Been looking to replace a Tiger Lake ultraportable which despite being a good laptop otherwise is terrible in terms of battery life and heat, but have been waiting to pull the trigger until an x86 laptop that can manage battery life numbers similar to that of a MacBook Air without also throttling the CPU to oblivion appears. Hopefully this gen of AMD mobile CPUs delivers.
I've recently bought new MSI with a Core Ultra 7 155h, just finished making Linux work on it, seems that without turbo boost (set it up with TLP) it manages at least 10h of life, and I didn't notice any degradation without turbo in everyday tasks. I've very little experience with it yet though.
I expect that it will use less baterry once Intel Thread Director usage finally gets merged to scheduler, right now on 6.8rc5 it is still using all different types of cores as if they are the same.
Also, was surprised that there are 4 types of cores now in a sense - P, E, two new LP cores, and actually two out of six P cores have slightly bigger maximum frequency, 4.8 instead of 4.6 GHz.
My ultraportable (ThinkPad X1 Nano Gen 1) gets 5-7h on a good day with the system set to “power saver” mode, with little difference between Windows and Fedora. If I’m juggling several tabs or doing anything slightly more intense it’s going to be lower.
The best x86 ultraportable option I’ve seen from current gen offerings is probably the HP Dragonfly G4, which if configured with the 1920x1280 screen and lowest-TDP CPU can manage around 14h which sounds ok, but efficiency still isn’t as good as with the MacBooks because it’s only capable of that with light usage because it has a 16Wh larger battery than a Macbook Air, has a lower resolution display that’s about half as bright, and has to be in power saver mode.
That being said, AMD chips are absolutely more power efficient than Intel chips, by a huge margin