[thimabi]

> Perhaps ~4 efficiency cores is simply just enough for the average MBP user's standard compute?

I believe that’s the case. Most times, the performance cores on my M3 Pro laptop remain idle.

What I don’t understand is why battery life isn’t more like that of the MacBook Airs when not using the full power of the SOC. Maybe that’s the downside of having a better display.

[umanwizard]

> Most times, the performance cores on my M3 Pro laptop remain idle.

Curious how you're measuring this. Can you see it in Activity Monitor?

> Maybe that’s the downside of having a better display.

Yes I think so. Display is a huge fraction of power consumption in typical light (browsing/word processing/email) desktop workloads.

[thimabi]

> Curious how you're measuring this. Can you see it in Activity Monitor?

I use an open source app called Stats [1]. It provides a really good overview of the system on the menu bar, and it comes with many customization options.

[1]: https://github.com/exelban/stats

[umanwizard]

Cool, thanks for the tip!

[netruk44]

> Curious how you're measuring this. Can you see it in Activity Monitor?

Yes, processor history in the activity monitor marks out specific cores as Performance and Efficiency.

Example: https://i.redd.it/f87yv7eoqyh91.jpg

[umanwizard]

Wow, I didn't even realize you could double-click the CPU graph on the main screen to open that view.