I recently got a new laptop, a ThinkPad P14s, as part of a project I undertook at the university. However, despite an advertised 10 hour battery life, I found that it was going from 100% to 0% charge in under an hour. That’s fine in a work-from-home situation, however I’m hoping as the world gradually opens up, I’m keen to become Mr Worldwide 😎, so an hour is not going to be enough for me. I eventually figured out a solution, however there was not clear documentation of this online. This post documents what I found, and how I fixed it.

Update 2024-02

Another factor that appears to influence the thermal profile of the machine is the Nvidia GPU. I had an issue that disabled the Nvidia drivers, and the average temperature over the next few days shot up significantly. Downloading and installing the newest drivers again (from the Nvidia website, signing the kernel modules) reduced the temperature significantly. I hypothesise that without properly correct drivers the GPU is idling at high power draw, which heats up the whole board.

Update 2023-12

Further Linux kernel updates appear to have improved power management for this CPU architecture significantly. Although I cannot say which version(s) introduced the improvement, nor have I got the data to compare the improvement, subjectively I can say that at kernel version 6.1 the battery life is way better.

Update 2022-11-08

Recent updates to components such as the BIOS and the kernel have allowed me to control the CPU and fan pressing Fn + l to set the fan/CPU on energy saving mode (which lowers the noise while also throttling the CPU). This can be reverted by pressing Fn + h, which sets the fan/CPU to performance mode. I will leave my original description of the steps I took prior to this, which may be valuable if you still have issues.

Original post

After some searching, I found a post from u/dathislayer that discussed how the Intel Tigerlake line of CPUs have a system called “dynamic tuning”. Namely it can vary the clock speed of the CPU while it is running, which can save battery life. However, upon checking my own CPU frequency, I saw that it was running at the so-called “Max Turbo” frequency of 4.80 GHz all the time, which explained the battery drain. The thread suggested setting the following variable dev.i915.perf_stream_paranoid=0 (configured via sysctl.d). However, unfortunately this did not seem to have an impact.

Luckily, I now had a likely reason for the battery issue, and was free to explore other solutions myself. I read the Debian documentation about CPU frequency scaling, which mentioned 2 tools: cpupower and cpufrequtils which are used to get information about and control the CPU frequency. After installing these two tools, I found immediately that my battery consumption went down significantly. However, after a few hours of use, I found that some of my activities felt more sluggish, some applications felt slower. Running cpupower frequency-info showed me the issue: my CPU frequency was being set to the lowest possible value.

This led me to investigate what the “governor” is: essentially the rules used to dynamically set the CPU frequency, e.g. to focus more on saving battery, or on getting the best performance. You can read more about governors in the Linux Kernel documentation. However, I found that by default I only had two governors available: performance and powersave. After further investigation, I discovered that this was because my driver was intel_pstate. By changing the driver acpi-cpufreq, I now have the complete set of governors available. I have set the governor to ondemand, and have found that my battery/performance trade-off is working well so far. I set the driver by adding intel_pstate=disable acpi=force to the GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT line of /etc/default/grub, then running sudo update-grub and rebooting. For more details on this, please refer to this post.