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Really curious to see the efficiency on the mobile CPUs from this gen. Been looking to replace a Tiger Lake ultraportable which despite being a good laptop oth

Really curious to see the efficiency on the mobile CPUs from this gen. Been looking to replace a Tiger Lake ultraportable which despite being a good laptop otherwise is terrible in terms of battery life and heat, but have been waiting to pull the trigger until an x86 laptop that can manage battery life numbers similar to that of a MacBook Air without also throttling the CPU to oblivion appears. Hopefully this gen of AMD mobile CPUs delivers.

nicolaslem 3y ago
You will likely have to wait 18 months more. Typically AMD mobile chips get announced in winter and are widely available in laptops by summer.
- wtallis 3y ago
  More specifically, CES in January is when laptop OEMs announce their new products, with ship dates staggered over the next several months (though oddball products can sometimes take until September or October to hit the shelves). Laptop chip announcements are usually timed at or slightly before CES, because there's no point announcing a laptop chip out of cycle when it'll be an uphill battle to get OEMs to use the chip. (The importance of annual laptop updates announced at CES also contributes to why laptop CPUs and GPUs almost always get new model numbers every year, even if it isn't new silicon. OEMs don't like having to market a new machine with last year's chip.)
AzzyHN 3y ago
To my knowledge, x86 is just more energy inefficient than the later ARM architectures. That being said, AMD chips are absolutely more power efficient than Intel chips, by a huge margin
- manuelabeledo 3y ago
  Not in idle, though.
vient 3y ago
What is your battery life expectation? Genuine question, did not use Macs at all. I've recently bought new MSI with a Core Ultra 7 155h, just finished making Linux work on it, seems that without turbo boost (set it up with TLP) it manages at least 10h of life, and I didn't notice any degradation without turbo in everyday tasks. I've very little experience with it yet though. I expect that it will use less baterry once Intel Thread Director usage finally gets merged to scheduler, right now on 6.8rc5 it is still using all different types of cores as if they are the same. Also, was surprised that there are 4 types of cores now in a sense - P, E, two new LP cores, and actually two out of six P cores have slightly bigger maximum frequency, 4.8 instead of 4.6 GHz.
- jwells89 3y ago
  The 13” Macbook Air is advertised to get 15-18h and 14” MBP 15-22h, and real world numbers with light-to-midweight usage is pretty close to that. My work/personal 16” M1 Pro/Max MBPs can end a day of work in Xcode and/or Android studio with 40-50% battery left. They do this out of the box with zero tweaking and have zero performance difference between plugged in or unplugged (no throttling). My ultraportable (ThinkPad X1 Nano Gen 1) gets 5-7h on a good day with the system set to “power saver” mode, with little difference between Windows and Fedora. If I’m juggling several tabs or doing anything slightly more intense it’s going to be lower. The best x86 ultraportable option I’ve seen from current gen offerings is probably the HP Dragonfly G4, which if configured with the 1920x1280 screen and lowest-TDP CPU can manage around 14h which sounds ok, but efficiency still isn’t as good as with the MacBooks because it’s only capable of that with light usage because it has a 16Wh larger battery than a Macbook Air, has a lower resolution display that’s about half as bright, and has to be in power saver mode.

nicolaslem 3y ago

You will likely have to wait 18 months more. Typically AMD mobile chips get announced in winter and are widely available in laptops by summer.

wtallis 3y ago
More specifically, CES in January is when laptop OEMs announce their new products, with ship dates staggered over the next several months (though oddball products can sometimes take until September or October to hit the shelves). Laptop chip announcements are usually timed at or slightly before CES, because there's no point announcing a laptop chip out of cycle when it'll be an uphill battle to get OEMs to use the chip. (The importance of annual laptop updates announced at CES also contributes to why laptop CPUs and GPUs almost always get new model numbers every year, even if it isn't new silicon. OEMs don't like having to market a new machine with last year's chip.)

AzzyHN 3y ago

To my knowledge, x86 is just more energy inefficient than the later ARM architectures. That being said, AMD chips are absolutely more power efficient than Intel chips, by a huge margin

manuelabeledo 3y ago
Not in idle, though.

vient 3y ago

What is your battery life expectation? Genuine question, did not use Macs at all. I've recently bought new MSI with a Core Ultra 7 155h, just finished making Linux work on it, seems that without turbo boost (set it up with TLP) it manages at least 10h of life, and I didn't notice any degradation without turbo in everyday tasks. I've very little experience with it yet though. I expect that it will use less baterry once Intel Thread Director usage finally gets merged to scheduler, right now on 6.8rc5 it is still using all different types of cores as if they are the same. Also, was surprised that there are 4 types of cores now in a sense - P, E, two new LP cores, and actually two out of six P cores have slightly bigger maximum frequency, 4.8 instead of 4.6 GHz.

jwells89 3y ago
The 13” Macbook Air is advertised to get 15-18h and 14” MBP 15-22h, and real world numbers with light-to-midweight usage is pretty close to that. My work/personal 16” M1 Pro/Max MBPs can end a day of work in Xcode and/or Android studio with 40-50% battery left. They do this out of the box with zero tweaking and have zero performance difference between plugged in or unplugged (no throttling). My ultraportable (ThinkPad X1 Nano Gen 1) gets 5-7h on a good day with the system set to “power saver” mode, with little difference between Windows and Fedora. If I’m juggling several tabs or doing anything slightly more intense it’s going to be lower. The best x86 ultraportable option I’ve seen from current gen offerings is probably the HP Dragonfly G4, which if configured with the 1920x1280 screen and lowest-TDP CPU can manage around 14h which sounds ok, but efficiency still isn’t as good as with the MacBooks because it’s only capable of that with light usage because it has a 16Wh larger battery than a Macbook Air, has a lower resolution display that’s about half as bright, and has to be in power saver mode.