the make -j5. Power consumption remains at 0W.
t=20min. Power consumption goes to 13W.
t=40min. Over the last 20 min, the power consumption went slowly down from 13W eventually reaching 8.4W. 8.4W also the power consumption of a freshly booted system.


I gain the impression that at t=10min, the internal battery may have taken over and then from t=20 to 40, the power supply charged back the internal battery. I did not see any capacity drops on /sys/class/power_supply/cw2015-battery/charge, though. Maybe the charge dropped by less than 0.5% keeping the rounded value of 100?


Let's focus on display off (without load): When the display is off, there is an oscillation of 0W for 2 seconds and 5.4W for two seconds. Do here really main power and battery flip flop charging the Pinebook Pro?

Any comments? Can you guys do further power measurements?


Messages In This Thread
Kill-A-Watt measurements - by Der Geist der Maschine - 02-23-2020, 04:17 PM
RE: Kill-A-Watt measurements - by ab1jx - 02-23-2020, 04:42 PM
RE: Kill-A-Watt measurements - by manawyrm - 02-28-2020, 08:20 AM

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