The ISA has nothing to do with the battery life. Battery life is the result of getting details right at every level of the software stack. Framework doesn't control every level of the stack. Arguably they don't control any of it.

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gorjusborg 13 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> Battery life is the result of getting details right at every level of the software stack

Exactly. Apple's way of doing things is about vertical integration of the stack, which is the polar opposite of how the PC market developed and largely still works.

The vertical integration approach (where you control all the layers beneath the customer facing product) has the benefit of allowing you to optimize that customer experience by tweaking things anywhere in the stack.

Power management in digital systems mostly comes down to being able to slow or turn off clocks when appropriate. Doing this well can be complicated, but you can tell that Apple has put a lot of energy into doing it.

The downside of the vertical integration approach is that components cannot be sourced or replaced with off-the-shelf components, as the interfaces are not really standard, they are tailor made for the use case.

For the Framework folks to pull off something like the M1's power sipping, they'd have to invest a lot of engineering time (a.k.a. money) and have strategic partnerships with hardware vendors and standards bodies to move the commodity chip market forward to support better power management.

The thing is, one of the strengths of the Framework is that the hardware is commodity, making their devices easy to repair. Also, any work that the Framework folks do to move things forward also benefit their competitors, which can shrink the potential reward for doing so.

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corndoge 14 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Yes, it's this. I also own an M4 mbp and an AMD framework 13. With both on maximum screen brightness, side by side, doing similar workloads, battery life isn't that much better on the M4. I think the difference maker is that the mac constantly decreases screen brightness when possible, turns the backlight completely off when there isn't any activity, heavily leverages power efficient scheduling and efficiency cores, no doubt turns off power to all peripherals whenever possible, and so on. And of course lid-closed suspend on a mac lasts indefinitely. Arch does none of these things and even on cohesive distros like Fedora there's only so much you can do in user land. Linux is designed for compatibility across a huge breadth of devices; darwin only has to support Mac hardware and can extract every ounce of power efficiency from deep hardware integration.

	▲	cosmic_cheese 13 hours ago \| parent [-]
		IIRC the low power states of M series chips generally dips down further than most x86 CPUs do, and the way both the SoC And OS are designed are for racing to idle and coalescing tasks to reduce wakeups. On the MBPs specially the screen can also drop down to 1hz so the GPU isn’t wasting cycles redrawing static content. The result is that in more typical usage where the machine isn’t under a constant load, battery life is much better. When it’s sitting there idle displaying a web page it’s barely consuming any power at all, where most competing laptops at minimum are pulling at least 2-3x as much power between the CPU not being able to scale down that far and constantly getting woken to perform poorly scheduled tasks.