Linux 4.17 Offers Some Promising Power-Savings Improvements

The performance was about the same in these benchmarks.

But as you can see, even under load, the power consumption is slightly lower... In the x264 multi-threaded video encoding benchmark, the power use was about a half Watt less with Linux 4.17.

With the single-threaded LAME MP3 encoding test, Linux 4.17 continued with slightly lower power use....

In other tests too, the Linux 4.17 continued delivering basically the same results as with the previous kernel releases while being slightly more power efficient.

Here's a look at that battery power usage through a variety of benchmarks. On this system in the tests I ended up running the Linux 4.17 performance was basically the same as Linux 4.15~4.16, but with lower power use. On average it was 0.3~0.4 Watts less and the peak power use was roughly a half-Watt lower. Not as significant as the idle power difference, but still when you are on battery power, every bit counts.