Energy consumption of smartphone components

Question

I'm looking for a list of all the components and their power drainage on an up-to-date smart phone.

• Accelerometer, gyroscope, magnetometer, etc.
• Display
• WiFi
• Bluetooth
• GPS
• CPU
• Camera
• Microphone
• etc.

Preferably in mA so it can be easily compared to the battery's capacity (usually specified in mAh).

The Sensor's power is actually available via the SDK and can also easily figured out for most devices on AndroidFragmentation. However what I'm looking for is comparable data for the other hardware components to consider their efficency.

Bonus: Will a request for less frequent updates of a Sensor decrease energy consumption of the Sensor, as it returns only one value for getPower()?

Answer 1

There are a couple of detailed studies that I am able to find on this.

1. A study from the USENIX meeting in 2010 which studies various components of a smartphone (except the camera)
2. Another study from the Hotmobile mobile computing workshop 2013 that has more information on cameras and displays.

Reference 1 especially seems a great starting point.

Answer 2

I'm looking for a list of all the components and their power drainage on an up-to-date smart phone.

That is impossible to answer.

First, different devices will use different varieties of these components, with different power characteristics.

Second, many, if not most, of those components will have no published power statistics, or the specific components themselves may not be knowable without a complete teardown of a device.

Will a request for less frequent updates of a Sensor decrease energy consumption of the Sensor, as it returns only one value for getPower()?

That will depend on the sensor. Some sensors are effectively always "on" (e.g., ambient light sensor), courtesy of the OS, in which case the only incremental power drain for your use of that sensor will be in passing that sensor data to your process. Other sensors might not be regularly used by the OS, meaning that your request for events from that sensor might turn it "on", resulting in power drain from the sensor itself in addition to supplying you with that data.

It would be truly wonderful if all Android devices were instrumented in the way the Qualcomm MDP is, so that we could get fine-grained power detail for our apps and their usage of various components.