Hello, people. So I'm having a bit of a problem I can't sort out. My laptop has been "updated" recently, and it has resulted in the battery life on the kit basically being sliced in half or less on my type of use (i.e., typewriter).
The reason for it is that the processor's cores are being systematically spooled up to a 1,7Ghz level in a sequence, regardless of the actual workload.
I know from some research that something similar has been done with Ryzen chipsets before (ref. AMD's fix for an issue described in pa-400. But I don't think that in this case it is possible to dig in lenovo's firmware-fixes to find a reference to this pa-400 fix in particular.
Or - I need to find out somehow what sort of functions might have been used to achieve this core-hiking, so that I might be able to coinvince lenovo-people to look at what functions in particular might cause it.
I know.. this is obviously Lenovo's problem. But they're just stonewalling, to the point that I sincerely doubt they're actually going to change the behaviour again. I haven't even been able to source previous bioses, or even the launch bios version.
So if anyone can point me in the right direction, or suggest some resources for firmware-kit downloads (I have not been able to do this officially, obviously), or suggest a possible avenue that they might have used to achieve this incredibly weird rotational hiking on the core speeds -- I'd be very grateful.
Note that this type of issue, if it actually doesn't stem from a specific Lenovo-fix, but rather is a "security bulletin" or a "performance concern" implementation (like what is suggested in pa-400) -- actually affects all ryzen kits out there. That if you are building a mini-pc, or have a desktop that you expect should go quiet once it's only used for excel and typewriting, and things of that sort -- this particular "fix" is going to prevent that. You're basically going to increase the ambient level of watt-drain to a fairly high threshold-value, which would actually be the difference on older ryzens similar to increasing the lowest draw to the level of having all cores at "base clock", at the very least (isolated on the cpu-part of the soc, my increase on my laptop kit/6800u is more than 10 times higher than the lowest level I had before the fix).
So I'm hoping that there are either other laptop-users, or mini-pc users, or just "silent desktop" users who might also be interested in this particular problem. And perhaps have some means of finding out what functions might actually have been used.
It's just so incredibly frustrating - I know for a fact that it's a firmware change that did it. But I have no means of actually pursuing it, or even requesting more information from Lenovo about what functions might have been used. You would think, for example, that they would be able to send a request to AMD on my behalf if they actually haven't caused this with any of their (entirely hidden) security bulletin implementations. But no - apparently people in general don't seem to think a laptop drawing twice as much power as normal is a problem.
