Okay, as we might be able to get other SoCs (Allwinner / Qualcomm) as well, I wanted to test out how much power consumption the OMAP5 has.
Not an easy task with our devboard... I did some quick measurements:
Without even being powered up, the devboard uses 0,21W... so I guess the EVM is not really optimized...? Nikolaus, any idea where these 0,21W come from? (maybe the serial USB connector?)
Well, as soon as I switch the EVM on, it eats up 2,25W (which is quite a lot!)
That's with the Pyra PCB, an HDMI Monitor and an USB keyboard connected, nothing else (no Ethernet).
It stays steady at 2,25W, even when X has fully booted and nothing at all is happening.
Running the PSX emulator goes up to 4W.
Removing the USB keyboard lowers the consumption of about 0,15W.
Using stress to get 100% CPU usage on both cores increases the power consumption up to about 6,25W.
Quite a bit of power usage!
Pandoras battery (15,84Wh) would be drained in 2,5hours full load from the EVM and in about 7 hours when doing nothing...
And PSX playing would be roughly 4 hours, which works fine for 9 - 10 hours on the current Pandora (with LCD).
That's not a long battery time, and right now, it's without any LCD and Wifi attached or using the Vivante / SGX.
I know everything on the EVM is currently active. All three USB ports, Ethernet, MIPI, HDMI, probably audio, etc.
Is there a way we can estimate how much power our final PCB would need? Can we find out how much power the SoC itself uses (without all the EVM stuff around?)
Do we know if we are even using power saving features of the SoC yet? (it doesn't sound like we do, as it seems weird to me that booting needs as much power as sitting around idling).
If the SoC doesn't do anything, it shouldn't use more than 0,5 W, right?
So, anyone has any ideas how we can test that?