7 ms·

> All that to say: M1 is pretty fast, but the reason the battery life is better has to do with everything other than the CPU cores. That's what AMD and Intel ar

> All that to say: M1 is pretty fast, but the reason the battery life is better has to do with everything other than the CPU cores. That's what AMD and Intel are missing. A good demonstration is the Android kernel. By far the biggest difference between it and the stock Linux kernel is power management. Many subsystems down to the process scheduler are modified and tuned to improve battery life.

qcnguy 1y ago
And the more relevant case for laptops is macOS, which is heavily optimized for battery life and power draw in ways that Linux just isn't, neither is Windows. A lot of the problems here can't actually be fixed by intel, amd, or anyone designing x86 laptops because getting that level of efficiency requires the ability to strongly lead the app developer community. It also requires highly competent operating system developers focusing on the issue for a very long time, and being able to co-design the operating system, firmware and hardware together. Microsoft barely cares about Windows anymore, the Linux guys only care about servers since forever, and that leaves Apple alone in the market. I doubt anything will change anytime soon.
- john01dav 1y ago
  Power efficiency is very important to servers too, for cost instead of for battery life. But, energy is energy. Thus, I suspect that the power draw is in userland systems that are specific to desktop, like desktop environments. Thus, using a simpler desktop environment may be worthwhile.
  - mcny 1y ago
    I used Ubuntu around 2015 - 2018 and got hit with a nasty defect around gnome online accounts integrations (please correct me if the words are wrong here). For some reason, it got stuck in a loop or a bad state on my machine. I have since then decided that I will never add any of my online accounts, Facebook, Google, or anything to Gnome.
  - qcnguy 1y ago
    It's important but not relative to performance. Perf/watt thinking has a much longer history in mobile and laptop spaces. Even in servers most workloads haven't migrated to ARM.
  - umbra07 1y ago
    I assumed the same thing, until I tested my hypothesis. KDE Plasma 6 uses less power on idle than just `Hyprland` (tiling WM) without anything like a notification daemon, idler, status bar, etc.
    - pdimitar 1y ago
      Were you able to find out why? This is very interesting and I'd never guess it.
- deaddodo 1y ago
  If x86 just officially said “we’re cutting off 32-bit legacy” one day (similar to how Apple did), they could toss out 95% of the crap that makes them power inefficient. Just think of the difference dropping A10 offered for memory efficiency. “Modern Standby” could be made to actually work, ACPI states could be fixed, a functional wake-up state built anew, etc. Hell, while it would allow pared down CPUs, you could have a stop-gap where run mode was customized in firmware. Too much credit is given to Apple for “owning the stack” and too little attention to legacy x86 cruft that allows you to run classic Doom and Commander Keen on modern machines.
  - fluoridation 1y ago
    >If x86 just officially said “we’re cutting off 32-bit legacy” one day (similar to how Apple did), they could toss out 95% of the crap that makes them power inefficient. Where do you get this from? I could understand that they could get rid of the die area devoted to x86 decoding, but as I understand it x86 and x86-64 instructions get interpreted by the same execution units, which are bitness blind. What makes you think it's x86 support that's responsible for the vast majority of power inefficiency in x86-64 processors?
    - delfinom 1y ago
      From what I understood. It's not "32-bit instructions" that are the problem. It's a load of crap associated with those 32-bit processors. There's more to x86 than just the instruction set. Operating systems need to carry the baggage in x86 if they want to allow users to run on old and new processors.
      - fluoridation 1y ago
        Before addressing anything else, "software is complicated by having to support legacy stuff" is not a valid argument for removing that support at the hardware level. If a software developer wishes to design their software without that legacy support, that's their prerogative. >Operating systems need to carry the baggage in x86 if they want to allow users to run on old and new processors. What do you mean by this exactly? Are you talking about hybrid execution like WOW64, or simple multi-platform support like the Linux kernel? WOW64 is irrelevant as far as power efficiency is concerned if the user doesn't run any x86 software. If the user is running x86 software, that's a reason not to remove that support. Multi-platform support shouldn't have an effect on power efficiency, beyond complicating the design of the system. Saying that the Linux kernel should stop supporting x86 so x86-64 can be more power-efficient is like saying that it should stop supporting... whatever, PowerPC, for that same reason. It's a non sequitur.
- curt15 1y ago
  >And the more relevant case for laptops is macOS, which is heavily optimized for battery life and power draw in ways that Linux just isn't, neither is Windows. What are some examples of power draw savings that Linux is leaving on the table?
  - qcnguy 1y ago
    There's no equivalent of AppNap if I recall correctly and drivers often aren't aggressive at shutting down unused devices, or they don't do it at all. Linux has historically had a lot of problems with reliable suspends too.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
stuaxo 1y ago
It's a shame they are so bad at upstreaming stuff, and run on older kernels (which in turn makes upstreaming harder).

qcnguy 1y ago

And the more relevant case for laptops is macOS, which is heavily optimized for battery life and power draw in ways that Linux just isn't, neither is Windows. A lot of the problems here can't actually be fixed by intel, amd, or anyone designing x86 laptops because getting that level of efficiency requires the ability to strongly lead the app developer community. It also requires highly competent operating system developers focusing on the issue for a very long time, and being able to co-design the operating system, firmware and hardware together. Microsoft barely cares about Windows anymore, the Linux guys only care about servers since forever, and that leaves Apple alone in the market. I doubt anything will change anytime soon.

john01dav 1y ago
Power efficiency is very important to servers too, for cost instead of for battery life. But, energy is energy. Thus, I suspect that the power draw is in userland systems that are specific to desktop, like desktop environments. Thus, using a simpler desktop environment may be worthwhile.
- mcny 1y ago
  I used Ubuntu around 2015 - 2018 and got hit with a nasty defect around gnome online accounts integrations (please correct me if the words are wrong here). For some reason, it got stuck in a loop or a bad state on my machine. I have since then decided that I will never add any of my online accounts, Facebook, Google, or anything to Gnome.
- qcnguy 1y ago
  It's important but not relative to performance. Perf/watt thinking has a much longer history in mobile and laptop spaces. Even in servers most workloads haven't migrated to ARM.
- umbra07 1y ago
  I assumed the same thing, until I tested my hypothesis. KDE Plasma 6 uses less power on idle than just `Hyprland` (tiling WM) without anything like a notification daemon, idler, status bar, etc.
  - pdimitar 1y ago
    Were you able to find out why? This is very interesting and I'd never guess it.
deaddodo 1y ago
If x86 just officially said “we’re cutting off 32-bit legacy” one day (similar to how Apple did), they could toss out 95% of the crap that makes them power inefficient. Just think of the difference dropping A10 offered for memory efficiency. “Modern Standby” could be made to actually work, ACPI states could be fixed, a functional wake-up state built anew, etc. Hell, while it would allow pared down CPUs, you could have a stop-gap where run mode was customized in firmware. Too much credit is given to Apple for “owning the stack” and too little attention to legacy x86 cruft that allows you to run classic Doom and Commander Keen on modern machines.
- fluoridation 1y ago
  >If x86 just officially said “we’re cutting off 32-bit legacy” one day (similar to how Apple did), they could toss out 95% of the crap that makes them power inefficient. Where do you get this from? I could understand that they could get rid of the die area devoted to x86 decoding, but as I understand it x86 and x86-64 instructions get interpreted by the same execution units, which are bitness blind. What makes you think it's x86 support that's responsible for the vast majority of power inefficiency in x86-64 processors?
  - delfinom 1y ago
    From what I understood. It's not "32-bit instructions" that are the problem. It's a load of crap associated with those 32-bit processors. There's more to x86 than just the instruction set. Operating systems need to carry the baggage in x86 if they want to allow users to run on old and new processors.
    - fluoridation 1y ago
      Before addressing anything else, "software is complicated by having to support legacy stuff" is not a valid argument for removing that support at the hardware level. If a software developer wishes to design their software without that legacy support, that's their prerogative. >Operating systems need to carry the baggage in x86 if they want to allow users to run on old and new processors. What do you mean by this exactly? Are you talking about hybrid execution like WOW64, or simple multi-platform support like the Linux kernel? WOW64 is irrelevant as far as power efficiency is concerned if the user doesn't run any x86 software. If the user is running x86 software, that's a reason not to remove that support. Multi-platform support shouldn't have an effect on power efficiency, beyond complicating the design of the system. Saying that the Linux kernel should stop supporting x86 so x86-64 can be more power-efficient is like saying that it should stop supporting... whatever, PowerPC, for that same reason. It's a non sequitur.
curt15 1y ago
>And the more relevant case for laptops is macOS, which is heavily optimized for battery life and power draw in ways that Linux just isn't, neither is Windows. What are some examples of power draw savings that Linux is leaving on the table?
- qcnguy 1y ago
  There's no equivalent of AppNap if I recall correctly and drivers often aren't aggressive at shutting down unused devices, or they don't do it at all. Linux has historically had a lot of problems with reliable suspends too.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

stuaxo 1y ago

It's a shame they are so bad at upstreaming stuff, and run on older kernels (which in turn makes upstreaming harder).