There’s simply no other way to describe it.
Even if you turn on all of the power management the hardware is capable of, it’s not terrific.
The x86 processors are known for being brute force energy hogs.
Buying x86 processors and expecting good power management is like trying to hypermile a Chevy Suburban.
(As big as a house and half as aerodynamic.)
There’s just so far you can take it.
The other architectures usually have better power management because people are using them on cell phones where they’re going to be really mad if the thing kills out 5 times a day.
This is essentially why Intel had no luck with mobile processors. The things that it makes are simply too broken and full of bugs to actually work properly if you’re going to run out of power at some point.
Sure, x86 has power management. Really, really terrible power management. It’s almost like an afterthought.
And thanks to Intel’s incompetence you risk data corruption and system crashes if you turn the wrong part of it on, and thanks to the “design” of modern Intel chips being more like SoCs, you need all or basically all of it on or else the one thing that isn’t powering down does a horrific amount of damage to the overall consumption of the system.
Intel and AMD power management and ACPI (which is full of Microsoft-isms and is the x86 power management and device description system of the PC) are so bad that Microsoft doesn’t even stop to figure them out on Windows.
It just turns parts off and you have to live with 3-4 hour battery life on a computer that could theoretically get 6-8 hours.
To get any decent amount of runtime you pretty much have to run Linux, and override it all to turn on and figure out if it actually corrupts anything or causes the system to become unstable.
I’ve been lucky with my two Lenovo laptops that turning it all on at boot with the powertop –autotune systemd service on Linux just happens to work and doesn’t appear to screw anything up.
Nevertheless, I think it should be embarrassing that Microsoft and Intel and AMD talk about “designing chips for Windows” where something as basic as good power management doesn’t even work on Windows, and rather than investigating it, they declared that you bought it and they’re not going to make more money off you soon, so have fun with broken power management, on the chip designed for Windows, under Windows.
Hell, you’re lucky if this thing even continues booting at all and doesn’t suddenly start crashing and saying “Unsupported Processor” because you installed a Windows update.
The recent Windows “Unsupported Processor” incident actually does happen once in a while, and Microsoft expects users to install newer UEFI firmware that may never come to keep getting Windows updates.
I never update my system firmware unless it’s doing something horrific because Linux doesn’t block you from installing operating system updates and throw bizarre panic errors if it worked okay to begin with, and system firmware updates gone wrong can mean a working computer becomes a dead one. So throwing it in the user’s lap just means that they risk a broken computer, trying to make Windows operable again.
Microsoft absolutely should be responsible and work around whatever the error is, because Windows worked on these systems before the update. So what the hell did they put in there, and why does it make a previously working computer “Unsupported”?
The owner of the machine didn’t do something wrong. Microsoft, Intel, and their OEM screwed up and now the user gets to suffer.
As for Intel, oh Intel…. Bailout Biden gave them billions of dollars to expand production in America with the “Chips and Science Act”, which is totally not at all like Communism.
No sir, not one bit.
If it was Communism, then perhaps the government officials would expect to see new factories going up instead of thousands of layoffs [1] [2] [3]….(and a cafeteria stabbing).
Oh, and since they lost the Apple contract, because their chips are too bad for even Apple (who dabbled with AMD chips internally and then called it on x86 and moved to ARM), the cuts affected Intel’s GPU division too, so expect performance of integrated GPUs to flatline after anything they already have in the pipeline.
Recently, Biden signed an executive order to limit Chinese access to all this Intel junk.
Last year, Intel said that the Chinese didn’t currently (in 2022) have anything that overtook the raw performance of the Intel chips, but they almost certainly will within 4 years.
As another disaster at Intel recently unfolded, Chinese regulators blocked Intel’s $5.4 billion dollar acquisition of Tower Semiconductor, causing Intel to have to pay $353 million for breach of contract and walk away with nothing.
Intel is a comically badly managed company and they and Microsoft deserve to die on the same hill.
(The Microsoft layoffs and hiring freezes continue, but Roy Schestowitz has covered this angle well enough, I think.)
You add all this up, and I mean, it’s not an emergency but I do want off x86 and onto something that runs Linux on ARM eventually.
Raspberry Pi Imager seems to have a Flatpak for non-Ubuntu users to create SD cards with various OS software and game emulators for the thing, and I think I could tolerate deploying this to crank out some OS images if I decide to pick one up. ⬆