> might be my Linux setup being inefficient
Given that videos spin up those coolers, there is actually a problem with your GPU setup on Linux, and I expect there'd be an improvement if you managed to fix it.
Another thing is that Chrome on Linux tends to consume exorbitant amount of power with all the background processes, inefficient rendering and disk IO, so updating it to one of the latest versions and enabling "memory saving" might help a lot.
Switching to another scheduler, reducing interrupt rate etc. probably help too.
Linux on my current laptop reduced battery time x12 compared to Windows, and a bunch of optimizations like that managed to improve the situation to something like x6, i.e. it's still very bad.
> Is x86 just not able to keep up with the ARM architecture?
Yes and no. x86 is inherently inefficient, and most of the progress over last two decades was about offloading computations to some more advanced and efficient coprocessors. That's how we got GPUs, DMA on M.2 and Ethernet controllers.
That said, it's unlikely that x86 specifically is what wastes your battery. I would rather blame Linux, suspect its CPU frequency/power drivers are misbehaving on some CPUs, and unfortunately have no idea how to fix it.
> x86 is inherently inefficient
Nothing in x86 prohibits you from an implementation less efficient than what you could do with ARM instead.
x86 and ARM have historically served very different markets. I think the pattern of efficiency differences of past implementations is better explained by market forces rather than ISA specifics.
x12 and x6 do not seem plausible. Something is very wrong.
These figures are very plausible. Most Linux distros are terribly inefficient by default.
Linux can actually meet or even exceed Window's power efficiently, at least at some tasks, but it takes a lot of work to get there. I'd start with powertop and TLP.
As usual, the Arch wiki is a good place to find more information: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Power_management
Those numbers would imply <1h runtime, or a >50W consumption at idle (for typical battery capacities). That's insane.
I've used Linux laptops since ~2007, and am well aware of the issues. 12x is well beyond normal.
At least on Thinkpads over the years, I've never seen anything remotely close to that either. I've had my Thinkpad x260 power draw down to 2.5 watts at idle, and around 4 or 5 watts with a browser and a few terminals open. That was back in 2018! With the hot-swappable battery on the back, I could go for 24 hours of active use without concern.
I get below 5W at idle (ff and emacs open, screen at indoor brightness, wifi on) on my gen11 framework. Going from 8 to 5 required some tinkering.
I don't think I ever saw 50W at all, even under load; they probably run an Ultra U1xxH, permanently turbo-boosted.
For some reason. Given the level of tinkering (with schedulers and interrupt frequencies), it's likely self-imposed at this point, but you never know.
My CPU is at over 5GHz, 1% load and 70C at the moment. That's in a "power-saving mode".
If nothing would be wrong, it'd be at something like 1.5GHz with most of the cores unpowered.
Something is wrong with power governor then. I have an opposite experience, was able to tune Linux on a Core Ultra 155H laptop so it works longer than Windows one. Needed to use kernel 6.11+ and TLP [0] with pretty aggressive energy saving settings. Also played a bit with Intel LPMD [1] but did not notice much improvement.
[0] https://github.com/linrunner/TLP
[1] https://github.com/intel/intel-lpmd
What is the laptop, and what's it doing?
What p-state driver are you using?