Comment by adrian_b
1 month ago
You are right about the order of magnitude of the percentages, but the CPUs <10 W are in phones, tablets, small SBCs (single-board computers) and only in a small fraction of laptops and mini-PCs.
The vast majority of laptops and mini-PCs uses more powerful CPUs. While 15 W CPUs were normal many years ago, when Intel launched the "Ultrabook" campaign, in recent years, due to better cooling, most laptops and mini-PCs use 25 W to 30 W CPUs, and a significant fraction of them (bigger than the fraction of the laptops/mini-PCs that uses <=10 W CPUs) uses CPUs with a TDP between 35 W and 65 W.
Lots of laptops have ~30W cpus, but that's peak usage. A typical laptop has a ~50WH battery, and a ~5W screen. If it's getting 5hr battery life, that means the CPU is averaging <5W.
True, but if you are classifying the CPUs by their idle power consumption, then that is completely unrelated to the ISA implemented by the CPU and even the correlation with the power consumed at maximum load is very weak.