When did laptops start lasting 10 hrs?!

[JEDI]

My last laptop was a pre-covid refurb Dell.
After (finally) replacing the battery, it lasted 2 1/2 hrs.

That Dell finally died late last year.
I got a Lenovo with amd Ryzen 5 Ai.
specs say the battery lasts for 10hrs?! (haven't tested it)

How the heck?!

 

[Ritaliti]

The biggest factor is the shift to ARM-based and efficiency-focused chips. AMD's Ryzen AI series (which you have) and Apple's M-series chips both moved to architectures that sip power compared to anything from even 3-4 years ago. Your old Dell was probably running a 15-28W Intel chip that would boost way higher under any load – modern chips are much smarter about scaling power to what's actually needed.

.... and maybe the battery is just bigger 😀

 

[DavidC1]

My last laptop was a pre-covid refurb Dell.
After (finally) replacing the battery, it lasted 2 1/2 hrs.

That Dell finally died late last year.
I got a Lenovo with amd Ryzen 5 Ai.
specs say the battery lasts for 10hrs?! (haven't tested it)

How the heck?!

The real advancement came in 2013 with Intel's 4th Gen Core Haswell platform, when they and the industry decided to take a system-wide approach to reduce power. Haswell improved battery life by ~50% compared to the predecessor.

System-wide is correct, because the CPU acts like a leash in a horse carriage buggy and when and only when rest of the components are at low power, the CPU can finally reach a low power state. I know from playing around with Haswell and newer systems that a single mis-behaving component prevents the CPU from reaching the lower power state. In one laptop, replacing the WiFi module from Realtek to a Intel one reduced CPU idle from 1.5W to 1W.

The Dell XPS 12 I had used 3rd Gen Core and it lasted 5-6 hours. The Haswell successor got 8 hours. Over the next few years until 6th Gen Skylake they got better at implementing the new changes, and they managed to get another 20-30% out of it, reaching the magical 10. AMD also inherited many of the changes, thus they get decent battery life too.

In the x86-land even Skylake could do a lot more, because in 2013-2015 Intel had a separate mobile-focused lineup called Atom that could do ~50% more battery life at the same capacity. They used that expertise to build Core Ultra 200V series "Lunar Lake". The recently introduced Ultra 300 series "Pantherlake" is similar to that and gets another ~50% over ~Skylake lines.

The latest Dell XPS 16 with 300 series "Panther Lake" gets 26.6 hours WiFi browsing: https://www.notebookcheck.net/Dell-XPS-16-review-Two-steps-forward-one-step-back.1251724.0.html

@Ritaliti

The biggest factor is the shift to ARM-based and efficiency-focused chips. AMD's Ryzen AI series (which you have) and Apple's M-series chips both moved to architectures that sip power compared to anything from even 3-4 years ago. Your old Dell was probably running a 15-28W Intel chip that would boost way higher under any load – modern chips are much smarter about scaling power to what's actually needed.

Buddy, 15-28W you are talking about is at high load like games and rendering. Even Pantherlake does the same thing. Battery life tests are mostly under light and bursty load like video playback and browsing. You could go to Windows and set it so your chip doesn't use more than 5W at max, but that won't improve battery life under light load.

Intel Atom pre-2013 were 3W chips, yet still had terrible battery life. Because the system couldn't idle low. It wasn't addressed seriously until 2013.