I have a question regarding Colibri T30 and the power consumption.
I had about 2 years of electricity consumption measurements made with the Colibri T30 and I came then to 1.25 W.
What surprises me is that the new modules have 2.3W consumption. I have tested all modules and have a Colibri T30 which has a consumption of 1.25W.
Now my question is what has changed within the last 2 years regarding consumption. (Version number remains the same)
I have to say that the power consumption is extremely important to us because our devices are powered by battery. I must also make the new Colibri T30 to 1.25 W to reduce.
There are two main differences that can explain this increase in power consumption:
The production batches of the T30 CPUs we got recently seem to be worse in terms of power consumption compared to the chips we got two years ago, even though they are still withing the spcifications. Especially the temperature dependence seems to be strong - once the CPU reaches a certain temperature, power consumption increases significantly, heating up the CPU more, which leads to an even higher power consumption…
Recent modules are shipped with an optimized RAM performance - The RAM is now running at 800MHz (versus 533MHz) before. This causes an increased power consumption and might “help” to trigger the effect described above.
What can you do about it:
We are working on a dynamic adaptation of the RAM frequency, in order to get the best out of both worlds - performance when you need it, and reduced power consumption when the highest performance is not required.
Our latest UpdateTool contains a file default_533.bct.
Use the UpdateTool to restore this file onto the Colibri T30 module. It will revert the RAM speed setting to 533MHz, as it was two years ago.
Keep your module cool. Any cooling that you can get helps to avoid the effect described in Reason 1. above.