Is there evidence to support that the decrease in time slice duration
causes the dramatic battery use increase claimed in the article?
Yes.
Quoting a technical paper released by Microsoft as part of their hardware developer documentation, Timers, Timer Resolution, and Development of Efficient Code:
If the system timer interval is decreased to less than the default,
including when an application calls timeBeginPeriod
with a resolution
of 1 ms, the low-power idle states are ineffective at reducing system
power consumption and system battery life suffers.
System battery life
can be reduced as much as 25 percent, depending on the hardware
platform. This is because transitions to and from low-power states
incur an energy cost. Therefore, entering and exiting low-power states
without spending a minimum amount of time in the low-power states can
be more costly than if the system simply remained in the high-power
state.
According to PC world, a global reputable computer magazine published monthly by IDG, Google has confirmed the issue:
In any case, the new reports have finally gotten Google's attention.
In a statement to PCWorld, the company noted that the bug has been
assigned internally, and that the Chrome team is working to fix
it—though only after Morris shined a spotlight on the issue. The
long-standing bug report has been bumped up to priority one.
More details:
The bug mentioned in Forbe's article, has been reported in Chrome's Chromium open-source project since September 29, 2012. This bug has grabbed 7445 votes from programmers.
Apparently, Google's browser increases the system clock tick rate to 1ms as soon as you launch the browser and keeps it that way until it is completely shut-down. This means that the system's CPU needs to switch to 'wake up mode' 1000 times in 1 second, to attend to Chrome-related tasks.
Microsoft’s default setting for Windows is 15.6ms, which will wake the computer 64 times in 1 second. Because Chrome forces the system clock resolution to 1.0ms, this causes substantial power drain, since this is much more frequent than usually observed with Microsoft's default setting.
In short, Chrome is waking the processor up 1,000 times per second instead of just 64 times per second.