• brucethemoose@lemmy.world
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    3 months ago

    Honestly, a lot of that is budget.

    Apple makes low clocked, very wide SoCs, and are always the first customer of the most cutting edge silicon node. This is very expensive. And Apple can eat it with their outrageous prices.

    Intel (and AMD) go more for “balance,” with smaller cheaper dies and higher peak clocks. Their OEMs also “cheap out” by bundling a bunch of bloatware that also drains the battery to pad margins. You can find PCs with big batteries and better stock configs, but these are more expensive.

    AMD is only just now getting into the “premium” game with the upcoming Strix Halo chip (M2 Pro-ish spec wise). Intel isn’t there yet, but there are rumors they will as well.

    • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
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      3 months ago

      bloatware

      Even if you remove all that crap, battery life is nowhere near the same vs the M-series chips. So while it may be a problem, it’s still not anywhere close to the reason battery life sucks.

      • brucethemoose@lemmy.world
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        3 months ago

        It can be if you run linux and throttle the chips. Even my older G14 last a long time, as the AMD SoCs are great, it can run fanless throttled down, and it just has a straight up bigger battery than razor thin Macs.

        But again, it’s just not configured this way in most laptops, which sacrifice battery for everything else because, well, OEMs are idiots.

        • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
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          3 months ago

          I don’t, I just run stock. I run an E495 and get something like 3-5 hours battery life, depending on what I’m doing, and after a few years of ownership, I still get around 3 hours battery life.

          • brucethemoose@lemmy.world
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            3 months ago

            On my G14, I just uses the ROG utility to disable turbo and make some kernel tweaks. I’ve used ryzenadj before, but its been awhile. And yes I measured battery drain in the terminal (but again its been awhile).

            Also throttling often produces the opposite result in terms of extended battery life as it likely takes more time in the higher states to do the same amount of work whereas running at a faster clock speed, the work is completed faster and the CPU returns to a lower less energy using state quicker and resides there more of the time.

            “Race to sleep” is true to some extent, but after a certain point the extra voltage one needs for higher clocks dramatically outweighs the benefit of the CPU sleeping longer. Modern CPUs turbo to ridiculously inefficient frequencies by default before they thermally throttle themselves.

      • Valmond@lemmy.world
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        3 months ago

        Isn’t the screen eating most of the power in laptops? I just have an old T490 that I don’t use very much so I might be not that well informed.

        • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
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          3 months ago

          I thought so too, but if Apple is getting more than 2x the battery life vs competitors while having a more dense screen, then I suppose it’s not as significant as I had thought.

          • Valmond@lemmy.world
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            3 months ago

            Denser screen shouldn’t use more power though? Lighter, brighter, larger yes, denser IMO not so much.