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this post was submitted on 02 Aug 2024
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I wish they’d start competing on power efficiency and performance per watt. Intel wouldn’t have had this issue if they’d make a CPU that runs at reasonable power consumption, and laptops suffer because of it.
They have such chips, like N100 or i3-305, but that won't cut it for more demanding users.
I've been trying to find a cheap N100 laptop to test, but I've tried some of their previous "economy core" powered machines and they neither get performance nor battery life. Race to idle is legitimately a good thing, but those machines are just too under powered to ever get to idle so they never get good battery life.
Under a load they get good battery life, but trying to use the computer as a computer they suck. One of these machines takes like 30 minutes for windows update to do a basic update. And the entire time the machine is unusably slow because of it. I installed linux on there and not having windows update ruining things made it tolerable, but still pretty bad for what on paper should have been enough.
I ordered mini pc equipped with N100 couple days back with intention to build home "NAS" with it and couple more services running. I think it's perfect for this, but don't have it in my hands yet.
Actually, having the task completed faster saves more energy than the long run. Of course, less efficiency due to too high clocks can be detrimental still.
Are mobile CPU's even affected by Intel's binning? One would assume they are smart enough to keep this practice to the gaming and maybe some parts of the server market.
That's assuming the task is a brief short load that actually ends. Race to idle when done right is more power efficient, but Intel isn't doing it right at the moment. Their lower end chips at the same tier can end up getting much better battery life than the higher end ones sheerly because they've capped their clock speeds to something reasonable. AMD does it well with zen 2 and zen 3, but zen 4 is starting to push performance over efficiency too trying to keep up. Every Intel laptop I've used in the last 5 years has gotten horrendous battery life. Doing the same task on an AMD machine gets me more or less the battery life I'd expect, and my M1 Macbook gets even better battery life than that (even running through emulation). There is 0 reason why my laptop from 2014 should get better battery life than my 2021 laptop doing the exact same task. The issue is Intel can't keep their clock speeds in their pants, and battery life suffers because of it.
All CPUs are binned. Mobile CPUs are binned for their low leakage current which is desirable for a laptop where battery life matters, and low leakage current means low idle power consumption.