Real-world battery life experience FW13 AMD

[FramerAlex]

Great answer, thanks!

[Gabriele]

Thank you, @Bennett_Derrico, @Charlie_6 and @Shijikori.

@Bennett_Derrico

no AMD’S way more power efficent and has a vastly superior IGPU

I know this to be true on Desktop and/or Windows. I just wanted confirmation about the Linux/Ubuntu side of things. Thanks!

@Charlie_6

AFAIK 13th gen has [deep]

11th gen does as well, but the wake-up time is a bit of a pain. And I cannot find an easy way to configure the machine to switch from s2idle to deep after a certain amount of time, to save battery.

@Shijikori

The newer Intel Core Ultra might be more interesting as it boasts more capable ARC iGPUs which do provide very similar performance to the Radeon 780M on the AMD APUs.

This sounds intriguing, but I would like to avoid finding myself running 24.04 LTS without it working out of the box, because the hardware is too recent. Wouldn’t I incur into this risk? I am using the machine for work, so I am not so interested to be on the bleeding edge, to be honest.

[Shijikori]

@Gabriele

This sounds intriguing, but I would like to avoid finding myself running 24.04 LTS without it working out of the box, because the hardware is too recent. Wouldn’t I incur into this risk?

Did a quick Google search, it seems there are still issues to be sorted in the IO but it does boot and work just fine asside from those IO issues.

[Adrian_Joachim]

@Gabriele

I know this to be true on Desktop and/or Windows. I just wanted confirmation about the Linux/Ubuntu side of things. Thanks!

The power efficiency of the cores is pretty insane, hardware decoding on linux is another story though. On windows it’s apparently fine but on linux it uses pretty excessive amounts of power compared to even much older intel systems. Performance wise though it’s pretty great, if only they could somehwo iron out that video decoding thing.

Hell the cores are so efficient that sw decoding 720p30 uses less power than it takes my old intel thinkpad with hw decoding.

[Shijikori]

@Shijikori

This is somewhat consistent with what I see. about 8-9W in video playback

So, turns out this was with hardware decoding disabled and while on power save. If using balanced instead, the consumption will shoot up to 20W. Enabling hardware decoding reduces the power consumption by about 5 to 8W.
I have observed an annoying behaviour which is when the acpi platform power is set to power-save, the contrast and colour accuracy of the screen will go to utter garbage. I really dislike this behaviour and prefer to take the power consumption personally. I could probably tweak the PPD settings so it does not put the acpi platform power to power-save but still.

[Mario_Limonciello]

I could probably tweak the PPD settings so it does not put the acpi platform power to power-save but still.

Yeah this is ABM (panel power saving). It does save a lot of battery life but can be off putting to some people.
it can be tuned in two ways, both summarized here:
upower / power-profiles-daemon · GitLab

[Shijikori]

i think i’ll be going with the kernel parameter option. thanks!