Unless Foundation always uses the current generation CPU, then this complaint is always valid. Or maybe invalid.
Thermals and energy consumption are almost always improving between generations. It's hard for me to think of 13th generation as old. Maybe I'm getting old!
The reason why I brought it up was that Lunar Lake was specifically designed to make an x86 offering that has comparable battery life with chips from Qualcomm and Apple. It's not a standard marginal generational improvement, for light office tasks (the type of use case this laptop is intended for) you get around 17 hours of battery life vs the previous generation's 10 hours (see benchmark results here: https://www.pcworld.com/article/2463714/tested-intels-lunar-... ).
I wanted to understand if any other cpu generations had comparable gains over the previous, but I need to work on an Intel ark scraper. Maybe I'll find some time to post it back here on HN. Thanks for added details
It's not surprising, Meteor Lake and onwards are all TSMC and unlike Intel they still actually know how to manufacture chips. Arc iGPUs are also a massive improvement over Iris.
It's not just a TSMC vs. Intel thing, Lunar Lake gets 7 more hours of battery life than Meteor Lake when doing the same "light office tasks" benchmark.
The numbers I've seen show that the peak power draw is similar to Meteor Lake, but it generally draws ~40% less than Meteor Lake when doing the same task. The SoC only idle power draw figures I've seen are 0.62W for Lunar Lake vs. 2.32W for Meteor Lake.
Thermals and energy consumption are almost always improving between generations. It's hard for me to think of 13th generation as old. Maybe I'm getting old!