I got a Surface laptop with the Snapdragon. 32GB, fastest model.

In general use it feels way faster than my 1 year old Lenovo, which was 2x the price.

It's the the Lenovo one is specifically programmed to only clock up when the load is sustained for longer, whereas the Surface one clocks up much faster.

And still, it lasts 10 hours, and my Lenovo does 1.5 at max.

How much did you pay for the Surface? I just got a Lenovo P14s w/ 64GB and Ryzen 8840HS for around $1100. I haven't used the Surface Pro Snapdragon yet but this laptop screams. I think it mostly comes down to disk performance for me though.

I feel like something's got to be weird with your Lenovo... I have a Lenovo Thinkpad T490 that's a little over 5 years old, use it on battery every day, never replaced the battery, and it still lasts around 3-4 hours.

I don't think so. I have a P16 Gen2 and this thing sucks power like nobody's business. 13950hk and 128gb of RAM. I barely get 1 hour of light programming work. I mostly use it as a desktop though, and I have a separate M2 Mac for traveling.

I believe H and HK (and HS?) are considered portable workstation chips. They draw about 55 watts compared to 15 or 28 watts at max load, and generally run much hotter as they have higher power ceilings. The U (and even lower than that) series are the “typical” laptop chips that give 5-10 hours or so of battery.

Caveat, apparently AMD workstation chips can give good battery. Plus, a down lock/undervolt/power limit will give much nicer battery life on a workstation laptop if you can do it.

Except that the Snapdragon X Elite is actually faster than both AMD and Intel chips on average.

It is faster only for the things that casual users do, which are not computation-intensive.

It is slower for scientific/technical computing or anything else that contains great amounts of operations with either arrays or big numbers.

Even for the things where the Qualcomm CPUs may be faster, their performance per dollar is inferior to the Intel/AMD CPUs.