Ha, don’t get too excited, <3W is just for idle testing (display brightness at 0, no wm). I’m actually not doing much special, also running Arch w/ tlp. The main differences will be not running additional crap, and display brightness.
I’ve been keeping notes that’s accrued into a pretty massive writeup (which I previously posted to the user reports thread). Here’s the section where I detail my idle battery numbers, which at 200 nits is right in line with your numbers.
And here’s a section on power consumption optimization options in Arch.
I suspect manually updating EPP and PL1 via RAPL is where you could eek out some tiny gains, but Framework’s laptop battery life is primarily limited by:
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having a too small 55Wh battery - my old Ryzen 4800H laptop idles higher, but also runs for much longer since it has a 91Wh battery. This is where something like the Slimbook Executive 14 or Tuxedo InfinityBook Pro 14 Gen7, with a 99Wh battery just simply outclasses the Framework (and at the same 1.3kg weight too). Not much to do there except to wait for better battery chemistry or a bigger battery mod (maybe taking out the speakers would be easiest?).
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Alder Lake P: while its max performance is great, it gets it by having even worse power efficiency than Tiger Lake (wah wah). Sure you get low idle power at C10, but even at C8, you’ve basically lost all of that, and even something that should be efficient, like hardware accelerated YouTube video playback (double checked with btop and intel_gpu_top) still raises my power consumption to >10W (that would translate to only about 5h (300min) of video playback?!)
To put this in perspective, Notebookcheck clocked the Ryzen 6800U Asus Zenbook S 13 UM5302 (which has a less efficient OLED display and a 67Wh battery) at 550min on their WiFi 1.3 test (they tested the Framework 12th gen at 447min, so only about 10% more efficient there, but the Zenbook also also gets a whopping 912m on their H.264 video playback test. Their Zenbook can playback video longer than my Framework can idle.
Sadly they don’t have full numbers for the Framework, but you can compare the Zenbook to other 1260P laptops. On an efficiency (Wh adjusted) basis, the 6800U Zenbook outperforms the 1260P Lenovo Yoga 9i by about 20% in the WiFi v1.3 test, and by about 35% in the H.264 test.
Based on initial reports, it looks like Ryzen 7000 (Phoenix Point) is further going to make big strides on efficiency (moving to TSMC N4, claiming 25% better PPW), while Intel 13th Gen (Raptor Lake) is staying on Intel 7 and probably won’t have significant improvements, eg, falling further behind. Here’s hoping Framework has been planning accordingly.
(I think in 2022 for a premium thin and light, 8h of light productivity (emails, typing, web browsing, etc) should be a minimum bar, and the Framework simply doesn’t get there.)
