Laptops

A look at Intel vs AMD laptop battery life


Intel is the winner, unsurprisingly.

Although the power consumption, or at least heat output, in the desktop tips to the AMD side, laptops have been different beasts since the Pentium M debuted. Intel has been having quite the advantage in battery life, which just took a slight bump when the Core 2 originally debuted. The 45nm version of the chip quickly fixed the high heat output of the 65nm chips and the "new" 25W Core 2 Pxxx is one of the least power sipping processors available.

Figures below are for almost identical laptops, which differ in the processor and shipset - AMD QL-64 vs Intel T6500, both at 35W and 2.1GHz, while chipset duties are attributed to a mobile HD 3200(780G) and to the GM45.


The difference is of around 30% better for the Intel machine, which would widen even more if the 25W Core 2 P8xxx/P7xxx was used - a cpu which doesn't even seem to output half of those 25W in the machines I've played with.
The battery life of the AMD machine is not bad at all, it hovers over 3 hours, the Intel machine just adds up one extra hour on top of that, which even puts some netbooks to shame.

The reason for this is AMDs current inability to produce 45nm laptop versions of it's processors. Until then, there isn't really much competition in the laptop segment. I would still take the AMD laptop for the better integrated graphics, but I'm no road warrior nowadays. As for processing, it isn't considered here, but the Intel machine is a good amount faster.

Source: Anandtech

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