My T440 does not have a discrete GPU.

It's basically a T440s without the touchpad. But it's got an i7, of that matters.

As an i7, is it quad core? I had a T440p with i7-4700MQ and it had terrible power consumption compared to prior and later Thinkpads I have experienced.

What I saw in powertop was that it never got into the better "package" power states. The cores could all be spending 90%+ of the time in C7 but the package as a whole was in C2 or worse. I never found a way to fix this.

Mine had the NVIDIA GPU as well as Intel iGPU, and I primarily used it with the iGPU. The NVIDIA was of the sort that was not connected to a physical output, so it supposedly could be powered down when not being used. I had no way to truly verify this, of course.

Nah, just a dual-core i7 @ 2.1 GHz. I got that laptop 2nd hand, so that was it.

I don't get into the bios very often so I might be wrong, but I don't recall seeing any indication of an nvidia gpu in mine. I'll look better!

On my T440p, the Intel and NVIDIA GPUs would show up via 'lspci'. I don't recall whether there were any BIOS options other than internal vs external display during POST/boot.