M4 Pro MBP vs M1 Pro Power Drain

[smirking]

I recently moved from a 16" M1 Pro MBP to a 14" m4 Pro MBP and it seems like the power drain on the M4 Pro is much faster than on the M1 Pro! It's not a case of me pushing the machine and quite frankly, I initially attributed the power drain to me working in Capture One Pro. It turns out that even when I'm barely doing anything, the power seems to be running down at an amazingly fast rate.

It's not an indexing thing. This machine's had plenty of time to index.

I could go all day doing everyday computing on my M1 Pro. I don't think my M4 could do even 6 hours. I suspect there's some software related bugs here, but it's still a bit disconcerting. Has anyone else noticed the same drop in power performance?

 

[smirking]

My Activity Monitor output is really curious. Even in low power mode, some of the performance cores are hitting 100% usage every few seconds and this is after I've quit all programs and I'm not doing anything.

In the Energy tab of Activity Monitor, WindowServer is very active. I'm a heavy user of spaces and it goes through the roof when I swap screen spaces, but even when I just sit there and stare at the screen, it's still very active.

 

[seggy]

If there isn't a setting we missed (and whatever it is it should be set anyway) I'm also seeing far more "spikey" power requirements for the M4 Pro vs M4. With all the dumb stuff unresolved in it, I can't help wondering if it's Sequoia that's the major culprit.

 

[smirking]

With all the dumb stuff unresolved in it, I can't help wondering if it's Sequoia that's the major culprit.

I also wonder if Sequoia is the culprit. I was still on Sonoma on my M1 Pro so when I upgraded to an M4 Pro, I also moved to Sequoia. I avoided upgrading to Sequoia. I just had a feeling that this would be one of those releases I should sit back for a while on given all of Apple's focus on launching new still experimental Apple Intelligence stuff.

FWIW, after I rebooted my M4 Pro, everything's back to normal and I'm back on track to get 10-12 hours if I'm just doing everyday computing and 8-ish hours doing my typical daily work that involves photos and crunching software.

So the M4 isn't more power hungry. It was just that something was wrong. After I rebooted, I stopped seeing performance cores spiking to max levels for no good reason. I also saw the efficiency cores handling nearly all of the load.

I have some thoughts about what may have caused my issues. For one, I turned off the switch that throttles low priority background processes the night before and spent 8 hours backing up my new 2TB drive to a Time Machine network drive. I did turn the throttle back on though so that shouldn't have been the cause of my weird power issues, but it wouldn't be shocking if it remained stuck in max power mode until after a reboot.

 

[throAU]

I recently moved from a 16" M1 Pro MBP to a 14" m4 Pro MBP and it seems like the power drain on the M4 Pro is much faster than on the M1 Pro! It's not a case of me pushing the machine and quite frankly, I initially attributed the power drain to me working in Capture One Pro. It turns out that even when I'm barely doing anything, the power seems to be running down at an amazingly fast rate.

It's not an indexing thing. This machine's had plenty of time to index.

I could go all day doing everyday computing on my M1 Pro. I don't think my M4 could do even 6 hours. I suspect there's some software related bugs here, but it's still a bit disconcerting. Has anyone else noticed the same drop in power performance?

Low power mode on m4 generation will still be faster than m1 at full power with far less power drain.

Pick your poison. Do you want ultimate performance or do you want fast with far less power draw?

This generation you get a far wider range between the two options.

But yes. They are still really fast relative to older machines when on low power.

Re cores running to 100% in activity monitor briefly on low power mode: the percentage is of the current clock speed. On low power mode the clocks are lower. Also, better to run one core at 100% briefly and then sleep the whole cluster than spread the load over more cores or at a slower rate and have to keep the cluster(s) powered up for longer.



Edit all that said: my m4 max gets way better life than my M1 Pro running the same stuff.

Could be some software on your machine doing something weird or maybe did battery? I’d try a clean install. Sucks but…

 

[smirking]

Could be some software on your machine doing something weird or maybe did battery? I’d try a clean install. Sucks but…

It was a software bug that was fixed by a reboot. I'm back to getting 10-12 hours doing everyday computing things and 8-ish hours doing my everyday work.

I have one idea what could have caused it. The day before, I needed to perform a full Time Machine backup of my 2TB drive to my NAS so I disabled throttling of low-priority processes from the command line. It took 8 hours overall, but 12 hours total due to some interruptions caused by accidental disconnects.

When I was done, I turned throttling back on. Either switching throttling back on didn't work until I rebooted or something else went haywire.

I'm not exactly sure what this does:
sysctl debug.lowpri_throttle_enabled=0

But I presume that it might be similar to setting the computer to Max Power.

I was disabling background tasks, quitting anything I could, and force quitting background processes like crazy and it wasn't doing a thing. I basically had my M4 Pro stripped down to its underwear and it was still acting like I was running stress tests on it... but the reboot fixed everything.

 

[seggy]

I also wonder if Sequoia is the culprit. I was still on Sonoma on my M1 Pro so when I upgraded to an M4 Pro, I also moved to Sequoia. I avoided upgrading to Sequoia. I just had a feeling that this would be one of those releases I should sit back for a while on given all of Apple's focus on launching new still experimental Apple Intelligence stuff.

FWIW, after I rebooted my M4 Pro, everything's back to normal and I'm back on track to get 10-12 hours if I'm just doing everyday computing and 8-ish hours doing my typical daily work that involves photos and crunching software.

So the M4 isn't more power hungry. It was just that something was wrong. After I rebooted, I stopped seeing performance cores spiking to max levels for no good reason. I also saw the efficiency cores handling nearly all of the load.

I have some thoughts about what may have caused my issues. For one, I turned off the switch that throttles low priority background processes the night before and spent 8 hours backing up my new 2TB drive to a Time Machine network drive. I did turn the throttle back on though so that shouldn't have been the cause of my weird power issues, but it wouldn't be shocking if it remained stuck in max power mode until after a reboot.

That is possible, in your case it may just be issues associated with that. i haven't done anything like that yet in terms of messing with process priority, but i have both M4 and Pro and the M4 Pro is noticeably more uneven in terms of draw. I'm collating a list of Sequoia woes I need to fix, for me this is one of the minor ones.

 

[PBG4 Dude]

LOL I have that sysctl command saved as a desktop text clipping on every Mac I have, for easy copy/pasting into Terminal when performing backups. Definitely increases CPU usage when low priority is disabled, according to Activity Monitor.

My M4Pro gets (to me) amazing battery life, but I haven’t timed it yet. Just know I can go 1-2 days without charging when doing ‘normal’ stuff.

 

[smirking]

LOL I have that sysctl command saved as a desktop text clipping on every Mac I have, for easy copy/pasting into Terminal when performing backups. Definitely increases CPU usage when low priority is disabled, according to Activity Monitor.

I'm actually suspecting that I had more going on than just that sysctl command possibly getting stuck until a reboot. I can't imagine that MacOS interprets that command as "set the processor just because."

 

[throAU]

LOL I have that sysctl command saved as a desktop text clipping on every Mac I have, for easy copy/pasting into Terminal when performing backups. Definitely increases CPU usage when low priority is disabled, according to Activity Monitor.

My M4Pro gets (to me) amazing battery life, but I haven’t timed it yet. Just know I can go 1-2 days without charging when doing ‘normal’ stuff.

Aside - if you're looking to keep collections of code snippets, command lines, etc. I can highly recommend ""SnippetsLab" on the App Store.

Not my app, not affiliated, etc. but I find it really handy for this sort of thing. I could use Bbedit of course, but I end up with all sorts of files left open in bbedit and snippets lab lets me file them in folders for powershell, bash, etc. pretty nicely.

 

[smirking]

Aside - if you're looking to keep collections of code snippets, command lines, etc. I can highly recommend ""SnippetsLab" on the App Store.

Also check out Clipy (https://clipy-app.com). It's based on the long abandoned Clip Menu. It's a barebones Clipboard history tool with snippet management. It might be one of the simplest utilities I have, but it's one that I can't live without.

I keep all the command line commands that I don't use enough to remember in it and test variables I use all the time like sandbox credit card numbers.

 

[PBG4 Dude]

Aside - if you're looking to keep collections of code snippets, command lines, etc. I can highly recommend ""SnippetsLab" on the App Store.

Not my app, not affiliated, etc. but I find it really handy for this sort of thing. I could use Bbedit of course, but I end up with all sorts of files left open in bbedit and snippets lab lets me file them in folders for powershell, bash, etc. pretty nicely.

Hey thanks for the recommendation! Will check it out!

 

[Fishrrman]

OP wrote:
"after I rebooted my M4 Pro, everything's back to normal and I'm back on track to get 10-12 hours if I'm just doing everyday computing..."

Somehow, I think "the solution" is to be found in this snippet above...