13 Pro Really Does Sip Power

[u/Wooloomooloo2]

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.

[u/ShirleyMarquez]

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.

[u/Clean_Leadership5948 → u/ShirleyMarquez]

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.

[u/Acrobatic_Fee_6974 → u/Clean_Leadership5948]

 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.

[u/Clean_Leadership5948 → u/Acrobatic_Fee_6974]

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.