M1 Pro Battery - Binned vs Unbinned?

[ArkSingularity]

Hi all,

I plan on purchasing a 14" Macbook Pro fairly soon, and I'm curious about battery life differences between the unbinned (8 +2) and the binned ( 6+ 2) models. Of course the unbinned models will consume more power during heavier workloads as they have more performance cores to work with. But I've heard some conflicting reports about the battery life differences during lighter workloads (web browsing, etc), and am curious about how heavily the extra CPU/GPU cores impact the battery life in such workloads.

If the differences are fairly small, it makes sense for me to go ahead and purchase the unbinned model (It's only $300 extra and I could probably use the extra CPU performance during XCode builds). But I use my computer fairly often on the go, and I don't want my battery life to suffer too much during lighter workloads either.

From owners of 14" MacBook Pros (binned or unbinned), how has your experience been in terms of battery life? Do you consider the unbinned M1 Pro to be a worthy upgrade?

Many thanks in advance!

 

[mr_roboto]

One behavior people have observed in M1 Pro/Max/Ultra is that macOS tries to use only one cluster of four performance cores whenever it possibly can. This seems to be due to Apple implementing power gating with cluster granularity - if a cluster is completely unused, it can be depowered to some extent.

In the binned Pro, I expect they disable one performance core in each cluster of 4. That means any load which demands four performance cores will have to light up both clusters, not just one. So there should actually be cases where a full 8+2 core Pro has better battery life than the binned 6+2 version.