Intel's Core Ultra 2 Chip Posts Nearly 24-Hour Battery Life in Lunar Lake

[ceronman]

Take it with a grain of salt. Other reviewers such as Hardware Canucks [1] have mentioned that they have not been able to get such long hours. Their numbers are closer to 15 hours.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CxAMD6i5dVc

[causal]

The type of test definitely matters but 15 hours ain't too shabby either

[barbegal]

Battery life is based on playing a 720p video file so most of the expended power will be in the video decoder and screen not the actual CPU. It's also dependent on the battery size in the laptop being tested so pretty much impossible to compare on any like for like basis.

[ac29]

Yep, also putting all of the laptops at "50%" brightness isnt an equal comparison. One panel's 50% might be the same brightness as another's 100%.

[xena]

Where is the video decoder unit located though?

[VincentEvans]

Spot on. Why not use any more or less standard cpu benchmark? The publication is either being strangely incompetent at this, or deliberately misleading.

[SushiHippie]

I'd love to know how long the Acer Swift Go 14 with the AMD Ryzen would have lasted with the same battery size.

The Acer Swift Go 14 has a battery with 53 WHrs and for e.g. the Asus Zenbook S 14 has a 72 WHrs battery. Would this mean the Ryzen Laptop could have lasted ~1.35 times longer than it currently did i.e. 21:15 hours instead of 15:40?

[jmakov]

But will the CPU last more than 2 months

[OptionOfT]

Honestly, I'll believe it if I have one in my hands.

So far I have a Surface Laptop 7 with the Snapdragon which has blown me away in terms of battery life. I'm talking 10+ hours watching video on full brightness.

And I'll happily sacrifice 50% of that for a better screen and a more powerful GPU.

The worst part today Windows 11 ARM is that on WSL `brew` is not supported.

[Sakos]

The most interesting part to me is the Cyberpunk 2077 performance compared to Snapdragon and AMD. It's surprisingly good and considering Strix Point pricing, Intel might be the next sure bet for the Steam Deck 2. If not with this, then maybe with Panther Lake (Intel 18A).

[JodieBenitez]

Ah... can't wait to see the next generation of "macbook killers".

[PaulHoule]

... and Microsoft (probably Linux too) will throw it all away with some tiny coding mistake.

[talldayo]

Probably not, Intel does a pretty decent job regulating power consumption as long as you don't modify the power profiles or fuck with ACPI. Distributions or third-party nagware might ruin the battery, but that goes for any laptop that's required to install Teams or McAfee.

Loading up powertop on my i7 6600u reports an idle draw of 5.5w with my browser open playing music. I think that's pretty damn good, for an old-ish laptop with mitigations enabled on Linux.

[tester756]

Where are all those people who for years (or since M1) were claiming that x86 is dead because ARM ISA (magically) offers significantly better energy-efficiency than x86 ISA.

Of course they ignored things like node advantage, but who cares? ;)

Meanwhile industry veterans were claiming something different and turns out they were right

https://chipsandcheese.com/2021/07/13/arm-or-x86-isa-doesnt-...

Asking which - x86 or ARM is faster/more energy eff is like asking which syntax (letters) is faster - syntax of Rust, Java or C++?

And same as with CPUs - everything is up to the implementation - compiler, runtime/vm, libraries, etc.

[UniverseHacker]

I'm curious how this new chip actually compares in power consumption to the apple cpus. Certainly at the time, when I went from an x86 macbook to an M1, the ability to really work all day on fairly compute intensive stuff, e.g. on an airplane or park bench with no AC was revolutionary.

[ceronman]

x86 is certainly not dead, and I don't think it will anytime soon, but they are still behind Apple M3 in terms of performance per watt. And M4 is about to arrive. I'm a bit disappointed because I really want more competition for Apple, but they're just not there yet, nor x86 nor Qualcomm.

[com2kid]

> is like asking which syntax (letters) is faster - syntax of Rust, Java or C++?

This is actually a bad example because C style decls are provably, objectively, bad. They make parsing harder and once the types are non-trivial, they are absurdly hard to read and write. The case in point being non-trivial function pointers in C. The syntax for declaring a function pointer of a type that returns a function pointer is hidious.

Meanwhile here is how you define a function in that returns a function that returns a string in a modern language (Typescript):

    type NumberToStringFunction = (num: number) => () => string;

Compare that to C

    typedef char* (*(*NumberToStringFunction)(int))(void);

> And same as with CPUs - everything is up to the implementation

It is very easy to add CPU features that place a hard limit on performance. That is why Arm64 dropped all the conditional stuff! (Any instruction that limits the potential branch prediction is going to severely impact potential CPU performance.) History is littered with failed CPU architectures that just couldn't scale up, Intel's famous folly being Itanium.

That said, x86 is mature and it dropped some of its less pleasant aspects with x64.

Also IMHO drivers matter more for laptops than the CPU does. A bad driver keeping the GPU on w/o need or just not being able to enter the lower sleep states in general, will kill battery faster than anything else.

[superjan]

It annoys me too, especially when the explanation is: “because RISC simpler so it is faster, duh”. However x64 is at disadvantage for instruction decoding (it’s difficult to decode multiple variable length instructions in parallel), and secondly the guarantees for memory coherence across cores. Both come with an extra burden intel can’t eliminate for backward compatibility.

[TrainedMonkey]

I am going to observe that competition is good for consumers. However, using video playback for battery life / efficiency is sketchy as all modern chips have specialized hardware for video decoding. Interestingly Apple also uses video playback as a proxy for battery life... probably for the same make number go bigger reason.

[noncoml]

"is like asking which syntax (letters) is faster - syntax of Rust, Java or C++"

Language syntax does affect the speed of the parser

[h0l0cube]

> (or since M1)

The bigger deal about the M-series performance and efficiency is SoC, not the ISA. This is something that could take off in the x86 world though it stifles upgradeability

[senttoschool]

Actually, Apple's M3 and even Qualcomm's X Elite are significantly ahead of the new Intel chip in raw performance and especially perf/watt.

Cinebench R24 ST[0]:

* M3: 12.7 points/watt, 141 score

* X Elite: 9.3 points/watt, 123 score

* Intel Ultra 7 258V (new): 5.36 points/watt, 120 score

* AMD HX 370: 3.74 points/watt, 116 score

* AMD 8845HS: 3.1 points/watt, 102 score

* Intel 155H: 3.1 points/watt, 102 score

Cinebench R24 MT[0]:

* M3: 28.3 points/watt, 598 score

* X Elite: 22.6 points/watt, 1033 score

* AMD HX 370: 19.7 points/watt, 1213 score

* Intel Ultra 7 258V (new): 17.7 points/watt, 602 score

* AMD 8845HS: 14.8 points/watt, 912 score

* Intel 155H: 14.5 points/watt, 752 score

PCMark did a battery life comparison using identical Dell XPS 13s[1]:

* X Elite: 1,168 minutes, performance of 204,333 in Procyon Office

* Intel Ultra 7 256V (new): 1,253 minutes, performance of 123,000 in Procyon Office

* Meteor Lake 155H: 956 minutes, performance of 129,000 in Procyon Office

Basically, Intel's new chip has 7% more battery life than X Elite but the X Elite is 66% faster while on battery. In other words, Intel's new chip throttles heavily to get that battery life.

  >Of course they ignored things like node advantage, but who cares? ;)

Intel's new chip is using TSMC's N3B in the compute tile, same as M3 and better than X Elite's N4P.

  >Where are all those people who for years (or since M1) were claiming that x86 is dead because ARM ISA (magically) offers significantly better energy-efficiency than x86 ISA.

I'm still here.

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[0]Data for M3, X Elite, AMD, Meteor Lake taken from the best scores available here: https://www.notebookcheck.net/AMD-Zen-5-Strix-Point-CPU-anal...

[0]Data for Core Ultra 7 taken from here: https://www.notebookcheck.net/Asus-Zenbook-S-14-UX5406-lapto...

[1]https://youtu.be/QB1u4mjpBQI?si=0Wyf-sohY9ZytQYK&t=2648

[2OEH8eoCRo0]

It's early. Im sure they'll be here moving goalposts and cherry picking some new stat that's suddenly a deal breaker.

[cortesoft]

I mean, any laptop could have 7 days worth of battery life with a big enough battery