For mobile professionals and businesses alike, power consumption plays a pivotal role in the day-to-day activities of mobile warriors. Laptops now exceed desktops in sales in the PC market, so it’s inevitable that businesses are looking to outfit more and more of its employees with laptops when the time comes to upgrade computer systems.

It used to be that businesses were faced with either high performance/non-portability with a desktop system or poor performance/high-portability with laptop systems. Thanks to advances in processing technology, laptops are closing the gap when it comes to performance when compared to their desktop counterparts.

However, there is one area which hasn’t seen much advancement in the laptop industry:  battery power/efficiency. Lithium-ion batteries are the lifeblood of laptops when they are away from a power outlet. Businesses rely on their employees to provide timely information when out in the field, so a laptop with little consideration for power consumption is likely not a wise choice.

While few improvements – short of increasing the cell count – have been made to lithium-ion batteries to improve battery life on laptops, chip manufacturers and laptop OEMs have devised ways of their own to improve battery life on machines.

Low-power processors

While quad core processors are becoming more prevalent for business use for CPU-intensive applications, dual core processors are still overwhelmingly favored in the laptop market. Laptop manufacturers like Lenovo and HP often look to Intel’s Core 2 Duo processors to provide a fine balance between performance and power efficiency.

For businesses that don’t require a lot of horsepower, Intel’s ultra-low voltage (ULV) Core 2 Duo processors can be had in speeds ranging from 1.06 GHz to 1.2 GHz and low-voltage (LV) Core 2 Duo processors top out at 1.6GHz. These processors sip power, while at the same time offering up just enough performance to handle most day-to-day tasks required by the average mobile user. Intel’s standard voltage Core 2 Duo mobile processors don’t give up much in terms of performance to their desktop counterparts, but they will cost you a bit more in terms of power efficiency when compared to the ULV and LV offerings.

To read more on power consumption for mobile professionals and other mobile-related topics, head on over to Lenovo’s Ultra-Mobile Enterprise website.