Agree. Higher binned processors (e.g. i7 vs i5) are more energy efficient per clock cycle. And therefore, more energy efficient per given length of instructions / tasks.
Maybe? Wouldn’t it require me to go into the BIOS though, everytime I wanted to toggle the iGPU?
I would rather pay for the convenience to not do so. Turning off the power means I have to close my work apps instead of a simple hibernate.
It would be cheaper for me to pay an airline/shop to plugin to their onboard power during flights/layovers (I would rather skip that though, which brought me to Framework but now I see they are abandoning power efficiency).
I have an 1185 batch 1 Framework that I have been using. I’ve run Windows 11, 10, Ubuntu, and Fedora on it. I’ve settled on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS now, and I am quite content.
5-7 hours is right inline with how I use mine, AND the standby times have been very decent. 10+ hours uses ‘usually’ less than 10% battery under Linux. Hibernation works flawlessly as well stretching the standby power to whatever I need.
It has 64gb of RAM, and is using 2 USB A expansion cards, 1 USB C card, and 1 256gb SSD card.
I think based on what you have mentioned that this setup would work for you quite well. Using a eGPU, thanks to the Thunderbolt 4 support the laptop possesses you also allow you to use a desktop class GPU. Although I’m not sure you would need that to support 3 monitors at once.
It looks like all of the 11th gen laptops are sold out. Getting a used one is the only realistic way forward on that front. All of the 11th gen mainboards look to be still available however.
The great thing about the Framework is that getting an older model doesn’t preclude you from updates or using it in conjunction with those updates for as long as you want.
“Disable” in the sense of ‘not use’. You can do that from the nvidia control page, via software.
Are they? What makes you think that?
In case you haven’t looked at this thread: Linux battery life tuning - it looks like idle usage for the current gen Framework can be tuned very low (~3W idle). Personally, I’m expecting that you could do the same with the 12th gen version.
There’s a lot you can tune to control temps and power usage via RAPL. Using thermald is the most common option but there’s also manual tuning you could do: Thermal management on Linux with RAPL limits
Alder Lake P does not appear to support >64GB of memory, but maybe ARK is wrong?: Intel Core i71260P Processor 18M Cache up to 4.70 GHz Product Specifications - if 96GB RAM is important for you, then you’ll probably want to confirm what will work for you w/ the laptop vendors directly.
For 3 x 1080p@60Hz displays, anything that supports a USB-C/DP MST adapter should work fine.
In terms of other options w/ potentially better battery life, I might look into the newly refreshed Tuxedo Pulse 15 Gen2 - it has a 91Wh battery and the Ryzen 5700U that should perform in the ballpark of the 1260P but much more efficiently. You can also use RyzenAdj to further improve power efficiency.
4 Likes
You can also easily disable physical cpu cores on bios level. Indeed this seems to reduce energy consumption read out (or estimated) by powertop. Just for fun I disabled 3 of 4 cores at the moment writing this. Running Fedora 35 on one core on an i7 1185G7 with 64GB. It does well on text processing and internet browsing as far as my spontaneous 2 hours experiment goes.
Don’t remember if this possibility was already mentioned.
PS: Being actively working on this machine Gnome and powertop are showing 6h left at 55% battery. Not too bad.
3 Likes
My 2 cts on it. I don t own the laptop yet.
But in the BIOS apparentely you may deactivate some cores and the turobo boost.
Those options might help with battery life ?
Anyone has tested this ?
My idea with my upcoming 12th gen framework is to set it in the range of the lower power U version which is 15W, bu deactivating to P cores = Intel Core i5-1235U
Buy one and switch off the core boost. Done. Power sipping ahoy.
1 Like
I believe you can limit “number of logic processors” in BIOS?
At minimum you can turn off HyperThreading.
Processors have a minimum state – they have to maintain a “lowest clock” in order to, well, sustain system functionality. Thus a high-power chip can only go so low (e.g. 5W)
I believe the 11th gen (due to the non-hybrid architecture) use less power and clocks lower.
However you can limit the max frequency/power in both Windows and Ubuntu (see the guide above), which can cap the amount of heat generation and reduce power spent on cooling.
I believe 64GB is the cap of all non-H mobile chips. H-mobile chips act more like desktop chips in the regard of core voltage.
It doesn’t make a lot of sense to have a beefy memory controller baked into the chips if there is basically no chance for them to see beyond a 64GB config. Let alone a mobile chip where every watt matters.
Again. what do you need 64GB of memory for? On Ubuntu they have disk cache, but aside from that (since SSDs take really long to wear out, especially given adequate overprovisioning). Unless you have some workload that will 90%+ utilize RAM I think its not going to be very important.
Compiling is another story, but they still work with less RAM – they will just have to save precompile/linker to disk, which means it will take longer.
1 Like
Do you mean you have switshed off some cores and the boost on your laptop ? (or do you mean you recomend it?)
If so : can you tell us the result while deactivating it ? How long have you gained on battery life? Aswell how many cores you have deactivated ?
1 Like
Where did you get the idea I switched off cores? I just said switch off the boost. The Cores are then locked between their absolute minimum and their specified maximum (in my case 2.8GHz).
No more boosting from 3.4 to 4.6GHz.
This limits the heat, the fans and the wattage ramping up all the time.
Up to you to do any testing re. the battery. I just now have a quieter and cooler laptop which was all I wanted. 
If folks are just doing admin/clerical/work on a train etc. I would suggest switching off the boost.
I do that too on some of my laptops…via custom power plans in Windows. (so that it’s switchable without restarts)
That’s the Intel Turbo Boost Technology (or whatever they come up with) setting in BIOS, right?
Capping boost does not really make it “low power”, just “lower-power”.