Intel Sandy Bridge Graphics Haven't Gotten Faster In Recent Years

[caligula]

2. there is no 400%-500% battery life improvement anywhere as most consumer laptops have now switched to 3-cell batteries, and thus the actual endurance is the same. (Apple uses bigger batteries than that so they can keep the same overall endurance)

I don't know what happened - maybe my friends earn more now, but in the early 2000s they usually had these cheap Acer laptops with 2 hours of battery life when new and less than one hour after say 1-2 years of use. It might also be a software problem that there was such a slowdown. For instance new video codecs and flash applets were quite demanding. Now a typical laptop is an ultrabook or something decent. For instance I just saw some marketing material for new i3/i5 laptops from Intel and they claimed 10 hours of battery capacity for the low end machines and something like 12-15 hours for the more expensive ones. From 1-2 hours to ~10 hours is a 400-500% improvement. I can't really find the models with such crappy batteries anywhere.

[starshipeleven]

I don't know what happened - maybe my friends earn more now, but in the early 2000s they usually had these cheap Acer laptops with 2 hours of battery life when new and less than one hour after say 1-2 years of use. It might also be a software problem that there was such a slowdown.

No, at the times the concept of "power saving" was not mainstream. The processor was eating like 30-40 watts even on idle so even 6-cell or 8-cell batteries didn't last long on a charge. Repeated charge-discharge cycles (and older battery technology) did degrade the battery faster.

For instance new video codecs and flash applets were quite demanding.

they had no hardware acceleration, anything would load the CPU and waste more power

For instance I just saw some marketing material for new i3/i5 laptops from Intel and they claimed 10 hours of battery capacity for the low end machines and something like 12-15 hours for the more expensive ones.

Their claims are optimistic and with batteries that you won't find in most laptops. Macbooks are the most consistent on getting that good endurance (due to better batteries on average).

From 1-2 hours to ~10 hours is a 400-500% improvement.

Yeah, as I said the improvement is real on the processor, and if you actually pair a modern processor with the bigass batteries of old laptops (6-cells or even 8-cells) you'd actually get that.

Point is most laptops have chosen to drop battery capacity to reduce size, be thin and light, and thus endurance is only around 200-250% of that (around 5-6 hours tops).