Intel And Samsung Team Up On SmartPower HDR To Slash OLED Battery Drain In Laptops

OLED screens that deliver vibrant HDR are becoming more common in laptops, with a strong contingent of entries at CES 2026 from Dell’s Alienware lineup, Lenovo’s newest ThinkPads and HP’s latest OMEN models. It’s a meaningful development that users can easily appreciate thanks to rich colors and unbeatable contrast, but an OLED, and particularly an HDR OLED, often comes with the drawback of a hit to battery life. To address this pitfall, Intel and Samsung Display have formed a partnership that’s already paying dividends.

The two companies have developed a solution called SmartPower HDR that they claim will bring significant efficiency improvements to OLED screens. The companies posit that this new technology can result in a reduction in power consumption of up to 22% in general usage, and up to 17% while viewing HDR content on an OLED-equipped laptop. Samsung further claims that SmartPower HDR has similar power consumption in HDR mode as in SDR mode.


These efficiency gains are possible because SmartPower HDR is able to dynamically adjust the amount of voltage being used based on the content being displayed. When a user is working on a spreadsheet or browsing the web, the system can operate with less voltage than it would need while doing something like gaming or watching a movie.

SmartPower HDR works by having the processor analyze the peak brightness of each frame in real time, and this data is then passed on to the panel’s timing controller (TCON). The TCON uses the data alongside the On Pixel Ratio (OPR) to calculate the optimal amount of voltage needed. As the demo at the top shows, this does not result in reduced brightness, so the only downside is in the implementation.

It’s a great breakthrough, as more battery life is always appreciated by mobile users, but it’s just the beginning. Samsung Display’s Vice President and Head of the Large Display Sales and Marketing & Product Planning Team, Brad Jung, says that the Korean conglomerate will "continue to advance SmartPower HDR while further developing a range of low-power OLED technologies, enabling more consumers to enjoy vivid, high-quality HDR content on laptops.”