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Intel Hardware Technology

The Intel P-Series Was a Step Back 48

Posted by msmash from the closer-look dept.
An anonymous reader shares a report: I reviewed a number of laptops in 2022 across consumer, workstation, gaming, business, Chromebook, and everywhere else. I touched all of the major brands. But I had a particular focus on ultraportables this year -- that is, thin and light devices that people buy to use, say, on their couch at home -- because, with Apple's MacBooks in such a dominant position, many eyes have been on their competitors on the Windows side. For many of these models, I found myself writing the same review over and over and over. They were generally good. They performed well. But their battery life was bad.

What these laptops had in common is that they were all powered by the Intel P-series. Without getting too into the weeds here, Intel processors have, in the past, included H-series processors -- powerful chips that you'll find in gaming laptops and workstations -- and U-series processors for thinner, lighter devices. (There was also a G-series, which was this whole other thing, for a couple of years.) But the Intel 12th Generation of mobile chips (that is, the batch of chips that Intel released this year) has a new letter: the P-series. The P-series is supposed to sit between the power-hungry H-series and the power-efficient U-series; the hope was that it would combine H-series power with U-series efficiency.

And then many -- a great many -- of this year's top ultraportable laptops got the P-series: big-screeners like the LG Gram 17; modular devices like the Framework Laptop; business notebooks like the ThinkPad X1 Yoga Gen 7; premium ultraportables like the Acer Swift 5, the Lenovo Yoga 9i, the Samsung Galaxy Book2 Pro, and the Dell XPS 13 Plus. The problem was that, in reality, the P-series was just a slightly less powerful H-series chip, which Intel had slapped an "ultraportable" label onto. It was identical to the H-series in core count and architecture, but it was supposed to draw slightly less power.
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The Intel P-Series Was a Step Back More

The Intel P-Series Was a Step Back

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  • This is not a "report" (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    This is a sob story dressed up in tech sauce.

    Boring for people who like drama. Useless for people who like tech. The use is solely because these "editors" need to produce something and couldn't recognise news if it snuck up on them and bit in their behinds.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Seems pretty factual and drama free. Maybe your pussy is too dry?

  • What is "poor" batter life? (Score:3)

    by Murdoch5 ( 1563847 ) on Wednesday December 21, 2022 @05:18PM (#63148770) Homepage
    In my opinion:

    1 Hour or less: Bad / Unacceptable
    1 Hour - 2 Hours: Poor, but meh,
    2 Hours - 3 Hours: Fine
    3 Hours - 4 Hours: Totally Acceptable
    4 Hours+: What more could you need?

    If you want all day 8 hours+ battery run times, bring a charger or battery bank, and you'll be fine, but to expect anything more than 4 hours is a joke, again IMO. I know people who want 20+ hours of run time, and I know people who demand their notebook MUST suspend properly to preserve battery, but why? You're rarely going to be busy enough to need hard use from a notebook for more than 4 hours, and it would be even more rare to need 4+ hours, and not have a spot to plug in. I think peoples expectations are outpacing reasonableness.

    • Your scale might make sense in a world where Apple M-series chips do not exist.

      But we do live in that world and those times are pathetic. Because we all know in the real world a 2-3 hour laptop is maybe good for an hour if you start to do anything serious with it.

      If I cannot even fly half way across country while working without needing to find power that is not "fine". It's at best marginally OK.

      The reason you need 4+ hours as a baseline, is because for taxing work you'd still like to be able to get 4 ho

      • Re:That scale seems really off (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Murdoch5 ( 1563847 ) on Wednesday December 21, 2022 @05:50PM (#63148876) Homepage
        You're entitled to your opinion, but I politely disagree. To clarify, my times are active run times, not idle power sitting still times.

        The battery banks can get "bulky" but not unreasonable, and certainly not so big you couldn't carry them comfortably in your notebook bag, or backpack. I have four large capacity banks, 1 in my workout bag, 1 on my desk (it's charging), 1 in the car, and 1 in my notebook bag, just in case I have to grab and go, and I've never once been worried my notebook, or phone, would randomly run out of power. Maybe I'm an outlier, but I can't imagine ever disqualifying a notebook because its battery won't last 8, 12, or 20+ hours, and I don't feel my expectations are too low, I just expect a battery to be a battery, and providing the run time allows me mobility, at least until I get to a bank, then I'm fine.

        There does come a point where the battery not holding a charge is absolutely stupid, and if you hit 30 minutes or less, than it's time to look into an upgrade or battery replacement, but I've only been in that situation a handful of times.

        • You're entitled to your opinion, but I politely disagree. To clarify, my times are active run times

          Even for active runtimes anything less than 3 hours is just bad.

          The whole reason you have a laptop is so that you can work in places without plugs for extended periods of time. Anything less than three hours just sucks for real work because at .5 hours remaining, you are going to have to go find a plug or waste time shutting down stuff to conserve power.

          Also plugs in a lot of places are of dubious quality and

          • Fair enough :)

          • Do laptops really only get less than three hours runtime still exist? I only ask because, if I put my laptop in power saver mode and turn down the brightness real low, I get about five hours. My laptop's processor is an 8-core Xeon, so several steps above any of the standard laptop processors in performance. I rarely need to use it like that, but it's nice to be able to.

            • Depends on what workload. I just saw the X1 Extreme review and it gets exactly 6 hours under "Modern Office" test: https://arstechnica.com/gadget... [arstechnica.com]

              That's reasonable but I've no idea what exactly the workload is, but I'm sure as hell it's not intensive GPU or CPU load. The battery is 86Wh and considering both the CPU and GPU run around 50W in efficient mode, you should clearly be able to kill it off within an hour or two.

              The ultraportable 10" laptop I bought earlier has a 28Wh battery so even if you run som

            • From personal experience: Yes, unfortunately. I have sub 3h run time because all the [large org] security and scanning software is installed and constantly pegging the CPU at 100%. I had a brand-new notebook computer (14") issued to me in late 2021 that only got ~2h out of the box for this reason. Now its closer to 90-100 min. Not the best.

              • I have sub 3h run time because all the [large org] security and scanning software is installed and constantly pegging the CPU at 100%

                I was at one place that had software like that in place mandated by security policy (lets just say, "Large Telco"), it rendered a laptop way slower and as you say just drank battery. Nuts to that, I don't think I'd let myself be subjected to that kind of torture again.

        • I bought a Chuwi Minibook X earlier this year to make it my travel laptop. It's literally one of only two ~10" 2-in-1s and the other one cost three times as much which defeated part of the reason for buying a separate travel laptop rather than just taking my X1 Yoga.

          It has a 28wh battery and probably a bug that keeps the CPU at 1.4W at idle so it lasts about 5 hours watching a movie. It can go way down just using wifi and sites with lots of JS. It's not great, and I do have a 20Ah powerbank but it increases

          • I will agree 6 hours might be reasonable, it's certainly within a threshold I could defend, but that is at the top of my range.

      • The reason you need 4+ hours as a baseline, is because for taxing work you'd still like to be able to get 4 hours out of it, at least.

        I love how you know what the OP needs more than the OP. Well, I'm with the OP on this one. I wouldn't be unhappy if my laptop got more than 3 hours of battery life while performing intensive tasks such as compiling the Linux kernel but for me it's far more important that I be able to upgrade the storage and memory in my multi-thousand dollar laptop than have an expensive p

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Macdude ( 23507 )

          We get it, you love Apple products. But at some point you need to realize that people with different use cases exist and are better served by other products.

          You're the one complaining that other people have requirements that differ from yours...

          • But he's not complaining. He actually mentions YOU specifically might not have access to outlets despite being virtually everywhere (home, cafes, offices, etc). But he doesn't, and he simply extends his experience to the general public. I tend to agree with him, as every place i work or play at for over 4 hours has an outlet, and i had have a battery bank for my phone and laptop when i need more.
      • That's pretty much where the best laptops are nowadays. Rated for 20 hours of life, but only if you have wifi, bluetooth and all peripherals off, and you're running a single program with the screen set at a brightness where you need night vision goggles to see it.

        Turn things on realistically, and the numbers are 4-6 hours if I understand correctly - for something like a Mac air or the best PC laptops.

        • Not quite as bad I got an new X1 earlier this year and for about a week just used it straight out of the box without with the clean OEM image. Installing the corporate image with MacAffee and a million other garbage security products made it noticeably slower and cut the battery life in a way I could pretty easily feel. Then just run Teams and it'll kill off the battery than can last 15 hours playing a movie in a matter of a a few hours.

      • I have a 65w battery bank that weighs about 500g that charges over usbc. It's not big and bulky.

    • I think peoples expectations are outpacing reasonableness.

      Back around the time the millennium bug was a thing my Dell Inspiron had two removable bays, one was for a battery, the other for a floppy, or DVD drive, or ... another battery. That laptop easily got me 7+ hours of battery life and that was over 20 years ago.

      No our expectations are fine and there are products on the market that meet them. Your expectations may differ as do your use cases. For me there's nothing more PITA than having to carry around a heavy power brick, especially when it doesn't contain ma

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      Most of these laptops TFA talks about are well into the 8+ hour range. The P series gives you a mix of performance and efficiency cores, because Intel's manufacturing process sucks and that's the only way they can make a reasonable mobile chip.

      I'm hoping that next year there are really good AMD ultra portables. They are so close this year, but machines like the ThinkPad Z16 have soldered RAM (which would be okay if they offered 64GB) and a single NVMe slot.

      • Soldered RAM is only OK if you have a fleet with replacements on standby. Otherwise it's a massive failure.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

          It's reliable enough that I can live with it. Would prefer socketed, but there isn't a socket that can support the kinds of speeds that soldered RAM is capable of.

          There is that new Dell socket, but it doesn't seem to be widely adopted.

    • It's where the batter dries out so you can't pour it before you're done cooking the pancakes

    • I've never had a laptop that lasts more than a couple of hours, but my new M2 MacBook Air lasts more than 8 hours. It was down to 78% after a whole morning of use. I bloody love not having to worry about bringing a charger or external batter around.

    • In my opinion:

      1 Hour or less: Bad / Unacceptable
      1 Hour - 2 Hours: Poor, but meh,
      2 Hours - 3 Hours: Fine
      3 Hours - 4 Hours: Totally Acceptable
      4 Hours+: What more could you need?

      If you want all day 8 hours+ battery run times, bring a charger or battery bank, and you'll be fine, but to expect anything more than 4 hours is a joke, again IMO. I know people who want 20+ hours of run time, and I know people who demand their notebook MUST suspend properly to preserve battery, but why? You're rarely going to be busy enough to need hard use from a notebook for more than 4 hours, and it would be even more rare to need 4+ hours, and not have a spot to plug in. I think peoples expectations are outpacing reasonableness.

      Hmmm.

      I don't believe there is an Apple Silicon-based Laptop that has less than twice that 4 hour "what more could you need?" level under even the most strenuous conditions. Most have more like 16-20 hours. No car-battery needed.

      Pretty telling that you didn't see fit to include it in your "scale", eh?

      • Why would I include additional levels beyond "What more could you need?"? Ignoring the fact I'm not an Apple user or fanboy, I'll still maintain anything over 4 hours is overkill under load.

        • Why would I include additional levels beyond "What more could you need?"? Ignoring the fact I'm not an Apple user or fanboy, I'll still maintain anything over 4 hours is overkill under load.

          Riiight.

    • This is such a bad take on the horrible power inefficiency situation going on with Intel right now. Intel P-series is a disaster. Their U-series is at least fairly efficient but 8 hours is a bare minimum baseline. Look at what Apple is doing with the M2 hitting 15 hours and achieving great performance. AMD does a solid job with Ryzen 6000 series. Intel just has no idea what they are doing. It's bad enough their HEDT CPUs hit 250W when AMD is hitting 150W. But where power really counts Intel should be doing

    • Now imagine you were talking about your phone. "Oh, just bring a charger with you everywhere you go, you don't need to get more than 4 hours". Yeah, that how ridiculous you sound.

      People who do a lot of traveling for work or a lot of remote work need more than 4 hours of battery life on their laptop. You don't always have the luxury of finding an outlet and being tethered to it. That's the whole damned point of a portable computer. Y'know, the portable part.

      • That's not ridiculous at all, have you ever had a mobile phone with battery power issues? My A53 has ~2 days of battery life at idle, and I rarely use it for much, but If you have a mobile phone that you need to rely on, you'll have a battery bank for it close by, which oddly enough is the same bank you'll probably use for your notebook. If you have to rely on having stable power on the go, then you're going to bring it with you, no questions asked.

        The argument that Apple has batteries that last 15 hours,

        • That's a big wall of text in a futile attempt to justify a completely wrong take. You're entitled to your opinion, even if it's wrong.

          • Imho is a completely right take. If it's for WORK, you should always have a seperate backup. There have been stories (both Apl and M$) for laptops that don't suspend properly and become space heaters in your bag and have no charge left because of a glitch in the os, app keeping it awake, or user misconfiguration. You know what's nicer to have than a 20 hour battery life? A 40 hour battery life for an extra pound of weight that can't be used without your explicit action (plugging in)
            • Yep, and that's the entire point. It's great to have 100 hours of run time in a notebook, but all that means is you might get 100 hours of run time. If you have to rely on the notebook, you'd be a fool to blindly trust it. I've been in a data centre when my notebook had "low battery", "~20%", and I asked where I could plug in. The response I got was "nowhere, we don't allow random computers to access our energy grid in this room, it's a secured energy grid", and he was DEAD serious. I laughed thinking
          • What's your argument? I'm suggesting you carry extra battery capacity with you, because shit happens. Let's say you have a 100-hour run time battery in your notebook, and you've only had the notebook on for 1 day, 24 hours, would you trust that battery has 76 hours of run time left? Would you trust it has 38 hours of run time left? I wouldn't trust it at all, and I wouldn't have to because I'd have a battery bank on me.

            Great, you have 100-hour run time battery, and all that means is you might get 100 h
    • There's one big reason to want longer battery life, and that is aging. A battery that runs twice as long will get half the number of cycles in a given timespan, therefore the point where you need to replace it may well be twice as far into the future. Or, in case you're not a careful person, chances are the laptop dies before the battery needs replacing. For me that's a lot of added value.

  • > It was identical to the H-series in core count and architecture, but it was supposed to draw slightly less power.

    Sometimes they just want to their new micro-architecture in production and worry later about tuning, per future sub-versions. It's kind of using consumers as unwitting beta testers.

  • I can confirm that the Core i5-1240P in my Framework seems to suck down a lot more power than the Core i5-10310U from my Lenovo T14. However, it also compiles code a lot faster.

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