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Comment by p1necone | Hacker News Reader

A lot of people are misinterpreting the results here (understandably, the article is pretty bad).

They're benchmarking the CPU, but measuring the power draw of a whole laptop - including a dedicated 3080ti GPU which will still be drawing a decent amount of power even at idle.

This benchmark is useful for measuring the speed and power draw of /this specific laptop/ vs an m1 MacBook, but not so much this new i9 in general.

Laptop CPU performance also varies massively even across the exact same chip depending on thermal design, so this chip on average could potentially be either much slower or much faster than this benchmark suggests.

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Can confirm those video cards draw a lot of power. I have a system76 with an nvidia 1060 (or some such). I can turn it off in and my battery life improves quite substantially. It doesn’t matter what applications are running it draws a lot. Maybe it’s a Linux problem.

On the plus side with that card and the machine plugged in it actually plays steam games quite well.

I’m guessing this is the first laptop Anandtech could get their hands on with this new chip.

That said I’ve been out of the PC space for quite a while. Do mobile discrete GPUs greatly draw much power when mostly idle (such as general desktop work)? Did others give up on switching the discrete GPU on and off a needed as Apple used to do (and gave up on IIRC)?

I believe there are laptops you can buy that do that well, but it's not universal.

Software support in Windows and Linux for swapping between a low power integrated GPU and a dedicated one on demand was rather spotty last time I had a system like that, but things might have changed since then (~6 years ago).

I had one of the Apple ones and while it worked well the software was spotty there too. It tried to guess when the discrete was needed but turned it on far too often. Which quickly made it hot and killed the battery.

Since I rarely gamed I ended up using a 3rd party utility to force the discrete GPU off 98% of the time and the laptop was much better for it.

I understand why Apple did that (power draw when GPU on) and why they gave up (didn’t work well at all).

>That said I’ve been out of the PC space for quite a while. Do mobile discrete GPUs greatly draw much power when mostly idle (such as general desktop work)? Did others give up on switching the discrete GPU on and off a needed as Apple used to do (and gave up on IIRC)?

I recently purchased and returned a Lenovo P1 Extreme Gen 4. It had an 11th generation i9 and a 3080.

With no external monitor attached, the 3080 power consumption in HWinfo was 0 watts doing basic tasks (e.g. surfing HN).This was plugged in or on battery.

If I plugged in an external 4K monitor, the 3080 power consumption was ~23 watts. A few watts less with a 1080 monitor. I think 27W if both were plugged in.

I think a lot of laptops can basically turn off the discrete GPU when it's not being used. Not sure about gaming laptops. There's some quirkiness to this with the GPU not turning always turning off when you unplug an external monitor - a reboot is required.

Thanks for the numbers. I’m glad to hear it can turn off, but I will say I’m surprised it’s minimum draw is so high when it’s on.

In hindsight, one of the thing I didn't check was the GPU draw at idle (with a monitor plugged in) when the laptop was in Balanced Power mode.

Typically if I plugged a monitor in I also had the power cord in. And with the Power plugged in, I had the laptop set to highest performance mode in Windows.

There is a balanced mode which is more conservative with power consumption. I wonder if the GPU idle draw would have been lower.

The laptop I used also had the external TB4/USB-C and HDMI ports wired to the NVIDIA GPU. This means that external monitor = GPU on. I wonder if there are some laptops that can use the iGPU for basic tasks, and only switch to GPU as needed.

There are also laptops with less powerful discrete GPUs that might draw less power at idle.

Based on The Verge's article, this is the laptop that Intel is providing to everyone.

I hadn’t seen that. Thanks, makes sense.

> They're benchmarking the CPU, but measuring the power draw of a whole laptop - including a dedicated 3080ti GPU which will still be drawing a decent amount of power even at idle

The charts in the PCWorld article show the idle power draw at 20W, so couldn't you just subtract that?

I imagine the GPU also draws lower power during idle, so they would both scale at undefined rates when benchmarking

I don't have the data for 3080TI but my GTX1650 consumes between 1-2 W in idle mode. Of course TI is a totally different beast.

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