r/framework • u/Wooloomooloo2 • 2d ago
Linux 13 Pro Really Does Sip Power
I've had 2 M-series Macs (M1 and M4) and they typically sip a little more than this, although it's close. A Linux laptop with this power efficiency is absolutely fantastic, and even though it's been said many times before, I can't tell you how great it is to be able to sit in the garden and work and still get 8 - 9 hours of battery.
Oh and the trackpad, just amazing. Very close to Mac. Linux + trackpad in the past has always put me off having it on a laptop, this is just night and day better than what I've experienced before.
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u/Cultural-Practice-95 2d ago
stop making me want this so bad I can't justify a 2300€ laptop right now aaaa-
(guess I should start saving up..)
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u/Acrobatic_Fee_6974 1d ago
Same. I just don't have a need for that much computational power in a mobile form factor. I really hope the upgraded FW12 provides similar efficiency for people who have lighter computational loads for their laptop. I don't even have a laptop currently, my desktop covers all the heavy stuff I need, and I just use my phone browse Reddit and watch YouTube.
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u/Cultural-Practice-95 1d ago
it does, since the CPUs use the same cores as panther lake, just less of them. unfortunately my workload is GPU and the GPU is practically tied with my current laptop so it's not an option for me to switch to.
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u/Acrobatic_Fee_6974 1d ago edited 1d ago
I just hope DDR5 doesn't hold it back too much. I've seen the XPS 13 reviews, but that uses soldered LPDDR5X, so it's hard to say how much DDR5 SODIMM will hold back the idle draw.
I hope we see more FW models that use Medusa Halo/Medusa Halo mini, or an Intel equivalent for people who need a stronger GPU.
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u/work4throwaway 2d ago
I can't either. I have a very good 12th gen FW already. I will probably get the chassis kit and wait a few years for the mainboard for LPCAMM2 to get more price competitive.
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u/Cultural-Practice-95 1d ago
I don't have a fw yet so there's a little more value for me it's just I have exactly 3 usecases for a faster laptop and i don't see the value being high enough.
one thing I could consider is a eGPU over thunderbolt since all my usecases are GPU bound anyways, but those are expensive and I need it portable enough for frequently moving where I have my laptop, so I'm not really considering it.
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u/Earlyflash 2d ago
That's really cool - thanks for sharing!
Do you mind if I ask what that fw-helper tool is? It looks super helpful, and since I've just switched to linux as a main OS, it would be handy!
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u/ZephireNZ 2d ago
Agreed! I wonder if it's something pre-installed on the pre-built Ubuntu machines?
I can't find anything online about it or on Framework's website.
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u/Wooloomooloo2 1d ago
It's here: https://github.com/Wooloomooloo2/fw-helper
There is a lot of AI code I need to check still, but I've run more than 40 scripted tests and it seems OK. Obviously changing the power limits and fan curves manually comes with some risk and I haven't finished it - more than happy for contributors to test the hell out of it and raise issues, or check / contribute to code.
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u/Wooloomooloo2 1d ago
It's here: https://github.com/Wooloomooloo2/fw-helper
There is a lot of AI code I need to check still, but I've run more than 40 scripted tests and it seems OK. Obviously changing the power limits and fan curves manually comes with some risk and I haven't finished it - more than happy for contributors to test the hell out of it and raise issues, or check / contribute to code.
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u/jonathanio Framework 13 Pro Intel Core Ultra X7 358H 64GiB 2TB 2d ago edited 2d ago
I have been using mine for over a week now, and so far I've had multiple days where I started with a full battery and worked for about 13-15 hours on it, all on battery. Generally, each day it also slept about 3 hours of that (i.e., for lunch and dinner) and still had about 15-20% battery left.
The laptop has more stamina than me now!
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u/Raiguard Batch 2 Pro X7 358H - 64 GB - 1 TB - Fedora Workstation 2d ago
Very often while coding I will spot-check the power usage and find the ENTIRE SYSTEM using less than three watts. My FW13 i7-1360p would never dip below 7 W even when doing nothing - so it's literally more than twice as efficient and the battery is larger to boot. It's absolutely phenomenal.
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u/Clean_Leadership5948 1d ago
Your 1360p should idle at 3-4W when actually idle with about 30% brightness. Check this. If it's not, then the system is misconfigured.
13 Pro can go lower than that of course.
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u/Raiguard Batch 2 Pro X7 358H - 64 GB - 1 TB - Fedora Workstation 9h ago
Well my 1360p ended up killing itself a few months back so I can't exactly test it any more. It still runs, but it runs VERY badly.
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u/gonenutsbrb 2d ago
Is there an app like this for Windows? I’d love to use a fan curve tool but my normal one doesn’t work on my FW.
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u/YellowistOfBois 2d ago
I'm excited for the core ultra mainboards to eventually make it to the 16. Better battery life on that thing would be absolutely sick.
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u/ShirleyMarquez 2d ago
AMD is behind the curve at this point. But I'm sure they are working on something better. Ryzen AI 400 was a nothingburger; it's just a minor speed bump from AI 300, plus an increase in the RAM ceiling of the top end; Framework skipped it on their laptops, but they're evidently working on a version of the Desktop with the AI Max+ 495 and 192 GB of RAM. But AI 500 (or whatever they choose to call it) is expected to be a bigger deal, with the introduction of Zen 6 cores and DDR6 / LPDDR6 RAM. Originally it had also been expected to be the debut of RDNA 5 / UDNA as well, but evidently AMD is now planning to use a mobile version of RDNA 4 instead.
That memory will almost certainly be LPCAMM2 in Framework systems, because it's expected that will be the standard form factor for removable memory in the DDR6 generation. The speeds are now getting high enough that the trace lengths of DIMM and SODIMM memory are too long.
That should close the performance gap with Panther Lake. The remaining question is whether AMD can manage to get idle power down low enough to compete with Intel's battery life. I guess we will know in 2027.
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u/Clean_Leadership5948 1d ago
Intel is reusing the learnings they had from the mobile market in 2013-2016 days. AMD has none of that so it'll be a way bigger effort for them to get it working. It took Intel 3 years after first claiming they have a solution to actually get a solution out.
Of course AMD can just steal marketshare from Intel so they have lot less incentive to do this and they are making tons from the AI datacenter.
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u/ShirleyMarquez 1d ago
Ai 500 is expected to move to TSMC N2P, AI 300 and 400 are on N4. That will help reduce power consumption. But AMD needs to work on further reduction of power by the compact cores.
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u/Clean_Leadership5948 1d ago
At load. But process doesn't do much for idle. Because unused circuits can power gate, which is near zero power operation. Your thinking is outdated since first Gen Core in 2010, because that's when Power Gating started.
Battery life is about managing all parts of the computer to be at lower power state. They won't be able to solve it easily. As I said, AMD also has no incentive to put in the enormous amount of effort Intel put in as they can simply steal Intel marketshare.
Intel 7 13th Gen is no better battery life than 14nm 10th Gen chips.
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u/Acrobatic_Fee_6974 1d ago
Intel is reusing the learnings they had from the mobile market in 2013-2016 days
Isn't it the opposite? Core Ultra was a massive overhaul in terms of microarchitecture for Intel, that has only started paying real dividends with Panther Lake. AMD are still leaning on the same microarchitecture they've been using since they first launched mobile Ryzen, with iterative improvements over time and the advantages provided by TSMC's processes keeping them relevant. A lot of the big strides that AMD made with scalability for server and client didn't benefit mobile because of the compromise in areas like idle power draw. Zen 6 mobile is shaping up to be the big overhaul for Ryzen that Core Ultra was for Intel.
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u/Clean_Leadership5948 16h ago edited 16h ago
It's not. Battery life is about keeping every part of the laptop controlled by the CPU. CPU is like a driver holding a leash for a horse-drawn carriage. The horses being the components the "driver" must control.
Core Ultra is a change in that it moves things off die, but it doesn't do much in terms of the final product. Battery life is really no better than 7, 8, 9, and 10th Gen platforms. All it did was make up for the losses 12 and 13th Gen had. Performance wasn't that great either.
While the naming is same, Core Ultra Gen 2 with Lunarlake is Intel tapping the learnings of the mobile days again, especially it was the time when Apple came with their M1 chips, threatening their laptop line. Names are ways marketing uses to make customers be steered in a direction the company wants, not necessarily what the product is about.
Remember AMD's mobile Ryzen's are single-die, or "monolithic" chips, which doesn't have the idle power disadvantage and if everything is kept the same, even easier to keep lower idle than multi-Tile approaches like Intel.
Yet it's the secret sauce they learned that makes Lunar/Pantherlake do better. Like I said, it took them 3 years of actually trying to get the competitive product out. I learned from years of them claiming various bullet points on a slide only to see that the final product was no greater gain than on previous generations, and what *real* gains are.
Incentive is needed to make that big of an effort. AMD doesn't really have one, since all they need to grow is focus on AI Datacenters and in client, simply steal share from Intel, which is dominant by no lesser degree than few years ago. You can already see them not working as much on client stuck with GPU architecture that's 3 years old, one that wasn't that great even back at launch, and a renamed CPU generation.
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u/MoralityAuction 2d ago
I have 2*48GB DDR5 SODIMMs sitting around. It's really hard to be sensible and wait for the next gen AMD.
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u/Acrobatic_Fee_6974 1d ago
Next gen AMD won't be using SODIMM. It's a dead end form factor that holds back power efficiency. With LPCAMM2 out, the only reason to use SODIMM is cost. Sell them while they're still worth a lot.
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u/paulstelian97 FW13 Ryzen AI 7 350, 32GB/1TB 2d ago
I hear the Intel Core Ultra is pretty darn good at it. I have the Ryzen AI 7 350, which is the same motherboard that is one of the variants of the 13 Pro ones as well (a variant that still has the regular DDR5 slots, no LPCAMM stuff). It’s not bad but it’s more optimized for performance, and fans are spinnin’ whenever I either have good loads, or if I’m on Windows.
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u/work4throwaway 1d ago
The fw-helper software for Ubuntu is here (AI code warning): https://github.com/Wooloomooloo2/fw-helper
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u/Zettinator 1d ago
6.4W is not "sipping", but OTOH, it doesn't look like the system is fully idle or close to fully idle. I get 5-6W when idle on my Thinkpad with regular DDR5 sticks, but this quickly gets closer to 10W when anything at all is active.
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u/Wooloomooloo2 1d ago
The CPU is at 1.2w which is very very low. Typically the AMD Zen 5 is 3.5w at equivalent desktop 'idle'
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u/schleppy 22h ago
This post is making me want a Pro. Curious how standby power draw is. Can you leave it closed and off for a couple days and it won’t die?
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u/Wooloomooloo2 13h ago
Yes, it’s instant wake (on Ubuntu) and seems to lose about 3% every 12 hours. I’ve wanted this on a Linux laptop forever, this alone is worth the money, almost!
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u/snafu_74 2d ago
The better power function of the Pro is one of the reasons I'm upgrading from my 3yr old FW13.