This is interesting. PCWorld actually found a 30% reduction in battery life!
The Framework laptop doesn’t have the largest battery, so it’s already kind of meh in run time, but switching to the 12th-gen CPU we see a reduction in run time by 30 percent.
Remember: Same battery, same RAM, same SSD and same screen. That’s just not a good showing for the 12th-gen Alder Lake P CPU. Even more puzzling to us is a video run down test pretty much lets the actual CPU cores coast while the hardware decoding built in the media engine do all of the work. We expected basically the same performance between the two.
There are a few variables that might be at play though. Remember, we used the same OS install because that’s really how most people do “upgrades.” Was there some hiccup doing it the lazy way? We don’t know but we’re in the process of doing a clean install of Windows 11 to re-run the test just to make sure the lazy way isn’t hurting the 12th-gen chip’s results.
We will say we’ve seen a few 12th gen P-class and a U-class laptops so far, and while battery life isn’t as bad as you see with the Framework here, we’re not seeing the runtime we expected either. Those 12th-gen performance improvements definitely seem to come at the cost of endurance.