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Notebook computers benchmarking report

The benchmarking report on notebook computers has been published – the 7th published by the Mapping and Benchmarking Annex.

Data was provided by Republic of Korea, Switzerland, Australia and the EU plus very comprehensive datasets on US and EU ENERGY STAR. The ENERGY STAR data enabled some detailed analysis of changing specifications, power demands and energy consumption. Analysis includes year on year efficiency changes for same specification products as well as tracking market and category average annual energy consumption figures.

Whole market data showed a 10% decrease in annual consumption of the average notebook PC for 2007 to 2008 – a trend echoed for better performing products in the ENERGY STAR data with reductions of around 8% per year from 2008 to 2011. Same specifications products (same computing capability) also showed significant improvements, with averages implying that 2011 products consumed less than two thirds the energy of comparable products from 2009.

Longer-term trends are becoming difficult to determine due to the changing metrics used over time, with the upcoming version 6 of ENERGY STAR bringing metrics likely to be non-comparable with previous statistics.

This benchmarking report is one of a series available by clicking the button below.