Mouse power consumption analysis

[Colin Ian King]

[Being re-sent as I'm unsure it went out last time I tried]

Hi there,

One of my tasks on the Desktop Power Consumption blueprint 
(https://blueprints.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+spec/desktop-p-power-consumption) 
was to analyse mouse power consumption.

I have run a set of tests and the data (.ods Spreadsheet) with some 
analysis (results.txt) are available here: 
http://zinc.canonical.com/~cking/power-benchmarking/mouse-movement/

The bottom line is that halving the mouse rate does not really save much 
power at all. It appears most of the power consumption is in the 
rendering of the mouse movement which varies depending on the graphics 
driver and this really isn't influenced by the mouse input.

My recommendation is not to reduce the mouse rate. Instead we need to 
see why some systems seem to consume a lot of cycles just rendering a 
mouse movement. This is a separate task and maybe out of scope for this 
blueprint.

Colin