Comment by unethical_ban 13 hours ago
This is what I don't get about laptop power consumption.
I would love an x86 laptop that can operate at 5W or less, even if it isn't blazing fast. If they can squeeze more performance out of a CPU for the same power budget, why can't they make a CPU with the same capability with less power use?
Honestly, that's not a CPU problem.
A laptop running below 5W needs to turn down its storage, RAM, GPU, LAN, WiFi, USB controllers, etc. The OS needs to act more like a smartphone, put everything to sleep, and use consolidated polling and interrupts for async behaviors.
I think this is the real advantage Apple has with their vertical integration. They can play a lot of complementary games between hardware and OS.
The steam deck's chip runs at 15w maximum and has I believe a 4, 6, and 8w mode. Maybe not 5w but pretty close. The linux desktop on it is a perfectly unimpressive but usable daily driver kind of thing. The problem is consumers dont want this. The failure of the netbook era proved it. People dont want to deal with slow speeds so this kind of thing wont be a mainstream mass produced item.
ARM faking x86 is probably the way to go for this case.
I think the maximum is 35w although the highest seen is probably around 30w. There was a requirement on getting 35w PD charger or it wouldn't be fast enough to recharge while playing
I guess maybe 35w covers usage plus recharging the battery, so actual consumption is 15w?
You should look into chinese laptops using the intel n150/n250 cpus. Those have a 6W TDP.
The issue with those cpus is that they're pretty much never used in laptops meant to do anything serious. They usually are employed into cheap plastic laptops using ridiculous batteries.
I would really like the form factor of 2011-2013 thinkpads, with the chonky 90WHr battery on the back and the 12" form factor.
With a modern cpu (low tdp and low power draw) that would be unbeatable everyday carry.
Isn’t the Apple M series basically the best of both worlds? Extremely high performance, and extremely low power use when not making use of it.
5W for a laptop is raspberry pi territory, and we're adding a screen to it. I hope we ever get there for a 14" fully usable laptop, but that sounds bleeding edge territory at this point.
The CPU alone can operate below 5W:
https://www.phoronix.com/review/lunar-lake-profiles/6