Display sub-system is among the highest power consuming entity
on a computer platform and the energy efficiency of the display
pipeline has a significant impact on the battery life, especially in
mobile devices. Traditional display sub-systems expend a lot of
energy to maintain the stable images on the screen by
transmitting the entire screen contents to display even if there is
little or no change in the screen. This paper characterizes the
computer generated screen updates for different type of
workloads by two independent techniques: HW & SW and
presents an analysis of the screen updates. Our data shows that
typically only less than 20% of the screen content changes and
there is 20-200ms idle time period between active frames. Future
display technologies can take advantage of this redundancy in
screen contents to save power on the display sub-system.