Customers buying Intel laptops in the past few years had to endure their laptop's bad endurance. Intel just could not get its CPUs to be efficient enough without sacrificing the performance.
The worst offender here was probably the Alder Lake generation: The 12th gen Core i CPUs introduced a new hybrid architecture Intel borrowed from ARM, with big P cores and small E cores. "E" stands for "Efficiency", and that made a lot of people hopeful that these laptops would have better battery life. However, it turned out that this "Efficiency" meant "cramming in as much multicore-performance as possible". In practice, Alder Lake offered worse battery life than previous 11th gen Tiger Lake CPUs.
Intel managed to fix this situation with later Raptor Lake and Meteor Lake CPUs, but the battery life was still not up to par compared with the competition. Enter Intel Lunar Lake. The first Intel CPU almost entirely manufacturer by TSMC finally improves the efficiency of the processors, increasing battery life in the process.
A great example to show off Intel's progress (or lack thereof for a few years) is the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon. We recently reviewed the newest Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 13 with Lunar Lake. Since 2021, Lenovo has not changed the battery capacity of the X1 Carbon, keeping it steady at 57 Wh. It also so happens that we have tested each generation with the available 2.8K OLED screen (except for the X1 Carbon Gen 9, which used a 4K IPS panel). This makes it ideal for a battery life and Intel efficiency comparison.
Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 13 21NS0010GE Core Ultra 7 258V, 2880x1800, OLED, 57 Wh | Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon G12 Ultra 7 155H, 2880x1800, OLED, 57 Wh | Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon G11 21HNS54T00 i7-1370P, 2880x1800, OLED, 57 Wh | Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon G10 21CB00DCGE i7-1260P, 2880x1800, OLED, 57 Wh | Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon G9-20XWCTO1WW i7-1165G7, 3840x2400, IPS LED, 57 Wh | |
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Battery Runtime | |||||
WiFi Websurfing | 658 | 466 -29% | 389 -41% | 300 -54% | 442 -33% |
The numbers do not lie: While the Alder Lake equipped X1 Carbon barely lasted five hours in the Wi-Fi test (150 cd/m² screen brightness), the newest X1 Carbon Gen 13 manages almost eleven hours, more than twice that. Our data also clearly demonstrates how Alder Lake (12th Gen Core i) and Raptor Lake (13th Gen Core i) were a step back compared with Tiger Lake (11th Gen Core i) - only the Meteor Lake version (Core Ultra Series 1) X1 Carbon Gen 12 (available from Amazon) finally managed to bring the efficiency up to the levels of Tiger Lake. With Lunar Lake (Core Ultra Series 2), it is finally much improved, which is why we think that the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 13 is the best X1 Carbon yet.