Intel notebooks, better than AMD when running on battery
Let's make a premise immediately: what we report has been discovered by Intel later some tests carried out internally. At the moment we report only what was declared by the Santa Clara house, but in the editorial office we have two notebooks available, one equipped with Intel Core i7-1185G7 (MSI Prestige 14 Evo) and one with AMD Ryzen 7 4700U (Lenovo Yoga Slim 7). In the coming weeks we will also carry out tests, to actually understand how the processors of the two companies behave in these scenarios.
Intel wanted to bring this comparison to the attention of journalists because, according to some internal studies carried out by Recently, 70% of laptop users work in different rooms in the home, with the laptop almost never plugged into an outlet. In most cases, these users use office productivity software such as the Microsoft Office suite, browse the web with the browser, and enjoy and create multimedia content.
Performance in these scenarios is, according to Intel, the criterion by which one should decide whether to buy a laptop with an Intel or AMD processor. To demonstrate how their solutions best fit these use cases, the company ran tests to measure the real-world performance of ten notebooks, five with Tiger Lake and five with Ryzen 4000U. In the comparison, entire CPU families were included, from Core i3 to Core i7 and Ryzen 3 to Ryzen 7.
The laptops in question were tested with all factory settings, except for brightness, which was set at 200 nit on all models under review. Looking at the benchmark results, it can be seen that on average Ryzen notebooks have longer battery life, but at the cost of lower performance.
For its benchmarks, Intel has used software that can simulate real loads, so as to reflect as much as possible the scenario described above. Among these we find PCMark 10 (test Applications), WebXPRT v3 (browser Edge) and SYSmark 25. Intel has also carried out other tests such as saving a PowerPoint presentation in PDF, importing Excel graphics into Word, converting a Word document to PDF and mail merge with Outlook.
Above you can see the results of the various tests. From the graphics provided by Intel we can see two things: the first is that the performance drops on AMD notebooks when they are not connected to the socket, even in an important way (-38% on PCMark 10, -48% on WebXPRT), unlike what happens on Intel solutions. The second thing is that all AMD processors offer about the same performance, effectively nullifying the differences between Ryzen 3, Ryzen 5 and Ryzen 7.
Read also: Intel Tiger Lake-H beats AMD Ryzen 4000 in Geekbench 5
Intel has tried to understand the reason for this behavior, coming to the conclusion that, when running on battery, Ryzen 4000 mobile processors delay and limit the burst of performance that occurs when connected to the electrical outlet , causing a deterioration in performance. Curiously, this drop is not recorded in Cinebench R20.
In conclusion then Intel claims that laptops with Tiger Lake processors are better, at least in these use cases, as they offer about the same performance both related to the socket that battery powered, unlike what AMD solutions do. As mentioned at the beginning, in the coming weeks we will also carry out tests with the notebooks we have available and we will tell you how they behave in our benchmarks.
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