Comment by microtonal | Hacker News Reader

Comment by microtonal | Hacker News Reader

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These numbers are usually lower in real life

There are data sheets and then there is real life. People were raving about AMD laptops before. I got a ThinkPad T14 AMD with a 4750U. The stated psref battery life is MobileMark 2014: 14 hr, MobileMark 2018: 11.5 hr. In practice that was more like 7 hours on Windows (with a mild workload) and 3 hours on Linux. The CPU performance was merely ok and I could get the fans blowing quite quickly.

Life with the laptop was quite miserable. There were many other paper cuts and despite being Linux-certified, I used Windows with WSL most of the time since basic things like suspend would at least work relatively reliably.

I sold the T14 after 7 months (thank deity that there was a chip shortage, so I could recoup quite a lot of the 1400 Euro I paid for the T14), got a MacBook Air M1 and didn't look back. It's a world of difference.

That does not match my own experience with a very similar t14s equipped with same CPU. I get much better battery life than 3 hours on Linux even with moderate workload (compiling, browsing, etc.). I often use it on the go and it’s been pretty great.

Lenovo ThinkPad T14 AMD Gen 1 here. My experience is totally different, using Fedora 36, everything works! Battery life I have no exact numbers, but definitely way more than 3 hours.

Within a year the kernel should support proper Power management on these new AMD systems. I have a year old 5800H that went from 3 hours to 11 hours battery life in typical use, just due to kernel version updates. It's like a new system.

This. The newer kernels support amd_pstate and it's a big difference.

It is such a shame that certain major distros don't ship latest kernels. I understand also shipping LTS kernels for customers/users that want the stability, but the default for desktops and install media should be a really recent kernel.

I think it’s pretty common to install the HWE kernel on Ubuntu.

I'm also on a fully-specced T14 Gen 1 AMD with the same CPU (4750u) and I get a full day's use out of it under Fedora 36. And CPU performance is way more than OK for my use-cases. I'm curious what you were doing with it.

There is a big improvement from the 4000 series to the 6000 series.

Something was screwed up, very likely on Windows, definitely on Linux. My 5800H gets 9 hours of battery life on Linux with KDE (full glass blur effect, IntelliJ, Firefox, etc...), without any undervolting or underclocking, at ~80% battery, 1440p60 15.6 inch screen. And about a third of the power consumption comes from the desktop class SSD I put into it.

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