Intel boasts battery performance superiority over AMD in Intel tests

Intel has taken quite a beating this year, from AMD's unwavering onslaught to the damning benchmarks of the Apple Silicon M1. The launch of its 11th-gen Tiger Lake processors for laptops has seemingly been pushed to the sidelines as a consequence and it is looking for ways to get back into the spotlight. What better way to do that than by calling out its eternal rival AMD over the latter's battery performance and, sure enough, the benchmarks ran by Intel show it having the upper hand in that particular use case.

Intel has traditionally dominated the desktop market where towering computers had less concern about power draw and thermal management. These days, however, laptops dominate the market, and battery life and heat dissipation have become just as or even more important than raw performance. Unfortunately for Intel, these have been areas where its mobile processors have not delivered to users' satisfaction.

In its latest marketing push, Intel addresses at least one of those concerns, specifically the performance of its new Tiger Lake processors based on its Evo platform when the laptop is running solely on battery power. It pits its 11th-gen processors with laptops running on AMD's Ryzen 4000 series to see which of the two sets squeezes the most out of battery power. Considering who's running the tests and presenting the results, the outcome is unsurprising.

Although it concedes that AMD's chips score better in battery life benchmarks, Intel also points out its own CPUs' better and more consistent output when it comes to actual data and number crunching. It also takes note of a rather odd behavior from AMD's processors where the CPUs delay burst and responsiveness for about 10 seconds. It also unsurprisingly calls out the inconsistency of the results from Cinebench, its least favorite suite.

Battery performance is, of course, just a single part of the picture and Intel has reportedly forbidden press from testing and talking about battery life, that other area where its chips have been notoriously weak. Intel has also so far remained silent on benchmark comparisons with Apple's shiny new ARM-based M1 but it is probably choosing its battles where it has a slight chance of succeeding.