Why the watt is the most important specification on battery devices

Every time I see “mah” in a consumption product, I shudder. Megahertz is also starting with bruises. This is because the most critical components of portable devices (batteries and processors) should really be measured in watts: it is the only common specification that gives it a real idea of ​​what your device can do.

With Watts, You Can Tell Hower Power Is Under The Hood – How Much Energy is Provided by Your Battery and How Much Is Coursing Through Your Chip. Watts determines if there is enough cooling to let this processor work for free, instead of overheating and strangling prematurely. Watts can even tell him how much battery life is left, according to the watt hours (WHH) of the remaining battery and the power in which his device is draining.

You can do everything with the math of primary school, so why not watts everywhere? Consumers are regularly exposed to power measurements when buying bulbs or reading their energy invoices. But many gadget manufacturers insist on measuring their batteries in miliactions and the speed of their chip in Megahertz or Gigahertz, none of which is a good measure of the true power of a device.

The Steam Deck Gaming hand computer is my example of how practical the watts can be. With a maximum power of the 15 -watt processor and up to 9 watts of overload for other components, a strenuous game drains its 49 ° battery in approximately two flat hours. My eight -year -old son can do that mathematics: 15 plus 9 is 24, and 24 times 2 is 48. It can fit in two 24 -watt sessions of an hour in 48Wh, and because he has 49Wh, he is almost sure to obtain it.

With the least strenuous games, sometimes I see that my steam deck drains the battery at a speed of only 6 watts, which means that I can get eight hours of play because 6 watts 8 hours are 48Wh, with remaining 1Wh on the 49Wh battery.

In its most basic form, the watt is a work measure. It is the amount of energy needed to do something in a individual speedeither heating foods in its microwave of 1,000 watts or providing the 2-3 watts that a smartphone needs while sailing on the websites on its screen. It is also specifically an electricity measure: watts are Volts Times amplifiers, and a battery capacity measure, such as my anterior steam cover example. (My colleague Thomas Ricker can also help you calculate the watt hours for energy storage outside the network and the home backup).

Quizás lo más intrigante, los vatios se usan como una medida de calor indirecta. If you have ever seen a computer processor with a certain TDP, or thermal design power, measured in watts, that is the amount of cooling required to run that chip at its normal speed. A chip is as fast as it can cool, so watts are more important than Megahertz.

Today's portable computers have long broken the 5 GHz barrier, which means that their chips in theory can work five billion times per second. Telephone chips are also approaching. But in small and limited devices with batteries, they can only maintain those speeds briefly before overheating. That is why a MacBook Pro with a fan has a better sustained performance than a Macbook Air without one, even if both have exactly the same chip. It is part of why a “15 watt” processor will generally feel slower than one of “28 watts”, even if both can reach 5GHz. More power and more cooling means that you are not just a sprinter; You can go to the distance.

Unfortunately, manufacturers do not always like to share watts with us. They would prefer to cite larger and impressive numbers that sound, announcing a bank or electric phone with a “5,000 mAh battery” instead of a 19.4Wh package. Can convert mAh to WhBut only if you know the device voltage, which is another specification that is often obscured. Some chips manufacturers even hide the power of their chips, so you will not know that you are using a weaker version, such as a graphic chip of NVIDIA RTX 4080 80 watts instead of a 150 watts, although certainly more power It does not always make a big difference.

Manufacturers also prefer to share what percentage of their battery remains instead of a really useful number such as the watt. They prefer to choose vague energy modes such as “performance”, “balanced” and “battery saver”, instead of using the smallest watt so that it can decide exactly how fast its battery is exhausting.

I feel that steam deck and other portable PC games should be a call for attention that watts are the best way. Is marvelous To think “garbage, my PC needs to last an extra hour before reaching my next exit” and make that a reality only re -paying an elementary school equation.

But if not, I will blame inventor James Watt, who left a legacy of pushing confusing specifications. While the watt is a really useful measurement unit, Watt did not occur. Instead, he coined a different Phrase that has been deceiving people for more than two centuries now.

The Watt was named by James Watt, more than 60 years after his death, due to his marketing blow. Watt was the man who first popularized the phrase “horsepower” as a way of selling his improved steam engine to all types of industry.

According Watt's own biographerThe idea of ​​comparing engines with the horses they could replace did not even occur; That is widely accredited to the pioneer of the steam machine Thomas Savery. Further, Watt's documents suggest That its definition of power was based on some background mathematics! Indeed, a guy told Watt that he wanted a steam engine that could do the work of 12 horses to turn a 24 -foot tall wheel of two and a half laps per minute, Watt guessed that each horse would throw 180 pounds of weight, so a power became 32,400 pounds per minute and then rounded to 33,000.

But even though a true horse has significantly more than one powerAt least for short periods, the power unit stayed. It has become one of the most durable examples of inventing a specification to help sell products, and it could be the reason we have to withstand shit specifications such as Mah Now.

Libere the watt, or else I will begin to measure devices in horses of force out of awake. The official conversion rate is 746 watts to 1 horsepower. Did you know that AMD recommends a 1 horse power supply for your last graphics card? Devils, Nvidia's 5090 need three quarters of the power of a horse alone.

There is no better unit than the watt. I would only want companies to let us know.