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What kind of numbers do you see in powertop between high and low load? (After running powertop --auto-tune and powertop --calibrate of course). I've noticed t

What kind of numbers do you see in powertop between high and low load? (After running powertop --auto-tune and powertop --calibrate of course). I've noticed the i7-8550U in my HP Envy can easily drive consumption up to 22W during a parallel compile even though I spend most of my time idling between 5 and 7W while editing text. The extra cores seem to consume a lot of power compared to my older 5th-gen laptop with 2 physical cores. I also wonder if mobile Ryzen behaves similarly or if Intel just trashed their power/thermals in order to compete on core count. Unfortunately, it's really hard to find benchmarks with power vs load stats. Most of them seem to be like "7 hours watching a movie in Windows" when I'd rather see "Battery is 55 Wh but computer uses 22W when all cores are 100% and 35W at 100% CPU and GPU". You know, like actual facts about the hardware rather than subjective usage experiences.

ggreer 8y ago
Powertop doesn't show any wattage numbers for me. I looked at gnome-power-statistics and saw that my laptop idles around 9 watts. That's all power consumption including the screen. This afternoon I upgraded my kernel from 4.15 to 4.18. Then I removed the r8168 module that I'd tried to use to reduce power consumption. Using the open source r8169 module got me PC7 states. Now my X210 idles at 5 watts. I'm guessing I could go lower if I tweaked more, but this is a huge improvement in battery life. I'm glad I took the time to look into it. I've gotten battery consumption figures as high as 30 watts when running something like `./minerd --benchmark --threads=8`. Intel claims the i7-8550U has a 15W TDP, but it can easily go above that if it has enough cooling.