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by travisby 1371 days ago
I'm a huge chromebook fan actually -- but my current one is looking a tad unsupported (pixel slate)

I've been considering a framework as a replacement actually!

One of the things I really care about is battery life + sleep performance.

The article mentions:

> .* At the same time, the Framework Laptop Chromebook Edition is our most power efficient product yet with optimizations from Google and Intel that allow for long-lasting battery life.

Can you provide some numbers around the battery life improvements? Sounds exciting! (And are these going to be backported to the normal 12th gen boards, or is it a feature of the unique mainboard/not firmware?)

Can you speak to the OS image as well? Is there any non-upstream drivers that are relied on? I notice lots of chromebooks have drivers that aren't in the regular upstream kernel, but just in the chromiumos source. I'm hoping that I could eventually swap OS' if needed w/o getting a new mainboard, and want to see how viable that is.

Thanks for the hard work, and in advance for the questions!

(P.S. like everyone else, AMD would be exciting if you don't know that :p)

[edit] one of my biggest disappointments in my slate is that it never received vm-in-vm support with the newer kernel. Is /dev/kvm available in the linux container? I _think_ that goes hand in hand with the steam supuport, but not sure

1 comments

Google has fairly strict requirements around power consumption. They have a standard test for 10 hours of active use through common use cases, which we were able to meet. For standby, the requirement is around 14 days. I have to double check where we are on the current software and firmware, but we are close to that number.

We actually did learn some things about the Intel re-timers through this product development that let us come up with ways to improve the behavior on the regular 12th Gen Framework Laptops. We are currently developing a firmware update for that that will improve both active and standby battery life.

> We actually did learn some things about the Intel re-timers through this product development that let us come up with ways to improve the behavior on the regular 12th Gen Framework Laptops. We are currently developing a firmware update for that that will improve both active and standby battery life.

Is this specific to Intel's 12th gen or can it also be ported to the 11th gen? I have an 11th gen Framework and am delighted with everything about the laptop except for battery life. If that could be improved, I would have absolutely no complaints whatsoever about the laptop.

We do have some learnings that would apply back to 11th Gen that are early in development. We also have a beta firmware for DisplayPort Expansion Cards that improves one area of active/standby power consumption, which applies to both 11th Gen and 12th Gen: https://community.frame.work/t/beta-displayport-expansion-ca...
This is awesome news. Excited the collaboration will have some nice side effects.