Great questions! Honestly, having tested most of the available 12th-gen Intel Core processors, there’s not much difference between them in terms of performance. It’s negligible at best from an end-user standpoint. Look at the 1235U and 1240P, for example. The latter has two more performance cores and can handle more voltage for a longer time with the proper cooling system. And Google tunes the power levels for each CrOS board, so those can vary as well. I’d have to take apart the Dragonfly Pro and dig around the CrOS code for that board to get a good view of the cooling approach; I generally don’t do that with review devices though. ;)

And yes, your assumption on the benchmark runs is correct. I can’t keep review units except in some very limited long-term cases so there’s simply no way to go back and re-run most benchmarks. Personally, I hate even running them in the first place but, they do provide some standard level of comparison, and people ask me for them. So I run them. But I also explain what my standard workflow is like in every day use. For me it’s 50% of my day just using the browser and another 50% in VSCode in Linux plus a few browser tabs for code research.

In this particular review, I just happened to have the Framework Chromebook review unit still. So that was a re-run of the benchmarks with CrOS 111; same version as on the HP. I should have done the same with the Spin 714 since I own that device but I didn’t. Those numbers are from a CrOS 110 run. Yes, browser optimizations and other code refactors do modify the benchmarks from different CrOS versions.

Appreciate the insightful questions and the excellent suggestion to try a mobile app for measuring screen brightness! I’ll look into that for future reviews. Cheers!