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A comment on M1 Pro First Impressions: Core Management and CPU Performance. Parent comment

Re:M1 Pro First Impressions: Core Management and CPU Perform... by lordnacho on Friday November 05, 2021 @02:07AM (#29115975)
Got mine last week and not only is it faster, the power usage is crazy good. I took it to town for the first time yesterday, thought I'd do some coding between meetings for a few hours. Battery is still over 90%. I actually don't know what the thing sounds like with fans on, because it hasn't happened yet. My old machine from 2019 would have been down to half power at least, and the fans used to come on with just two monitors plugged in and not much workload.
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Re:M1 Pro First Impressions: Core Management and CPU Perform... by iknowstuff on Friday November 05, 2021 @02:37AM (#29116101)
I think I'm missing out as mine drops by a very pedestrian 10% an hour. WindowServer keeps using a cool 4% of the CPU at all times, even when nothing is running.
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Re:M1 Pro First Impressions: Core Management and CPU Perform... by spacelamb on Friday November 05, 2021 @10:14AM (#29119548)
I had it even worse only 5 hours of battery life in my first week of usage. It turned out OneDrive had a bug with syncing; after reinstalling (then keeping it on overnight for the sync to finish), the battery jumped to ~8-10 hours with fairly heavy usage (Parallels + Safari, though with syncing paused), which is near your current level. The Energy tab of the Activity Monitor helped me identify OneDrive as the power suck.
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Re:M1 Pro First Impressions: Core Management and CPU Perform... by GhettoComputers on Friday November 05, 2021 @05:36AM (#29117099)
The task manager (called activity monitor) has a power usage section. It might be syncing or if you had Firefox on it uses way more than safari.
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Re:M1 Pro First Impressions: Core Management and CPU Perform... by saagarjha on Friday November 05, 2021 @08:10AM (#29118085)
How are you measuring CPU usage? Presumably whatever monitoring tool you're looking at needs to redraw itself, and that's going to bring in WindowServer…

(FWIW, my WindowServer usage is generally around 3-8% when idling and I am losing about 6% an hour at the moment.)

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Re:M1 Pro First Impressions: Core Management and CPU Perform... by grumpyprole on Friday November 05, 2021 @02:56AM (#29116169)
Perhaps you have some rogue process that is causing windows server to run at 4%?
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Re:M1 Pro First Impressions: Core Management and CPU Perform... by mmargerum on Friday November 05, 2021 @06:00AM (#29117248)
Visual studio code haha
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Re:M1 Pro First Impressions: Core Management and CPU Perform... by harshitaneja on Friday November 05, 2021 @09:41AM (#29119071)
I am not 2021 macbook pro's yet but on 2020 M1 VS Code doesn't have higher than usual impact on battery. Atleast I, with 7-8 active vscode windows throughout the day, couldn't notice.
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Re:M1 Pro First Impressions: Core Management and CPU Perform... by merrywhether on Friday November 05, 2021 @06:06AM (#29117273)
Any chance you have Dropbox running? They are very slow to native M1 support and otherwise their app manages to really kill battery life.
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Re:M1 Pro First Impressions: Core Management and CPU Perform... by vmception on Friday November 05, 2021 @08:08AM (#29118069)
I’m actually debating if I even want to do a backup and restore because of this. I don’t want my chimera of an environment.

I think I want to just use this machine fresh and just move a few files over as needed.

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Re:M1 Pro First Impressions: Core Management and CPU Perform... by jb1991 on Friday November 05, 2021 @08:10AM (#29118091)
Any background process running through Rosetta, like dropbox, or maybe your Windows server, will eat up tons of battery if they’re not running native.
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Re:M1 Pro First Impressions: Core Management and CPU Perform... by codeisawesome on Friday November 05, 2021 @07:32AM (#29117792)
I’ve wondered for a while if the fans coming on due to dual monitors is a software / driver issue that could be fixed by a patch. It would save me from buying a new machine right now.
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Re:M1 Pro First Impressions: Core Management and CPU Perform... by zuhsetaqi on Friday November 05, 2021 @07:57AM (#29117980)
It’s because as soon as you plug in an external monitor, the dedicated GPU is used for the output and is responsible for the added heat
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Re:M1 Pro First Impressions: Core Management and CPU Perform... by sudhirj on Friday November 05, 2021 @08:24AM (#29118197)
That part isn't a bug, though. It needs the dedicated GPU to push all those pixels, the native screen is already pretty dense.

There was a bug where something would infinite loop on a non-standard resolution, think that was fixed.

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Re:M1 Pro First Impressions: Core Management and CPU Perform... by throwntoday on Friday November 05, 2021 @05:02AM (#29116922)
Same here, spent two hours programming on the train and it went down by about two percent.

So glad I went with the spec I did, all the power I need with room to grow.

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