Display backlight, hdmi card using 10 watts power

Community Support
1

I don’t think that the bios update caused this, but I did just update to 3.10 11th gen and this happened immediately afterwards.

here is part of the output from powertop:

The battery reports a discharge rate of 20.4 W
The energy consumed was 409 J
The estimated remaining time is 0 hours, 31 minutes

Summary: 1608.3 wakeups/second, 0.0 GPU ops/seconds, 0.0 VFS ops/sec and 97.5% CPU use

Power est. Usage Events/s Category Description
9.63 W 45.0% Device Display backlight
9.36 W 100.0% Device USB device: HDMI Expansion Card (Framework)
1.27 W 667.1 ms/s 13.8 kWork intel_atomic_commit_work
340 mW 50.0% Device Radio device: btusb

the power usage now seems to be unaffected by how low I turn down brightness as far as I can tell.
running manjaro, and tlp not sure what else to include, let me know what else I need to include, I have nothing plugged into the hdmi card.

2

Powetop’s predictions for what’s using the power is often not good at all. Very likely that this is due to CPU usage.
Maybe try removing the HDMI card and see how much it takes though for testing.

3

Forgot about this, but the issue was unrelated to hardware, it seems like plugin in kate was causing a memory leak using like 25% cpu and then a GB or two of ram and was causing unnecessary power drain.