David Kanter (dkanter.delete@this.realworldtech.com) on May 20, 2013 5:30 pm wrote:
> That's not actually true. People watch movies on tablets, all the time. Some are feature length, some
> are just 30 minute TV shows, and some are 0.5-5 minute youtube clips. Those are all fair workloads.

Which is usually accelerated by dedicated decode hardware, driving CPU requirements down to a very small figure - even for 1080p. Except in cases where there's a software problem or the codec is unsupported, which is unusual.

Sure, you could say that if you need 5-10% of the CPU constantly it matters that the power consumption is low, but even a relatively power hungry mobile CPU will use a lot less power than the decode hardware, display, and (in the case of streaming video) wifi. Unless it has totally broken power scaling.

There's a reason why video playback is what nVidia chose to show off power consumption of Tegra 4:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Msw7lOEWe0E

I would suggest that games are a stronger argument for constant CPU load, but even there GPU power consumption can easily dwarf CPU power consumption.