Modern CPU's and systems can do much better than that. A colleague of mine has a Dell XPS 13, and with the screen off it sips ~3.4W being mostly idle (running U

Modern CPU's and systems can do much better than that. A colleague of mine has a Dell XPS 13, and with the screen off it sips ~3.4W being mostly idle (running Unity desktop doing nothing). I was surprised by this, since the last time I took the time to optimize my laptop's power consumption was in 2010, when 17W was a respectable result. It's not just the CPU, either. M.2 SSD's are quite a bit more power efficient than SATA, and when you're going to low single digit power usage, even those things start to stack up.