Real-world battery life experience FW13 AMD

Framework Laptop 13
41

More savings: Down to 3.1W idle swapping the AMD/Mediatek radio with the Intel AX210.

Also much better wifi signal (90%+ vs 60) and better speeds.

Don’t quote me on this, but I think I read somewhere that AMD and Mediatek have an arrangement where manufacturers are required to sell the CPUs and wifi chip together, so it may that the Framework is being forced to sell the AMD with a subpar radio.

Definitely another point in favor of a thoroughly upgradeable laptop, in that we have an escape hatch out of that kind of political nonsense.

42

Is this compared to your post around 10 days ago where you were down to 3.2w idle so changing out the card is delivering better performance with 0.1w idle power savings?

The trying to get a sense of scale (IE what are the biggest things you’ve found have made a difference)?

43

Sorry, yeah, that’s with a bunch of tabs open. 2.8-2.9 idle.

It’s hard to say what I did was the biggest… they were all in the range of a couple hundred milliwatts. Disabling Docker seems to have been big, maybe 400mW or so, which is a bit disappointing because it seems to suck power (specifically it causes interrupts) even when I have no containers running.

Also, slightly unrelated, but I’ve given up on Firefox because it seems to go glitchy with hardware video decoding enabled.

44

Maybe switching to Podman is an option for you? It doesn’t require a daemon to run, therefore when no containers are running nothing at all is running.

1 Like
45

Oh you’re right! good idea, thanks!

46

Reviving this thread now that we’re a few firmware updates further than October '23.

I’m currently on the fence about buying the FW13 AMD mostly because of battery life and not being able to find if FW finally delivers timely updates through LVFS(without it being in beta or something or suggesting to boot Windows to update firmware).

Did general battery life improve in the meantime?
Was the video playback issue fixed by firmware or AMD updates?

I’m planning to run Ubuntu 24.04 but need to be sure that the FW is about as efficient as my current 3 year old Lenovo laptop with a Ryzen 4800u(with currently 79% battery left I still have an estimated remaining 7 hours and 20 minutes left).

Thanks in advance!

47

Overall, I get 8-9 hours (conservatively) while coding with:

  1. PPD in balanced mode and a dark theme (ABM helps).
  2. Intel (ax210) wireless card with power power saving enabled.
  3. Arch Linux, Linux 6.9.2 (i.e., latest everything).
  4. Expansion Cards: HDMI-v3, USB-A, 2x USB-C.

I tend to run out of energy before my laptop does at this point.

However, no, the video playback issue has not been fixed and I’m not holding my breath on that one. If you’re going to be watching video on Linux, you’ll halve your battery life. And that’s with X (no fractional scaling) and either VAAPI or Vulkan.

4 Likes
48

I’m curious, what is your coding workflow like? Depending on what IDE you use and what kind of coding you do this battery life can mean very different things.

49

Fair point, I use Emacs + Go (with the gopls language server) so it’s relatively lightweight. I average 6-7W when working, 4-5W idle.

But also note: I keep a browser open as well, so I wouldn’t expect vscode (or anything like it) to add too much overhead. Really, your biggest issue will be your language server, compiler, and the number of random linters you run.

1 Like
50

Yep, so that’s a relatively lightweight workflow you are dealing with.
Mine is kind of similar although leaning more towards web technologies (go sometimes included) and I use vim instead of emacs.
Although my framework is mostly docked these days, I’ve had similar results in terms of battery life, maybe a little bit less worse than yours as my workflows are also very docker centric.

1 Like
51

Hi, backend Java engineer here, I have a similar setup as @Stebalien , however running Tumbleweed which is equally bleeding edge, and I kept the original Mediately WiFi card.

Same expansion cards and also using PPD from my distro, no TLP.

Video playback via Firefox is still atrocious, and I’ve also kinda lost all hope there. Talking about ~10W or more when my previous 11th gen Dell managed 4-5W in the same situation.

As for dev activities, I mostly use it docked, but when I’m undocked battery goes down at a higher rate than I’d like.

IntelliJ IDEA + ~5 docker containers (with podman) + Firefox with a bunch of tabs + Teams (including a couple of video calls) + Logseq, frequent (incremental) maven compilations during the day, and I’m never below 10W.

With a 61Wh battery, forget MacBook Pro levels of autonomy. With my usage I can expect 4-5 hours off the charger with a full charge.

I occasionally unplug and work from another room or the couch, and I consistently get a ~20% loss every hour.

I limit my battery charging to 80%.

So, to sum up, I’m quite disappointed. My 11th gen XPS had similar performance for DEV work but would outlast this FW easily. Problem was the 16GB LPDDR that ultimately forced to replace it, since not upgradeable. Graphics are also much better, I can actually play the occasional GTA V on this one.

If you have a similar usage pattern and want to live the dream of remotely working from a chiringuito on some remote island, this laptop probably isn’t for you.

Linux support is good (including LVFS) but I would’ve liked the hardware support to not take so much time to be optimized (and as the video playback issues prove, we’re still not there yet, and this HW is now ~1 year old).

4 Likes
52

This is somewhat consistent with what I see. about 8-9W in video playback. A very cool 4-5W when writing some code and doing stuff that isn’t using the video decoders.

Unfortunately, the issues with power saving and efficiency seem to be mostly on the side of the GPU and this is even consistent with desktop AMD chips. For reference, I had a Vega56, which didn’t really have much in it’s design in the way of power saving beyond being quite power efficient for it’s time, it managed 15W idle on Linux and about 10W idle on Windows. Which drastically lower than my current 6800 XT idling at 35-40W on Linux (no Windows metric, didn’t look at it).

The issues have more to do with GPU device drivers than anything but it’s not impossible some firmware improvements could be needed too.

3 Likes
53

Just checking:

  1. Any storage expansions? Those tend to draw power regardless.
  2. Did you set PPD into “balanced” mode (and are you running v0.21+)?

But yeah, I’m guessing the “few video calls” are rapidly draining power. I take video calls on a separate device.

2 Likes
54
  1. No
  2. Not sure, will check
55

Running Arch Linux on my FW13 AMD, limiting battery to 80%, I get an estimated 8h battery life remaining when just reading blogs/news, and coding or similar in some terminals. Video playback is much rougher, if 1080p video on youtube then it’s closer to 20W usage, with or without hardware acceleration (I’ve tried back and forth after each update to check). I remember reading somewhere that there is a need to slightly re-architect how the amdgpu driver and display compositors manage the available “hardware planes” in order to avoid expensive pixel buffer copies back and forth (after decode before display). Who knows when that will shake out.

More disappointing to me is the poor battery life while suspended. It’s like 24 hours. I’ve never been a fan of hibernate, and never needed it before, but I may have to just accept it …

3 Likes
56

We’ve read the same issue :wink:

For those interested to track it, it’s here:

2 Likes
57

If you only get 24h of sleep, something is seriously wrong, you should get a lot more (I get close to a week). Please try the s2idle script from @Mario_Limonciello and see if it reports any errors:

1 Like
58

I have just usb-c cards in the back and usb-a cards in the front. (I could take those out I guess, but this is the recommended placement for them.) Nothing plugged in and no hardware that didn’t come directly from framework.

I ran the s2idle script back in November, all green checks. The script has been updated a lot over the past months, so I just ran it again, and as expected all pre-checks are green … but it apparently doesn’t reach “hardware sleep”? Thanks for the tip, I’ll have to re-investigate …

(… but it’s always had 1 to 2 days of suspend battery life, across 3 firmware versions and like 3 kernel releases, I do have the absolute latest linux kernel and firmware for ssd and graphics and everything, and I’ve never heard of anyone getting longer than 1-2 days suspend with this model …)

59

I have the same arrangement. My Framework also isn’t holding it’s battery well in sleep. I’ve been using hibernation on it if I want to keep my session. Otherwise, I just shutdown the machine entirely.

60

My machine definitely doesn’t hold charge whilst suspended with the recommended Fedora power profiles. I now just have to power it down every time I’m finished using it. Not ideal but also quite annoying.