HD-DVD et autonomie de portables

Currently, the battery provided with most laptop is sufficient to watch a whole DVD in a row. This could be different in a near future, with the arrival of HD-DVD. Indeed, this format requires processing 6 times more information than a standard DVD. Graphic cards migh be much more used, increasing significantly their power consumption. According to ATI, the autonomy of a laptop could be divided by three when reading a HD-DVD. In order to limit this problem that could waste the trip of several travelling movie-addicts, the canadian graphic chip manufacturer is considering the possibility of implementing a specialised decoding unit within the GPU for this format. While playing the HD-DVD, only this unit would be working, while the rest of the graphic card would be in sleeping mode.