Lenovo ThinkPad Z16 again shows the potential of the Ryzen 6000

Until now, 2022 hasn't been a very easy year in the laptop market. Even though Intel Alder Lake has brought some large performance increases, it paid for it with a fairly short battery life, which in some cases is even lower than that of the Tiger Lake predecessor generation.

The only real hope on the horizon are the processors from AMD. Already with the Ryzen 4000, AMD grabbed the performance crown from Intel in the laptop segment to a large extent. And now this: the AMD Ryzen 6000 also appears to be more efficient than Alder Lake. A few years ago, it was hardly imaginable that the AMD CPUs could achieve a better battery life than the Intel chips.

A practical example is the Lenovo ThinkPad Z16 (available from Amazon, affiliate link), which we recently tested extensively. The ThinkPad Z16 uses processors of the "H" series, which are processors designed for a high performance and also have a high power consumption. Typically, such CPUs often have a rather bad battery life compared to power saving chips.

What makes things more difficult in the ThinkPad Z16 is that with 72 Watthours, the battery is anything but large. While this sounds like a recipe for a bad battery life, the ThinkPad still lasted for almost 10 hours in our WiFi test. Of course, we should also mention that Lenovo uses a power-saving WUXGA-Display with a 1,920 x 1,200 pixel resolution. But still, with such a small battery capacity, this is a good battery runtime for a laptop with the H series chip.

If Lenovo would choose to use a slightly larger battery in the next model of the Z series, the Z16 could become a real endurance champion, while still offering a very good performance at the same time. Our verdict: If anybody can currently compete with Apple's M series, it is more likely AMD than Intel.