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Comment by Turskarama | Hacker News Reader

I can't help but feel like an x86 tablet is a non starter, the architecture is just too power thirsty compared to ARM.

I use an RPi3 with 7 inch touchscreen to listen to webradio all the time. Just the other day I was curious, and measured its power consumption. My laptop with Ryzen 4700u with turned off screen uses less amount of power than the Rpi with screen on (~6W for laptop vs ~7.5W for RPi). I'm really thinking about ditching my RPi's as a radio and even as pihole, as my laptop can do much more while still using close to 0% CPU.

Sure, the screen on/off comparison makes this measurement a bit unfair, but calling x86/x64 energy inefficient doesn't sound particularly correct.

One major difference that could explain the power consumption is that the 4700u uses a 7nm process, and the old RPi3 uses a 40nm process.

I have a tablet with a i5-7200u (2016) with a small-ish ~34WHr (originally, well worn since!) battery that gets 7 hours usage easy. How is this "power hungry"? For an ancient quad core & inefficient old storage drive.

As with 90% of everything, people take a bunch of highly visible indicators to decide their opinions & then shit on anything & everything that doesn't meet their set conception. People hate Electron because they think of Slack, but Slack has shit ass architecture. Dump it's web data and you'll find dozens of multi-megabyte indexeddb databases with mostly duplicate data. It's just a shit app. You can build shit apps in anything. But vscode being slick fast & smooth doesn't register for anyone, seemingly carries no weight. The negative conceptions dominate & rule, are the things that get posted, actively, and with energy. It's a damned shame.

I tried VSCode on a Librem 14 by Purism. It has a tenth gen Core i7 with 12 threads. With only very basic essential extensions like syntax, Git integration, and a Vim mode, I could type faster than the view updated.

Electron may be great for people who want to write Web apps, but browsers are RAM and CPU hungry beasts compared to the GUI toolkits they're trying to replace.

In short, which environments are running VSCode smoothly? Do I need next gen hardware to run a damn IDE smoothly?

Web apps have some advantages, but performance is nowhere in that list.

Your poor performance seems unexpected in extreme. Folks at work are on m1's with quite a lot of extensions & everything feels snappy.

Having a huge git repo could poyentially hurt; would be interesting to test. Who knows maybe vim mode is partly to blame? I personally still mainly use vim, not vscode, so I don't know what usual suspects there are. It'd be awesome if there's good profiling that can show what plugins are taking significant time in the core loop. We have brutal eslint to apply but that for example all happens async. Once again, we're back where we started, of one bad situation - some random plugin somewhere - creating a lightning rod for disdain.

Good luck finding an ARM tablet with an open device tree that you can compile/install mainline linux onto.

Somehow people keep forgetting about this. ARM support sucks till today

According to this comparison the performance per watt is roughly the same for the CPU in this tablet (Intel N200) and the Apple M1: https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/5178vs4104/Intel-N200-v...

A Surface Go or Surface Pro, which this is essentially a clone of, will happily run for a school/business day, and that's with the weight of Windows on it.

You can run Linux on it: https://github.com/linux-surface/linux-surface

Which gives you an hour or two of battery life, and effectively no camera support.

I have one, running Linux on it, love it and consider best Linux device I ever had had, but I wish there were fewer quirks.

> Which gives you an hour or two of battery life

Interesting, but that must be some bad configuration, something that must be fixed on that specific line of tablets. It is not necessary on Linux.

And of course some rogues had to pass leave some judgement and a "guess what triggered my reaction". In this case, the very annoying and utterly avoidable game of guesses is among the easiest: that it was a banality? But not all of this public may have been there...

Edit: to expand more on the implicit of the original post «not necessary on Linux»: that «an hour or two of battery life» is quite extraordinary, and should really require a bit of expansion: what is it that drains that battery? That is not normal at all, and requires some more detail, like "Android 12 tried to marry my cousin" or similar would.

x86 is pretty power efficient. Looks like its using an Intel Alder lake CPU, which means it has e-cores which can be even more power efficient.

Even better, it’s the N series which is all e-cores. They’re fast enough, and there’s no worry about the p-cores wasting battery in a tablet.

I don't know much about peak power consumption of these chips, but they are crazy efficient when idling / having little load. Plus, ARM support still sucks :-(

> the architecture is just too power thirsty compared to ARM

Maybe the architecture, but not the products.

You can consume 3 watts on some Intel based laptops.

This is an Intel Atom renamed those have been used for tablets before and Gracemont is supposedly even better?

It’s a 6 watt processor that still scores well in benchmarks, very well picked.

Agreed - ARM put x86 on the clock, and Apple Silicon - the best implementation of ARM yet - is the death knell of x86. Every opinion to the contrary feels like cope, because it's coming, and fast.

A CPU is not a computer. Apple does not sell its CPUs to other manufacturers. A single vendor cannot supply solutions satisfying every person and every business requiring computers, no matter how good their tech is. Fast ARM merely keeps Apple relevant. It is not such an unfair advantage that everything else dies.

Latest Intel chips are faster than Apple Silicon in single and multi-thread benchmarks... (they use more power, but they are faster...)

These days I’ve started to care a lot more about power per watt than raw numbers. Watts = heat = fans = noise.

You realize we're commenting on a post about a fanless laptop running Intel CPU?

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