Hi,
now that I also got a Pocket with rk3588 I also did some armchair “benchmarks”. I only tested each scenario twice (to weed out bad systematic errors and i kept the better of both results) and my results are in minutes not seconds. Unless somebody convinces me of the utility of it, I am not planning to perform more thorough tests because your actual runtime will vary wildly depending on how you use the unit, whether you have wifi on and how much you transfer, how much you utilize your SSD, your display brightness, keyboard backlight on or off etc…
I wanted to check the default installation so my test setup involves the latest system image tag sysimage-v5-20250603
loaded on an SSD and using the new default desktop: gnome. The only changes I did to the configuration were setting these things in /etc/UPower/UPower.conf
:
AllowRiskyCriticalPowerAction=true
CriticalPowerAction=Ignore
Without the above, gnome (via upower) will shut down the system when the sysctl thinks that the battery is at 0% which might not necessarily mean it’s really empty. I wanted the system to run until the battery protection boards cut the power and the system switches off hard (it actually reboots and fails to boot because the batteries are flat).
1. Fullscreen YouTube with full display brightness
I played this fireplace video which is the same video that Jeff Geerling used in his review of the classic reform and tried to do the same test: play the video in fullscreen in firefox while connected to the internet via wifi. According to the YouTube interface, the video was displayed in 720p@30. It lasts less long than Esther’s probably because I had my display on full brightness. Runtime: 02:26 h
2. Actually watching a movie
Above test is to replicate a similar setup in the review by Jeff. But personally I would not watch videos via the YouTube web interface. Instead lets check the scenario where you just want to watch a movie in 1080p@60 h264 and to do so you use clapper because it can use the system’s hardware acceleration. Keyboard backlight is off as it would distract from the movie in a dark room. Note, that compared to the previous test the machine lasts longer despite the video quality being better both in resolution as well as in framerate. Runtime: 02:47 h
3. Trying to conserve as much energy as possible during use
I wanted to find out how long I can actually use the Pocket while trying to be as conservative with my energy use as possible. Scenario: I’m on a trip and there are no power plugs in the train but I still want to be a bit productive. So I reduced the display backlight to minimum and turned off the keyboard backlight. Then I opened a terminal and ran htop
to simulate some very light editor workload like writing documentation or reading text files. Runtime: 4:56 h
4. I forgot my Pocket in the pocket
The Pocket cannot (yet) suspend so to not loose my work I put it into my pocket and it can happen that it gets forgotten there. How long will it survive? This test has the screen and keyboard backlight switched off and the gnome desktop is just idling (why is this gnome-shell
process continuously consuming 4% CPU doing nothing??). Runtime: 05:23 h
5. Maximum CPU stress
How long does the battery last if I try to drain it? The stress
utility keeps the system busy (I used stress --cpu 8 --io 4 --vm 2 --vm-bytes 128
no SSD is installed so no --hdd
), display is on full brightness and keyboard backlight is on. Runtime: 02:04 h
6. sway
Okay, who am I kidding, I’m not going to use gnome.
So lets perform test 3 above but with sway instead of gnome (same terminal emulator). Runtime: 4:59
Conclusion
I was surprised to see how flexible the RK3588 is. If you need it, it gives you high performance at the cost of battery lifez. If you don’t need the performance though, you easily get twice the battery runtime.
I want to do a more thorough test comparing the different SoMs against each other in the classic Reform. If you have ideas about specific scenarios you’d like me to test, please write me a PM or reach me via josch@debian.org (don’t hijack this thread which is about RK3588 Pocket battery life), thanks!