[vient]

> building a CPU that doesn't guzzle battery

It may be the software problem as well. On Windows I regularly need to find which new app started to eat battery like crazy. Usually it ends up being something third-party related to hardware, like Alienware app constantly making WMI requests (high CPU usage of svchost.exe hosting a WMI provider, disabling Alienware service helped), Intel Killer Wi-Fi software doing something when I did not even know it was installed on my PC (disabling all related services helped), Dell apps doing something, MSI apps doing something... you get the idea.

It seems like a class of problems which you simply can't have on macOS because of closed ecosystem.

Without all this stuff my Intel 155H works pretty decently, although I'm sure it is far away from M-series in terms of performance.

[illusive4080]

The Mac ecosystem isn’t as closed as you’re alluding to. You can easily download unsigned binaries and run them. Furthermore, if you’re looking for a battery hog, look no further than Microsoft Defender, Jamf Protect, and Elasticbeat. All 3 of those are forcibly installed on my work laptop and guzzle up CPU and battery.

[swiftcoder]

> You can easily download unsigned binaries and run them

It's definitely becoming less easy over time. First you had to click approve in a dialog box, then you had to right-click -> open -> approve, now you have to attempt (and fail) to run the app -> then go into System Settings -> Security -> Approve.

I wanted to install a 3rd party kernel extension recently, and I had to reboot into the safety partition, and disable some portion of system integrity protection.

I don't think we're all that far from MacOS being as locked-down as iOS on the software installation front...

[olyjohn]

Yep, they will lock all that down. It's been coming for years. Tech companies have learned to do their anti-consumer work slowly and progressively over time instead of dropping it all at once. The whole frog in boiling water thing...

Microsoft is working towards this too. They wish so bad that they were Apple.

[vient]

> You can easily download unsigned binaries and run them

Of course, but I assume you don't really need to install third-party apps to control hardware. In my case Alienware and Dell bloat came from me setting up an Alienware monitor. MSI bloat came from setting up MSI GPU. Intel Killer stuff just got automatically installed by Windows Update, it seems.

> Microsoft Defender

This one I immediately disable after Windows installation so no problems here :)

On work we get CrowdStrike Falcon, it seems pretty tame for now. Guess it depends on IT-controlled scan settings though.

[illusive4080]

Re: Microsoft Defender, I’m actually talking about defender on macOS. It is a multi platform product. I hear infosec is pretty happy with it. Me? It uses 100% CPU even when I’m doing nothing. I’m not happy.

[eppsilon]

Try some of the steps on this page [1]. In particular, enabling real-time protection stats and then adding exclusions for the processes causing the most file scans can help.

1. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/defender-endpoint/mac-supp...

[illusive4080]

I’m not in control, I’m just a user, but thanks. I have talked to the owners on occasion and plan to keep bringing it up so they can investigate.

[kalleboo]

What's mad is that you would have thought that Microsoft would use the Surface devices to show hardware manufacturers what could be done if you put some effort in, but I've heard so many horror stories from Surface owners about driver issues

[cosmic_cheese]

Windows doesn't do it any favors, for sure. Running Linux with with every tweak under the sun for better life still leaves a large gap between x86 laptops and MacBooks, however, and while there's probably some low hanging optimization to be taken advantage of there I think the real problem is that x86 CPUs just can't idle as low as M-series can, which is exacerbated by the CPU not being able to finish up its work and reach idle as quickly.

[vient]

I wonder if Windows and Linux just can't yet work on heterogeneous CPUs as well as macOS does. Intel chose an interesting direction here, going straight from one to three kinds of cores in one chip. I almost never see LPE cores being used on Windows, and on Linux you have obscure soft like Intel LPMD which I tried but was not able to notice any battery life improvements.

[cosmic_cheese]

I'm a bit out of my depths here, but I believe a significant contributing factor is how early Apple made multi-CPU Macs available, with the earliest being the summer 2000 revision of PowerMac G4 tower (dual 500Mhz PPC G4s), pre-dating the release of OS X. They made it easier for devs to take advantage of those cores in OS X, because this yielded performance boosts that were difficult to match in the x86 world, which was still heavily single-CPU.

Because the OS and apps running on it were already taking advantage of multithreading, making them efficiency core friendly was easy since devs only had to mark already-encapsulated tasks as eligible for running on efficiency cores, so adoption was quick and deep.

Meanwhile on Windows there are still piles of programs that have yet to enter the Core 2 Duo era, let alone advance any further.

[hamburglar]

> Apple made multi-CPU Macs available, with the earliest being the summer 2000 revision of PowerMac G4 tower

Earlier. I did some multiprocessing work on an SMP PowerPC Mac in 1997.

[nxobject]

Would this have been with MacOS 7’s Multiprocessing Services? I managed to play with an SMP Mac clone (DayStar Genesis MP), but all I really could do in the end is use some plugins for Photoshop.

[hamburglar]

That does not ring a bell. I believe it was macOS 8 or 9.