3 ms·

Even ignoring the "couple mm will add battery life", what about a couple of mm actually allowing the fucking machine to breathe and not thermal throttle? My la

Even ignoring the "couple mm will add battery life", what about a couple of mm actually allowing the fucking machine to breathe and not thermal throttle? My largest complaint with laptops is their performance just cannot match that of a low end desktop, and you're certainly not helping your customers by releasing a machine that (let's face it) is designed to not run at its fullest potential. It's the equivalent of buying a v8, but after you get past 35mph a couple of the cylinders shut off.

dwaite 8y ago
Making a portable device that never thermally throttles means a non-practical thermal system, likely consuming power and generating noise by running 100% all the time. The reality is that the thermal output differs by well over an order of magnitude depending on what you are doing. When a complicated task comes along, the system may: 1. spike to full CPU usage at max power usage (possibly higher than rated TDP) 2. if the work continues, get temporarily throttled while the cooling system catches up 3. settle on a "steady state" thermal performance Since the design of the cooling system is different on a case-by-case basis, the thermal properties are now customizable by the laptop manufacturer to match their system. This can cause issues with certain "stress test" benchmarks which do not take into account the more complex nature of both modern CPUs and cooling solutions. The performance curve from start to stop of a CPU load task no longer looks like a square wave. I assume you were referring to the 2018 MBP with i9 chip (which I own). Initially there was an issue because the thermal and power profile that the machine shipped were not appropriate (and actually in some cases made the i9 machine perform inferior to an i7). They fixed this with a later software update, which AFAIK resolved people's issues. I didn't purchase my machine until after the software update was released, so I never saw the original behavior.

dwaite 8y ago

Making a portable device that never thermally throttles means a non-practical thermal system, likely consuming power and generating noise by running 100% all the time. The reality is that the thermal output differs by well over an order of magnitude depending on what you are doing. When a complicated task comes along, the system may: 1. spike to full CPU usage at max power usage (possibly higher than rated TDP) 2. if the work continues, get temporarily throttled while the cooling system catches up 3. settle on a "steady state" thermal performance Since the design of the cooling system is different on a case-by-case basis, the thermal properties are now customizable by the laptop manufacturer to match their system. This can cause issues with certain "stress test" benchmarks which do not take into account the more complex nature of both modern CPUs and cooling solutions. The performance curve from start to stop of a CPU load task no longer looks like a square wave. I assume you were referring to the 2018 MBP with i9 chip (which I own). Initially there was an issue because the thermal and power profile that the machine shipped were not appropriate (and actually in some cases made the i9 machine perform inferior to an i7). They fixed this with a later software update, which AFAIK resolved people's issues. I didn't purchase my machine until after the software update was released, so I never saw the original behavior.