Customers who purchased Intel laptops over the last few years had to deal with poor battery life. The problem stemmed from Intel struggling to make its CPUs efficient without compromising on performance.
The Alder Lake Generation’s Flaws
The Alder Lake series was perhaps the worst in this regard. The 12th gen Core i CPUs brought a new hybrid design that Intel took from ARM, featuring large P cores and smaller E cores. The "E" stands for "Efficiency," raising hopes that these laptops would enjoy improved battery life. Unfortunately, "Efficiency" turned out to mean "maximizing multicore performance." As a result, Alder Lake actually provided less battery life than the previous 11th gen Tiger Lake CPUs.
Progress with Raptor Lake and Meteor Lake
Intel addressed these issues with the subsequent Raptor Lake and Meteor Lake CPUs, but the battery performance still lagged behind competitors. Then came Intel's Lunar Lake. This first CPU mostly produced by TSMC finally enhances processor efficiency, leading to better battery life.
Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon: A Case Study
A great example illustrating Intel's progress—or lack thereof over recent years—is the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon. We recently tested the latest Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 13 featuring Lunar Lake. Since 2021, Lenovo has kept the battery capacity unchanged at 57 Wh. We also evaluated each generation with the available 2.8K OLED display, making it perfect for comparing battery life and Intel's efficiency.
The statistics are revealing: while the Alder Lake variant of the X1 Carbon barely lasted five hours in our Wi-Fi test (at 150 cd/m² brightness), the newest Gen 13 model achieves nearly eleven hours—more than double. Our findings also indicate that Alder Lake (12th Gen Core i) and Raptor Lake (13th Gen Core i) represented a regression compared to Tiger Lake (11th Gen Core i). Only the Meteor Lake version (Core Ultra Series 1) of the X1 Carbon Gen 12 (available on Amazon) finally matched the efficiency levels of Tiger Lake. With Lunar Lake (Core Ultra Series 2), the performance sees a significant boost, which is why we consider the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 13 the best X1 Carbon to date.
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