Is there anything else we can do besides using PPD (Power-Profiles-Daemon) and the other obvious stuff (using sensible screen brightness and speaker volume settings, disabling bluetooth when not in use, etc)? It’s not very good. Framework AMD battery life does seem to be much better on Windows 11 from the reviews and stuff I’ve read, but I’d prefer to stay on a Linux distro if possible. With my 7640u, I only seem to be getting 3-4 hours of battery life on average, maybe 5 at most if I keep to the most basic of basic tasks. For example though, if I open a video player of any kind, such as youtube or twitch, my battery life just starts to absolutely tank.
What could be the issue here? I have a really hard time believing the CPU is actually this inefficient, because that belief goes against most every AMD Framework review I’ve read, as well as AMD’s reputation for having created very efficient laptop CPUs for years now. Is it a lack of finely-optimized driver support since the Zen 4 architecture is still such a new platform? Or maybe something else?
Other than hardware supported video and graphics, I recommend setting powersave governor and decreasing max frequency. You can use the cpufreq extension to do this. If it is not supported then use cpupower. Even if you set max freq to 2 GHz, the system will be still as snappy and you will not loose anything in performance unless you are gaming.
Please go read the forums and do some research. I suggest starting here: https://community.frame.work/t/tracking-ppd-v-tlp-for-amd-ryzen-7040/39423
Numerous threads on this topic already including on this subreddit. Net net is you won’t get battery life on linux equivalent to windows unless you are willing to do some tweaking.