Hey Guys, I’m an intel guy but all my research says that AMD is the way to go for battery life and performance. I plan on buying the base model of either. The month or two wait is not an issue for me, so I’m just worried about performance and battery life, or quirks (battery drain etc…). Any suggestions would be helpful.
AMD is more energy efficient (definitely under load, not sure about idle and near idle), but has significantly worse IO, especially for a device with only 4 USB-C ports that are supposed to be as universal as possible. Much of that universality is lost with the AMD variant and there are 3 different types of ports with different amounts of universality/capabilities.
Plus AMD has a history of their firmware and drivers not being quite ready and stable on launch. But you could argue that the post-launch firmware update was already a major step towards stability and it’s a mobile platform with limited modularity, so that there are not tons of different variants that could be untested / unstable and yet to be discovered.
You’ll have to decide whether IO or performance / energy efficiency is more important.
Both Intel and AMD advertise new display output capabilities (DP UHBR10 and faster) for their CPUs, but to my knowledge FW did not implement this in either variant (and I am not sure if it would even be possible, given that no other device so far has claimed support for it), so the IO differences seems to be rooted mostly in amount of display-capable outputs, USB4 ports and display-support on those USB4 ports.
I mean, I would probably almost never connect a display. But in the odd chance I did, like to a tv to share pictures, I’d want it to work. But like, if the IO issues are just 25% slower USB transfer speeds, then I don’t care. I guess I’m not sure what you mean by “worse IO”.