Benchmarks: Power Draw and Battery Life
The video-encoding power-draw is interesting insofar as the chip doesn't throttle before the benchmark ends. In other long-load applications we do see that throttling in evidence. For example, three minutes into a big Blender test the power consumption drops from 75W to 55W as the chip begins to throttle down to an all-core 3.17GHz.
AMD made a huge deal about pushing the performance envelope and ensuring that battery life was improved over previous generations. As AMD's Joe Macri opined at a recent tech day, 'doing nothing well is extremely difficult'.
The G14 does a sterling job in our standard video battery-rundown test, no doubt helped by having an FHD screen.
We've also recently moved on to using PCMark 10's baked-in tests. The first two instances are as impressive as the multi-thread performance; getting over 11 hours on each on a high-performance laptop is simply excellent.