I’m at a point where I can buy a Framework laptop, and was hoping to get a bit of purchase advice.
I know there are other threads and videos about battery life on Linux, and how the Framework Laptop’s battery life is okay, but can be tuned. While doing my own research, I read that the current AMD processors are power efficient enough when in use, but Intel processors can be pretty good when running in low-power mode (due to their LPE cores). With that in mind, I’m asking myself what configuration would be easiest and quickest to set up for low power use.
If I care most about getting to low power consumption under Linux quickly, is one vendor better than the others? Does Intel have the most convenient Linux tooling for power management, or does AMD? Or in the end, is there no easy answer?
(While distro may not be important, chances are I’ll be using Fedora or Arch)
It depends, and you’ll definitely find people who disagree … the FW 12 has been pretty darn good on battery in my experience, especially in standby, and the 7040 series has gotten OK too. The AI 300 seems harder on the battery than its older sibling, but that might improve as newer kernel releases come out.
That said, it seems like you’re optimizing for a metric that’s not a strength of x86 laptops. If you want long battery life in a light laptop form factor, an ARM Mac is pretty much unbeatable.
The ARM Macs are tempting. If Linux wasn’t my daily driver (and if price weren’t an object), I would consider getting one.
In the end, it’s not even that I need something super power efficient… I guess I want to make sure that the battery can last a train ride while spinning up fans as little as possible, and not have to mess around with dozens of settings to get that working. If possible.
How long a train ride, and what will you be doing? A few hours editing office docs? Easy peasy. A couple hours gaming or running local LLMs? Fried.
Avoiding dozens of settings and background tasks is more a distro question than a hardware question. Fedora/Bluefin/Aurora/etc do OK out of the box. If other distros have better battery life, I’d like to know!
Of course, the moment I post the thread, I start finding the information I need! I’ll start answering my own question in the thread, and maybe it will help someone else.
Platform differences for power
CPU differences
Core Ultra Series 1 processors have LPE, E, and P cores. Low power modes are very low power, but higher-power modes can be higher. Start at 28W TDP.
Ryzen 7000 series have a TDP starting at 15W, but otherwise no special sauce.
Ryzen AI series have a TDP starting at 15W, and Zen 5c cores that may be less power-hungry.
Linux kernel/software differences
Intel: kernel supposedly aware of LPE cores for scheduling.
AMD:
Ryzen 7000 series: no special per-core optimization, but platform has been around long enough to be somewhat optimized.
Ryzen AI series: not enough recent optimizations, but may get them in the future.
I think that AMD’s own software tools, in particular the AMD pstate driver, do not allow you to control core behavior.
AMD: RyzenAdj can adjust power targets in granular ways! It even supports Krackan point now. (found in this recent forum post, but I now remember I’ve seen it elsewhere)
Haven’t found Linux-compatible GUI tools yet.
Other thoughts
Intel is apparently bringing a power slider of some kind for Panther Lake, their upcoming platform… may not be relevant for Framework for now.
In 6.17, AMD is bringing their Hardware Feedback Interface to provide better classification and dynamic rankings around heterogeneous core processors. Affects processors with mixed Zen 4c or 5c cores. Not sure if it affects power use.
Conclusion
If I understand correctly, it’s easy for Intel mobile processors to be in their low-power state. However, I don’t know how to force that state and have conservative power ramp-up when on battery.
RyzenAdj makes AMD platforms more interesting for power adjustment. One tool? Yes please! That might be what I go with.