Given that videos spin up those coolers, there is actually a problem with your GPU setup on Linux, and I expect there'd be an improvement if you managed to fix it.
Another thing is that Chrome on Linux tends to consume exorbitant amount of power with all the background processes, inefficient rendering and disk IO, so updating it to one of the latest versions and enabling "memory saving" might help a lot.
Switching to another scheduler, reducing interrupt rate etc. probably help too.
Linux on my current laptop reduced battery time x12 compared to Windows, and a bunch of optimizations like that managed to improve the situation to something like x6, i.e. it's still very bad.
> Is x86 just not able to keep up with the ARM architecture?
Yes and no. x86 is inherently inefficient, and most of the progress over last two decades was about offloading computations to some more advanced and efficient coprocessors. That's how we got GPUs, DMA on M.2 and Ethernet controllers.
That said, it's unlikely that x86 specifically is what wastes your battery. I would rather blame Linux, suspect its CPU frequency/power drivers are misbehaving on some CPUs, and unfortunately have no idea how to fix it.
Nothing in x86 prohibits you from an implementation less efficient than what you could do with ARM instead.
x86 and ARM have historically served very different markets. I think the pattern of efficiency differences of past implementations is better explained by market forces rather than ISA specifics.
These figures are very plausible. Most Linux distros are terribly inefficient by default.
Linux can actually meet or even exceed Window's power efficiently, at least at some tasks, but it takes a lot of work to get there. I'd start with powertop and TLP.
At least on Thinkpads over the years, I've never seen anything remotely close to that either. I've had my Thinkpad x260 power draw down to 2.5 watts at idle, and around 4 or 5 watts with a browser and a few terminals open. That was back in 2018! With the hot-swappable battery on the back, I could go for 24 hours of active use without concern.
Something is wrong with power governor then. I have an opposite experience, was able to tune Linux on a Core Ultra 155H laptop so it works longer than Windows one. Needed to use kernel 6.11+ and TLP [0] with pretty aggressive energy saving settings. Also played a bit with Intel LPMD [1] but did not notice much improvement.
I also own a 155H laptop using Linux Mint! Would you share your settings with TLP and LPMD? I am not getting not much longer battery life than Windows 11 on it after some tinkering, so seeing somebody else's setup may help a lot. Thanks!
Won't say I got much longer battery life, and even what I got may be as well explained as "TLP made energy profile management almost as good as on Windows, and then Windows's tendency to get a bunch of junk processes seeping on your battery tipped the scales to favor Linux". Also I ended up switching back to Windows because of never-ending hardware issues with Linux, installing it on 155H back in February 2024 was especially rough but even 6 months later I randomly got Bluetooth not working anymore after Ubuntu update.
TLP: don't remember details now, as I recall scaling governor does not do anything on modern CPUs when energy perf policy is used. CPU_MAX_PERF_ON_BAT=30 seems to be crucial for battery savings, sacrificing performance (not too much for everyday use really) for joules in battery. CPU_HWP_DYN_BOOST_ON_BAT=0 further prohibits using turbo on battery, just in case.
LPMD: again, did not use it much in the end so not sure what even is written in this config. May need additional care to run alongside TLP.
Also, I used these boot parameters. For performance, I think, beneficial one are *mitigations, nohz_full, rcu*
Given that videos spin up those coolers, there is actually a problem with your GPU setup on Linux, and I expect there'd be an improvement if you managed to fix it.
Another thing is that Chrome on Linux tends to consume exorbitant amount of power with all the background processes, inefficient rendering and disk IO, so updating it to one of the latest versions and enabling "memory saving" might help a lot.
Switching to another scheduler, reducing interrupt rate etc. probably help too.
Linux on my current laptop reduced battery time x12 compared to Windows, and a bunch of optimizations like that managed to improve the situation to something like x6, i.e. it's still very bad.
> Is x86 just not able to keep up with the ARM architecture?
Yes and no. x86 is inherently inefficient, and most of the progress over last two decades was about offloading computations to some more advanced and efficient coprocessors. That's how we got GPUs, DMA on M.2 and Ethernet controllers.
That said, it's unlikely that x86 specifically is what wastes your battery. I would rather blame Linux, suspect its CPU frequency/power drivers are misbehaving on some CPUs, and unfortunately have no idea how to fix it.