The ISA has nothing to do with the battery life. Battery life is the result of getting details right at every level of the software stack. Framework doesn't control every level of the stack. Arguably they don't control any of it.
Exactly. Apple's way of doing things is about vertical integration of the stack, which is the polar opposite of how the PC market developed and largely still works.
The vertical integration approach (where you control all the layers beneath the customer facing product) has the benefit of allowing you to optimize that customer experience by tweaking things anywhere in the stack.
Power management in digital systems mostly comes down to being able to slow or turn off clocks when appropriate. Doing this well can be complicated, but you can tell that Apple has put a lot of energy into doing it.
The downside of the vertical integration approach is that components cannot be sourced or replaced with off-the-shelf components, as the interfaces are not really standard, they are tailor made for the use case.
For the Framework folks to pull off something like the M1's power sipping, they'd have to invest a lot of engineering time (a.k.a. money) and have strategic partnerships with hardware vendors and standards bodies to move the commodity chip market forward to support better power management.
The thing is, one of the strengths of the Framework is that the hardware is commodity, making their devices easy to repair. Also, any work that the Framework folks do to move things forward also benefit their competitors, which can shrink the potential reward for doing so.
The result is that in more typical usage where the machine isn’t under a constant load, battery life is much better. When it’s sitting there idle displaying a web page it’s barely consuming any power at all, where most competing laptops at minimum are pulling at least 2-3x as much power between the CPU not being able to scale down that far and constantly getting woken to perform poorly scheduled tasks.
Like you can make an x86 computer that is not a PC. PS4 is one example: https://fail0verflow.com/media/33c3-slides/#/22
But when you make a PC, you are stuck with multiple layers of legacy crap, any of which can prevent proper low power states or suspend.
Sleep/Hibernation works fine on the Framework under Windows. It's just Linux that has this problem.
I use MacOS because of this - I'm never going to use a Windows laptop, and I'd prefer Linux but power management just isn't there.