The TDP of the M1 is between 15 and 20 Watts: I use one third of that with Intel...
Crunching some numbers, some benchmarks seem to place the M1 as three times faster. Through raw numbers, the M1 seems not much more "performant per watt" than the Pentium Silver - only slightly better. And, for a laptop, the importance is (in general) more on energy efficiency than in speed.
Edit: danieldk rightly noted below that TDP is a "high load consumption estimate". Official data for the "situational" consumptions are a bit harder to find.
That's the TDP. For light daily tasks (casual web browsing, e-mail, etc.) the M1 primarily relies on the energy-efficient Icestorm cores. While typing this comment and having some applications in the background (like Slack), package power use hovers between 40 and 300mW (roughly 100mW on average).
The energy efficiency of M1 MacBook is remarkable. My wife had an M1 before I did. She was in some video meetings on battery for some hours, I wouldn't believe her when she told me she still had 80% battery remaining.
>I wouldn't believe her when she told me she still had 80% battery remaining.
Really? I feel like that's just having any 2021 laptop. I have a 13" Linux laptop with the i7-1185g. I'm not going to pretend it matches the performance/watt of an M1, but a few hours of video calling makes a completely negligible difference to battery life for me. 20% for a few hours of video calls just feels baseline.
I've never been in a situation where I needed to get back to a charger, and can happily go the whole day of development and meetings with charge left over to spare.
We should also compare the batteries to talk about "hours". This one is around 40Wh, according to `upower -d`; when it was new, I could do light work for 12..14h (Linux "desktop").
I have been trying getting some numbers from `powerstat`, intrigued by danieldk's results of 0.1W consumption: I am getting 3.7W during this browsing session. That 0.1W must be related to the CPU only. The result from `powerstat` is aggregate (if I raise the display lightness to an uncomfortable level the consumption raises to 4.5W). I do not know how to only get the consumption of the CPU. Trying to check...
Edit: I am really not sure how to disaggregate consumption and find a number comparable to that 0.1W. Maybe, danieldk, you could provide instead the aggregate consumption - the total (not just CPU) average consumption of your system? And eertami? Just to get an idea.
Really? I feel like that's just having any 2021 laptop. [...] 20% for a few hours of video calls just feels baseline.
I had a brief Linux/Windows excursion with a ThinkPad T14 Ryzen laptop. Three hours of video meetings was enough to drain most of the battery in Linux (worse power management, plus no hardware encoding/decoding in some video meeting apps). In Windows, it lasted a bit longer, but the battery would definitely be drained 50%, often more.
The ThinkPad was not a lemon. This seems like pretty normal drain if you look at people's experiences on the web.
The M1 is an SoC with CPU + GPU + NPU + NAND Controller and many others, being used in a Fanless condition under 10W on MacBook Air.
>Official data for the "situational" consumptions are a bit harder to find.
A single HP Core uses ~4W at peak. It's performance per watt is quite far ahead than anything in x86 at the moment. Intel AlderLake might help a bit. But will still be behind in pref / watt.
Crunching some numbers, some benchmarks seem to place the M1 as three times faster. Through raw numbers, the M1 seems not much more "performant per watt" than the Pentium Silver - only slightly better. And, for a laptop, the importance is (in general) more on energy efficiency than in speed.
Edit: danieldk rightly noted below that TDP is a "high load consumption estimate". Official data for the "situational" consumptions are a bit harder to find.