How much battery life does the upgrade to 12th gen CPU save?

Hello. I am currently daily driving Ubuntu 21.10 on the 11th gen i5 CPU and I’m getting around 3-4 hours of battery life on just a browser and VSCode. I’m wondering if anyone is on the 12th gen CPUs and can get significantly more battery life, since that is what’s advertised. I’m also wondering if there will be a diffference between the i5 and i7 in terms of battery life. Thanks!

Edit: I just reread and it looks like the 12th gen CPU upgrade kit isn’t released yet.

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By whom and from where did you see this from?

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By Framework at this link: Framework | Upgrade Kit (12th Gen Intel® Core™).

That’s what I thought.

Read (again): standby battery life

Hello Kevin,

The blog reported on power optimizations in Linux (standby power draw) and much of this was focused on Fedora 36 and Ubuntu 22.04.

12th gen won’t have much of an impact on battery life - on one hand the CPU cores are more power-efficient and there’s improved power management and lower power states, but on the other there are 8 efficiency cores tacked onto each CPU package - one cancels the other out. If the thread scheduler was fully optimized that, when idle, the E cores run everything and the P cores go to a very low power state, that might help. But the thread scheduler is still being worked on and during load the 12 - 16 cores will inevitably put more demand on the battery than the 4 cores of the 11th gen so no, 12th gen should not have any meaningful impact on battery life. It may make it worse, and these optimizations are the only thing preventing it from being drastically worse.

This is not limited to Framework, it’s the nature of 12th gen and all laptop manufacturers are having to deal with it.

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First, batch of 12th gen ships in July, I’m sure forum members will post impressions upon delivery but until then, nobody knows the exact details of battery life. There will certainly be a difference between the i7-1280P and the i5-1240P and the i7 has 2 more P-Cores.

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That’s a bummer. I was hoping the efficiency cores would help battery life but I’m not a computer engineer. My order is batch 2 so hopefully people in batch 1 can find some BIOS settings or something to maximize battery life. I got the i5 so I’m not looking for anything high powered.

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When are these two batches expected to ship?

Your needs are extremely close to mine: Low power Framework Laptops

What’s the specific CPU model, how much RAM do you have and how many active hours do you use this? (As in 2 hours active usage vs the 3 - 4 of total on time on battery)

There’s no deadline for shipping so we won’t know until they start shipping. I don’t know how long I’ll be using it at a time but I got the base model with the i5 and either 8 or 16 gig ram.

off topic, but keep in mind that if your browser time includes watching videos and you care about battery life you must enable GPU acceleration.

also i’m not gonna suggest that you use vim or something, but vscode isn’t exactly lightweight either :slight_smile:

You are right its a big concern. If you look at the reviews of other 12th gen laptop, you ll see they all have worst battery life than the year before with 11th…
The only one that are not doing that bad went from 50wh batteries to 60wh.
And those are brands like Asus and dell and samsung.
Hopfully the BIOS framewok option to deativate cores will work well, to get to 11th gen performance…if it could fall back to 11th gen nbr cpu while on battery…

that shouldn’t be a solution :slight_smile: i think it’s more a matter of tuning that hasn’t happened yet

We have the answer :smiley:
It 60 minutes more than my 4 years old Thinkpad E590 (45Wh)


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Hello I’m thinking of buying a Framework and installing Linux, I’m just trying to decide 11th or 12th. The higher speed is tempting but honestly the battery life is probably more important.

Iann_C : Thanks for the figures, were those under Linux or Windows?

Any feedback on the effect of the recent thread director code in kernel >5.18 on 12th gen battery life?

Thanks in advance.