5 ms·

It seems to me that cooling is the ball that has been dropped on the new MBA. I haven’t seen one opened up yet but the heatsink design from last time (2018/2019

by 0x202020 7y ago

It seems to me that cooling is the ball that has been dropped on the new MBA. I haven’t seen one opened up yet but the heatsink design from last time (2018/2019) didn’t use a heat pipe over the CPU, it just kinda forced air to be drawn over it. From this video: https://youtu.be/hB1aP2OnUJA https://youtu.be/hB1aP2OnUJA we can see it quickly gets to 100c and stays there despite ramping the fan up. So while a quad core that can turbo up to 3.5/3.8ghz sounds awesome, for heavy sustained performance it looks like it’s definitely going to be clocking down to 1.5ghz or so. This isn’t a surprise to me but I think some people just see 3.5/3.8 quad core and think this is going to be right on the heels of the MBP 13

unlinked_dll 7y ago
Apple has always been more content with letting CPUs throttle themselves rather than cooling them properly or using processors that can't be effectively cooler in their physical design. That said compared to other notebooks, MacBooks in similar tiers tend to benchmark quite well regardless of the thermal throttling.
- unvs 7y ago
  I bought the MBP 16” and when I work with an external monitor it’s like having a hair dryer on. I wish I could just go back to a desktop machine again.
  - mvid 7y ago
    It might be worth looking into an egpu if you mostly notice it on an external monitor
  - zten 7y ago
    External monitors force the use of higher-power discrete graphics. See an adjacent comment about eGPU if you want to control this better. Edit: admittedly, this is a bit like returning to a desktop...
    - unvs 7y ago
      I’d be fine with having an eGPU at the office actually. That’s where the noise gets most out of hand and annoys my coworkers. It’s just a bummer to sink even more money into this machine.
  - teruakohatu 7y ago
    The concensus seems to be this is a GPU related driver or OS bug. Trying changing resolutions or scaling or refresh rate. 2K moniter are supposedly worse than others. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22265235 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22265235 It is a joke that a high end machine has such a glaring issue. Then again, Apple got away from selling terrible terrible keyboards that were not easily replaceable for years.
    - unvs 7y ago
      Interesting! Thanks for the link. Not one of my coworkers is getting the 16 after hearing how noisy it is, and they ALL were planning on upgrading. Let’s hope a future software update might improve it.
  - indemnity 7y ago
    Why not both? For 60% of the cost of my MBP 16, I built a liquid cooled Ryzen 9 3900Z beast with 64GB of fast RAM, 1TB NVME SSD, RTX 2080 GPU, driving two 4k displays. I run nixOS on it, my MBP only sees the light of day for things that absolutely require macOS, or when I’m out and about. For normal, mostly stationary dev (Go, Rust), the desktop is miles better.
    - jimbob45 7y ago
      It’s been forgotten that PC parts are commodities.
  - asenna 7y ago
    I have the exact same issue on my 16". So much so that I've started preferring using my much smaller iPad as the second screen using the sidecar feature instead of my main 4k monitor. Although I love everything else about the MBP 16, this issue drives me crazy.
- MonaroVXR 7y ago
  > Apple has always been more content with letting CPUs throttle themselves rather than cooling them properly or using processors that can't be effectively cooler in their physical design. Why would you do that?
  - 0x202020 7y ago
    To me it seems to be more so that Apple designs for Intels listed TDP and that’s it. The CPUs in the MBA are 9/10w and that is what it can handle sustained and staying slightly above base clock so not technically thermal throttling. Most of the time iirc Intel doesn’t list per core boost only the highest possible boost. So for example the CPU is rated at 1.1ghz base and up to 3.5ghz boost. In the thermal throttling video we see it hold steady at ~10w and ~1.5ghz sustained. As far as Intel/Apple is concerned this isn’t thermal throttling because it is still higher than the base clock. Previously they would list all core boost clock and I think if it fell below that it would technically be thermal throttling

unlinked_dll 7y ago

Apple has always been more content with letting CPUs throttle themselves rather than cooling them properly or using processors that can't be effectively cooler in their physical design. That said compared to other notebooks, MacBooks in similar tiers tend to benchmark quite well regardless of the thermal throttling.

unvs 7y ago
I bought the MBP 16” and when I work with an external monitor it’s like having a hair dryer on. I wish I could just go back to a desktop machine again.
- mvid 7y ago
  It might be worth looking into an egpu if you mostly notice it on an external monitor
- zten 7y ago
  External monitors force the use of higher-power discrete graphics. See an adjacent comment about eGPU if you want to control this better. Edit: admittedly, this is a bit like returning to a desktop...
  - unvs 7y ago
    I’d be fine with having an eGPU at the office actually. That’s where the noise gets most out of hand and annoys my coworkers. It’s just a bummer to sink even more money into this machine.
- teruakohatu 7y ago
  The concensus seems to be this is a GPU related driver or OS bug. Trying changing resolutions or scaling or refresh rate. 2K moniter are supposedly worse than others. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22265235 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22265235 It is a joke that a high end machine has such a glaring issue. Then again, Apple got away from selling terrible terrible keyboards that were not easily replaceable for years.
  - unvs 7y ago
    Interesting! Thanks for the link. Not one of my coworkers is getting the 16 after hearing how noisy it is, and they ALL were planning on upgrading. Let’s hope a future software update might improve it.
- indemnity 7y ago
  Why not both? For 60% of the cost of my MBP 16, I built a liquid cooled Ryzen 9 3900Z beast with 64GB of fast RAM, 1TB NVME SSD, RTX 2080 GPU, driving two 4k displays. I run nixOS on it, my MBP only sees the light of day for things that absolutely require macOS, or when I’m out and about. For normal, mostly stationary dev (Go, Rust), the desktop is miles better.
  - jimbob45 7y ago
    It’s been forgotten that PC parts are commodities.
- asenna 7y ago
  I have the exact same issue on my 16". So much so that I've started preferring using my much smaller iPad as the second screen using the sidecar feature instead of my main 4k monitor. Although I love everything else about the MBP 16, this issue drives me crazy.
MonaroVXR 7y ago
> Apple has always been more content with letting CPUs throttle themselves rather than cooling them properly or using processors that can't be effectively cooler in their physical design. Why would you do that?
- 0x202020 7y ago
  To me it seems to be more so that Apple designs for Intels listed TDP and that’s it. The CPUs in the MBA are 9/10w and that is what it can handle sustained and staying slightly above base clock so not technically thermal throttling. Most of the time iirc Intel doesn’t list per core boost only the highest possible boost. So for example the CPU is rated at 1.1ghz base and up to 3.5ghz boost. In the thermal throttling video we see it hold steady at ~10w and ~1.5ghz sustained. As far as Intel/Apple is concerned this isn’t thermal throttling because it is still higher than the base clock. Previously they would list all core boost clock and I think if it fell below that it would technically be thermal throttling