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I went from saying, "if only they had an AMD" to getting a different machine in ARM and now im saying "if only they had ARM". I never realized how much heat, v

I went from saying, "if only they had an AMD" to getting a different machine in ARM and now im saying "if only they had ARM". I never realized how much heat, vibration, air blowers negatively affected me before. A framework laptop with some type of ARM or ARM-like cpu could do a lot with the space savings on cooling.

devwastaken 4y ago
Apples M1 only worked because everything is in one chip. Very different from the goals of framework. There aren't any vendors offering M1 competitors either.
- masklinn 4y ago
  > Apples M1 only worked because everything is in one chip. That’s not true in any way?
  - 3OCSzk 4y ago
    Could you elaborate why it isn't the case?
    - Nursie 4y ago
      They may be referring to the early rumours/misapprehension that the RAM was on-die and part of the SOC as well. This isn't true AFAICT.
    - masklinn 4y ago
      Because there’s no evidence for the claim, and the evidence is mostly “Apple has created a huge and complex chip”? And what does “Everything is in one chip” even mean? Because the memory certainly isn’t, it’s soldered on the package but it’s not part of the package, it just doesn’t take additional room on the main board. And there are a bunch of other chips on the mainboard Finally, it’s pretty much just following mobile / phone chip SoC design, so any other manufacturer could do the same, if they wanted to create a giant and expensive SOC. And I want to be really clear on the “giant and expensive” part: the M1 family is the sort of scale you usually see on giant workstation or server chips, the M1 Pro has 33.7 billion transistors, that’s more than a Threadripper 5995WX, a $6500 64 cores CPU. The M1 is just short of the 5950X’s transistor count (16 billions to 19.2), the M2 is above (~20).
      - audunw 4y ago
        > And what does “Everything is in one chip” even mean? I guess he's mainly thinking of GPU, which isn't unique. But there's not that many SoCs with that amount of power in one SoC. So it's close to competing with alternatives with discrete GPUs, which does increase power consumption. I believe it has integrated Flash controller too, which is very unique for a laptop/desktop chip, no? > Because the memory certainly isn’t, it’s soldered on the package but it’s not part of the package, it just doesn’t take additional room on the main board. And there are a bunch of other chips on the mainboard It's on the package so it can be as close to the SoC as possible. That decreases the capacitance of the traces, which decreases power consumption. It's not stacked on top of the SoC, which might have been even better (but harder to cool), but it's close. > Finally, it’s pretty much just following mobile / phone chip SoC design, so any other manufacturer could do the same, if they wanted to create a giant and expensive SOC. Uh, yeah, anyone could copy the M1 for a laptop/desktop product. But they haven't exactly done that yet have they? That's kind of the point? > the M1 family is the sort of scale you usually see on giant workstation or server chips Yeah, which again, almost never packs the kind of functionality Apple does into the M1. With that many transistors, on such an advanced process, you're going to have a lot of leakage currents, so Apple must have put an impressive amount of work into power management. I mean, it's not just about being an SoC with lots of things packed within the chip or extremely close to the cheap (memory). No. It's apparent that they've focused on across the entire design process. Even the choice of ARM factors into that (fewer transistors needed for instruction decoding). But I wouldn't say the original comment is completely wrong.
- mastax 4y ago
  AMD's laptop CPUs are also "everything in one chip." Intel still has a separate chipset die on the package as far as I can tell.
  - rowanG077 4y ago
    This is not true. AMD CPUs do not include NVME controllers for example. There probably are more things AMD does not do on the CPU itself.
    - paulmd 4y ago
      [citation needed] Cezanne SOC topology: https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/ix6FrojFD7anKypadF2vKM.jpg https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/ix6FrojFD7anKypadF2vKM.jpg Rembrandt SOC topology: https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/8wnuFCokmeHjESuSbzYWMJ.jpg https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/8wnuFCokmeHjESuSbzYWMJ.jpg Even on the desktop processors, there are onboard lanes dedicated to the NVMe itself, and the entire processor (including NVMe) is capable of booting without a supporting chipset at all - the "X300 chipset" is actually not a chipset at all, it is just using the SOC itself without an external chipset, and you do not lose NVMe functionality. Not sure if you are using some really weird meaning of "NVMe controller" that doesn't match what anyone else means?
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
      - rowanG077 4y ago
        I meant the controller that manages the NAND cells, I assumed it would be called NVMe controller. Essentially the IC that the "NVMe controller" in your image talks to.
        paulmd 4y ago
        That would normally be called a "flash controller" and yeah, of course that lives on the SSD. (unless it doesn't - eMMC doesn't normally have a flash controller and you just do direct writes to the flash cells... as do some IOFusion PCIe cards that are just flash directly attached to PCIe with no controller. Sometimes that functionality is just software-based. Flash cards (eg microSD) usually also do not have a flash controller directly either.) Anyway, it's true though that Apple does push the flash controller functionality into the SOC while AMD does not, Apple implements their SSD in a non-standard fashion, that's why it's not compatible with off-the-shelf drives. The flash is just flash on a board, I don't even think it's NVMe compatible at all either. So if you want to be maximally pedantic... neither does Apple implement onboard NVMe controllers, just flash controllers ;)
wingmanjd 4y ago
Is there any other ARM processors in Apple's M1 class of performance? I haven't kept up with progress on the CPU front.
- specto 4y ago
  Unfortunately, not even close.
  - jjtheblunt 4y ago
    unfortunately? as in no competition to drive progress?
    - nwah1 4y ago
      Not too many companies have a market cap over a trillion dollars, and if you don't then you can forget about competing on the upcoming process nodes that will require enormous capital. Samsung's internal processor division seems to be sucking. Google is trying it half-heartedly like they do with nearly everything. Nvidia and AMD haven't really tried to compete for the desktop ARM market, and Intel certainly hasn't. Qualcomm has rolled their mobile chips for laptops, but they remain mobile chips in a larger form factor. So Apple is in a class of its own for desktop-grade ARM CPUs.
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
      - jagger27 4y ago
        Hopefully Qualcomm’s Nuvia acquisition will bear some fruit sometime soon.
      - varispeed 4y ago
        I hope they move into workstation. Something like a quad M2 MAX would probably sell like there is no tomorrow.
    - hiyer 4y ago
nwah1 4y ago
I don't doubt those benefits are real, but I recently bought a Samsung Galaxy Book with Intel 12th gen and integrated graphics, and it is actually fantastic. Super thin, lightweight, silent, and low heat, while still boasting 12 extremely fast cores. And it was very affordable. It is very weird for me to buy a laptop where I have almost no complaints... and Samsung did a splendid job with all the fit and finish. I'm sure a lot of it is in fact thanks to the non-CPU upgrades like DDR5, since CPU is rarely the bottleneck, but it is all the same to me. This to me sounds like the experience people were praising the M1 chips for, and tbh Intel actually delivered for once. I say this as someone who had been solidly in the AMD camp for a long time. Thanks to competition, Intel now has to be good. Weird!
- xuki 4y ago
  How is the battery life? M1 laptops can easily last the whole day without plugging for most users.
  - nwah1 4y ago
    I am able to get 4 or 5 hours of intensive programming done on battery power... running multiple IDEs, Android emulators, browsers, etc. I've never tried it with a normal usage pattern because I only use battery power for working.
    - jxi 4y ago
      That’s pretty bad compared to m1. Less than half the battery life. Also Samsung laptops don’t last in my experience. They make short term tradeoffs at the expense of long term reliability.
      - bpodgursky 4y ago
        Maybe, but 4-5 hours is solidly the point at which it doesn't matter at all to me. I haven't had trouble finding an outlet for years, even at airports, planes, coffeeshops, etc.
kcb 4y ago
I've played with an AMD 6800u laptop and I would say it's the ideal x86 laptop chip right now. Normal usage at the 12w mode or light gaming at 20w mode was super impressive. Even though 12th Gen Intel chips have made great performance gains Intel is still relying on unsustainable high turbo boosts to get the benchmark numbers. I just recently stumbled across these two otherwise identical laptops. https://psref.lenovo.com/syspool/Sys/PDF/Lenovo/Lenovo_Slim_7_ProX_14IAH7/Lenovo_Slim_7_ProX_14IAH7_Spec.pdf https://psref.lenovo.com/syspool/Sys/PDF/Lenovo/Lenovo_Slim_... https://psref.lenovo.com/syspool/Sys/PDF/Lenovo/Lenovo_Slim_7_ProX_14ARH7/Lenovo_Slim_7_ProX_14ARH7_Spec.pdf https://psref.lenovo.com/syspool/Sys/PDF/Lenovo/Lenovo_Slim_... The AMD version is rated for 20% greater battery life just from the CPU difference.
- ZuLuuuuuu 4y ago
  Exactly. Not just 1 model but you can compare identical ThinkPad models as well and AMD versions have significantly better battery life. Not only that, even last year's identical models with 11th Gen Intel CPUs have better battery life than their new 12th Gen models. So Intel's power efficiency actually decreased compared to last year, even though they introduced the hybrid architecture. In some instances Alder Lake CPUs slightly edge out Apple's CPUs in performance, but with a terrible battery life (~4 hours of real world battery life vs >10 hours on Apple laptops) and noisy fans. AMD on the other hand seems to have focused on getting a good balance this year. 6800U models have significant performance improvements over the last gen while improving the battery life as well. I am thinking of buying a new laptop this year, but I am waiting for the AMD models. For anyone interested, these are the models I am waiting for: https://psref.lenovo.com/Product/ThinkBook/ThinkBook_13s_G4_ARB https://psref.lenovo.com/Product/ThinkBook/ThinkBook_13s_G4_... https://psref.lenovo.com/Product/ThinkPad/ThinkPad_X13_Gen_3_AMD https://psref.lenovo.com/Product/ThinkPad/ThinkPad_X13_Gen_3... Both have much better battery life than their Intel counterparts: ThinkBook 13s Gen 4 (AMD): 14 hours ThinkBook 13s Gen 4 (Intel): 10.9 hours ThinkPaf X13 Gen 3 (AMD): 15.68 hours ThinkPad X13 Gen 3 (Intel): 11.8 hours These numbers are usually lower in real life, but they are comparable with each other.
  - microtonal 4y ago
freedomben 4y ago
I have absolutely no data or information to back this up, but I predict a RISC-V based Framework within the next 5 years. And I'll be one of the first customers to buy one.
- selectodude 4y ago
  Why wait? https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/07/first-risc-v-laptop-expected-to-ship-in-september/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/07/first-risc-v-laptop-...
  - freedomben 4y ago
    That's super exciting, but I'm not familiar with Xcalibyte. are they a good and reputable maker?
    - necovek 4y ago
      Is frame.work a good and reputable maker? Not saying they won't turn out to be, but they are still young considering the space they are in. Similar holds for any other hw maker that is only starting out!
      - tasubotadas 4y ago
        Or any maker that starts using RISC
      - freedomben 4y ago
        Yes I think frame.work is a good and reputable maker. They are indeed still young, but they've made and kept a number of big early promises, and have been consistently shipping. There are some bugs/quality concerns but I'm confident they'll work them out. I've bought hardware before though from companies I'd never heard of, and either never received it or when I did it was much poorer quality than advertised or was so long after the order that I'd nearly forgotten about it. Would hate for that to happen with xcalibyte
- 4y ago
ben-schaaf 4y ago
Lowering the power of an intel/AMD CPU enough to passively cool it would yield way more performance than currently commercially available arm CPUs. (Obviously excluding CPUs that aren't purchasable like Apple's)
- ido 4y ago
  Does that include the Apple M1 / M2 lines?
  - ben-schaaf 4y ago
    I have absolutely no reason to believe Apple will ever sell those to third parties. I've edited the comment to clarify.
KingOfCoders 4y ago
My XPS didn't blow. My MacBook Pros (Intel) always did. As others have shown heat management in Intel MacBook Pros were abysmal and not comparable to other Intel Laptops. Yes, the M1 is a huge power efficiency jump forward, would love affordable ARM desktop machines, but a lot of the MacBook Pro (Intel) problems are from very bad heat management. [Edit] My understanding is, that a lot of power efficiency and performance comes from the large cache - not only ARM - which is more efficient than main memory and faster - also see AMD X3D. (per core AFAIK) Ryzen 7 L1/L2: 32/512, M1 L1/L2 192/3072
varispeed 4y ago
> I never realized how much heat, vibration, air blowers negatively affected me before. It's like a constant drilling sound that gets into your brain and makes thoughts flow like through the mud in the full sunlight. For that reason, despite that I don't like Apple and I am not a fan of macOS, I decided to buy M1 MBP. This is a lifechanging experience, that laptop. You can even put it on low power mode and won't lose much perfomance and it is absolutely silent. Even if you run a prolonged heavy task and fans kick in, you will barely hear them (ha hope it won't get worse over time and that there will be a way to disconnect them if that is going to be a problem). Oh and no coil whine. Even if my XPS 15 miraculously don't have fans on, you can be sure their noise is inconveniently replaced by distinct coil whine that is just as annoying as fans. I am probably going to buy another macbook, this time the Air one just for leisure and learning.
- asdff 4y ago
  I'm honestly impressed that so many people in these threads work in environments quiet enough where the fan is the largest source of annoyance. If I'm inside its drowned out by my window AC unit. If I'm outside on the patio its drowned out by my neighbor's window AC unit. If I take it to work then its the hvac vent over my desk that's the dominant source of noise, followed by the construction site across the street. Usually I use third party tools to pin my fan at max speed when I'm doing anything because it keeps the keyboard cooler.

devwastaken 4y ago

Apples M1 only worked because everything is in one chip. Very different from the goals of framework. There aren't any vendors offering M1 competitors either.

masklinn 4y ago
> Apples M1 only worked because everything is in one chip. That’s not true in any way?
- 3OCSzk 4y ago
  Could you elaborate why it isn't the case?
  - Nursie 4y ago
    They may be referring to the early rumours/misapprehension that the RAM was on-die and part of the SOC as well. This isn't true AFAICT.
  - masklinn 4y ago
    Because there’s no evidence for the claim, and the evidence is mostly “Apple has created a huge and complex chip”? And what does “Everything is in one chip” even mean? Because the memory certainly isn’t, it’s soldered on the package but it’s not part of the package, it just doesn’t take additional room on the main board. And there are a bunch of other chips on the mainboard Finally, it’s pretty much just following mobile / phone chip SoC design, so any other manufacturer could do the same, if they wanted to create a giant and expensive SOC. And I want to be really clear on the “giant and expensive” part: the M1 family is the sort of scale you usually see on giant workstation or server chips, the M1 Pro has 33.7 billion transistors, that’s more than a Threadripper 5995WX, a $6500 64 cores CPU. The M1 is just short of the 5950X’s transistor count (16 billions to 19.2), the M2 is above (~20).
    - audunw 4y ago
      > And what does “Everything is in one chip” even mean? I guess he's mainly thinking of GPU, which isn't unique. But there's not that many SoCs with that amount of power in one SoC. So it's close to competing with alternatives with discrete GPUs, which does increase power consumption. I believe it has integrated Flash controller too, which is very unique for a laptop/desktop chip, no? > Because the memory certainly isn’t, it’s soldered on the package but it’s not part of the package, it just doesn’t take additional room on the main board. And there are a bunch of other chips on the mainboard It's on the package so it can be as close to the SoC as possible. That decreases the capacitance of the traces, which decreases power consumption. It's not stacked on top of the SoC, which might have been even better (but harder to cool), but it's close. > Finally, it’s pretty much just following mobile / phone chip SoC design, so any other manufacturer could do the same, if they wanted to create a giant and expensive SOC. Uh, yeah, anyone could copy the M1 for a laptop/desktop product. But they haven't exactly done that yet have they? That's kind of the point? > the M1 family is the sort of scale you usually see on giant workstation or server chips Yeah, which again, almost never packs the kind of functionality Apple does into the M1. With that many transistors, on such an advanced process, you're going to have a lot of leakage currents, so Apple must have put an impressive amount of work into power management. I mean, it's not just about being an SoC with lots of things packed within the chip or extremely close to the cheap (memory). No. It's apparent that they've focused on across the entire design process. Even the choice of ARM factors into that (fewer transistors needed for instruction decoding). But I wouldn't say the original comment is completely wrong.
mastax 4y ago
AMD's laptop CPUs are also "everything in one chip." Intel still has a separate chipset die on the package as far as I can tell.
- rowanG077 4y ago
  This is not true. AMD CPUs do not include NVME controllers for example. There probably are more things AMD does not do on the CPU itself.
  - paulmd 4y ago
    [citation needed] Cezanne SOC topology: https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/ix6FrojFD7anKypadF2vKM.jpg https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/ix6FrojFD7anKypadF2vKM.jpg Rembrandt SOC topology: https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/8wnuFCokmeHjESuSbzYWMJ.jpg https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/8wnuFCokmeHjESuSbzYWMJ.jpg Even on the desktop processors, there are onboard lanes dedicated to the NVMe itself, and the entire processor (including NVMe) is capable of booting without a supporting chipset at all - the "X300 chipset" is actually not a chipset at all, it is just using the SOC itself without an external chipset, and you do not lose NVMe functionality. Not sure if you are using some really weird meaning of "NVMe controller" that doesn't match what anyone else means?
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - rowanG077 4y ago
      I meant the controller that manages the NAND cells, I assumed it would be called NVMe controller. Essentially the IC that the "NVMe controller" in your image talks to.
      - paulmd 4y ago
        That would normally be called a "flash controller" and yeah, of course that lives on the SSD. (unless it doesn't - eMMC doesn't normally have a flash controller and you just do direct writes to the flash cells... as do some IOFusion PCIe cards that are just flash directly attached to PCIe with no controller. Sometimes that functionality is just software-based. Flash cards (eg microSD) usually also do not have a flash controller directly either.) Anyway, it's true though that Apple does push the flash controller functionality into the SOC while AMD does not, Apple implements their SSD in a non-standard fashion, that's why it's not compatible with off-the-shelf drives. The flash is just flash on a board, I don't even think it's NVMe compatible at all either. So if you want to be maximally pedantic... neither does Apple implement onboard NVMe controllers, just flash controllers ;)

wingmanjd 4y ago

Is there any other ARM processors in Apple's M1 class of performance? I haven't kept up with progress on the CPU front.

specto 4y ago
Unfortunately, not even close.
- jjtheblunt 4y ago
  unfortunately? as in no competition to drive progress?
  - nwah1 4y ago
    Not too many companies have a market cap over a trillion dollars, and if you don't then you can forget about competing on the upcoming process nodes that will require enormous capital. Samsung's internal processor division seems to be sucking. Google is trying it half-heartedly like they do with nearly everything. Nvidia and AMD haven't really tried to compete for the desktop ARM market, and Intel certainly hasn't. Qualcomm has rolled their mobile chips for laptops, but they remain mobile chips in a larger form factor. So Apple is in a class of its own for desktop-grade ARM CPUs.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - jagger27 4y ago
      Hopefully Qualcomm’s Nuvia acquisition will bear some fruit sometime soon.
    - varispeed 4y ago
      I hope they move into workstation. Something like a quad M2 MAX would probably sell like there is no tomorrow.
  - hiyer 4y ago

nwah1 4y ago

I don't doubt those benefits are real, but I recently bought a Samsung Galaxy Book with Intel 12th gen and integrated graphics, and it is actually fantastic. Super thin, lightweight, silent, and low heat, while still boasting 12 extremely fast cores. And it was very affordable. It is very weird for me to buy a laptop where I have almost no complaints... and Samsung did a splendid job with all the fit and finish. I'm sure a lot of it is in fact thanks to the non-CPU upgrades like DDR5, since CPU is rarely the bottleneck, but it is all the same to me. This to me sounds like the experience people were praising the M1 chips for, and tbh Intel actually delivered for once. I say this as someone who had been solidly in the AMD camp for a long time. Thanks to competition, Intel now has to be good. Weird!

xuki 4y ago
How is the battery life? M1 laptops can easily last the whole day without plugging for most users.
- nwah1 4y ago
  I am able to get 4 or 5 hours of intensive programming done on battery power... running multiple IDEs, Android emulators, browsers, etc. I've never tried it with a normal usage pattern because I only use battery power for working.
  - jxi 4y ago
    That’s pretty bad compared to m1. Less than half the battery life. Also Samsung laptops don’t last in my experience. They make short term tradeoffs at the expense of long term reliability.
    - bpodgursky 4y ago
      Maybe, but 4-5 hours is solidly the point at which it doesn't matter at all to me. I haven't had trouble finding an outlet for years, even at airports, planes, coffeeshops, etc.

kcb 4y ago

I've played with an AMD 6800u laptop and I would say it's the ideal x86 laptop chip right now. Normal usage at the 12w mode or light gaming at 20w mode was super impressive. Even though 12th Gen Intel chips have made great performance gains Intel is still relying on unsustainable high turbo boosts to get the benchmark numbers. I just recently stumbled across these two otherwise identical laptops. https://psref.lenovo.com/syspool/Sys/PDF/Lenovo/Lenovo_Slim_7_ProX_14IAH7/Lenovo_Slim_7_ProX_14IAH7_Spec.pdf https://psref.lenovo.com/syspool/Sys/PDF/Lenovo/Lenovo_Slim_... https://psref.lenovo.com/syspool/Sys/PDF/Lenovo/Lenovo_Slim_7_ProX_14ARH7/Lenovo_Slim_7_ProX_14ARH7_Spec.pdf https://psref.lenovo.com/syspool/Sys/PDF/Lenovo/Lenovo_Slim_... The AMD version is rated for 20% greater battery life just from the CPU difference.

ZuLuuuuuu 4y ago
Exactly. Not just 1 model but you can compare identical ThinkPad models as well and AMD versions have significantly better battery life. Not only that, even last year's identical models with 11th Gen Intel CPUs have better battery life than their new 12th Gen models. So Intel's power efficiency actually decreased compared to last year, even though they introduced the hybrid architecture. In some instances Alder Lake CPUs slightly edge out Apple's CPUs in performance, but with a terrible battery life (~4 hours of real world battery life vs >10 hours on Apple laptops) and noisy fans. AMD on the other hand seems to have focused on getting a good balance this year. 6800U models have significant performance improvements over the last gen while improving the battery life as well. I am thinking of buying a new laptop this year, but I am waiting for the AMD models. For anyone interested, these are the models I am waiting for: https://psref.lenovo.com/Product/ThinkBook/ThinkBook_13s_G4_ARB https://psref.lenovo.com/Product/ThinkBook/ThinkBook_13s_G4_... https://psref.lenovo.com/Product/ThinkPad/ThinkPad_X13_Gen_3_AMD https://psref.lenovo.com/Product/ThinkPad/ThinkPad_X13_Gen_3... Both have much better battery life than their Intel counterparts: ThinkBook 13s Gen 4 (AMD): 14 hours ThinkBook 13s Gen 4 (Intel): 10.9 hours ThinkPaf X13 Gen 3 (AMD): 15.68 hours ThinkPad X13 Gen 3 (Intel): 11.8 hours These numbers are usually lower in real life, but they are comparable with each other.
- microtonal 4y ago

freedomben 4y ago

I have absolutely no data or information to back this up, but I predict a RISC-V based Framework within the next 5 years. And I'll be one of the first customers to buy one.

selectodude 4y ago
Why wait? https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/07/first-risc-v-laptop-expected-to-ship-in-september/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/07/first-risc-v-laptop-...
- freedomben 4y ago
  That's super exciting, but I'm not familiar with Xcalibyte. are they a good and reputable maker?
  - necovek 4y ago
    Is frame.work a good and reputable maker? Not saying they won't turn out to be, but they are still young considering the space they are in. Similar holds for any other hw maker that is only starting out!
    - tasubotadas 4y ago
      Or any maker that starts using RISC
    - freedomben 4y ago
      Yes I think frame.work is a good and reputable maker. They are indeed still young, but they've made and kept a number of big early promises, and have been consistently shipping. There are some bugs/quality concerns but I'm confident they'll work them out. I've bought hardware before though from companies I'd never heard of, and either never received it or when I did it was much poorer quality than advertised or was so long after the order that I'd nearly forgotten about it. Would hate for that to happen with xcalibyte
4y ago

ben-schaaf 4y ago

Lowering the power of an intel/AMD CPU enough to passively cool it would yield way more performance than currently commercially available arm CPUs. (Obviously excluding CPUs that aren't purchasable like Apple's)

ido 4y ago
Does that include the Apple M1 / M2 lines?
- ben-schaaf 4y ago
  I have absolutely no reason to believe Apple will ever sell those to third parties. I've edited the comment to clarify.

KingOfCoders 4y ago

My XPS didn't blow. My MacBook Pros (Intel) always did. As others have shown heat management in Intel MacBook Pros were abysmal and not comparable to other Intel Laptops. Yes, the M1 is a huge power efficiency jump forward, would love affordable ARM desktop machines, but a lot of the MacBook Pro (Intel) problems are from very bad heat management. [Edit] My understanding is, that a lot of power efficiency and performance comes from the large cache - not only ARM - which is more efficient than main memory and faster - also see AMD X3D. (per core AFAIK) Ryzen 7 L1/L2: 32/512, M1 L1/L2 192/3072

varispeed 4y ago

> I never realized how much heat, vibration, air blowers negatively affected me before. It's like a constant drilling sound that gets into your brain and makes thoughts flow like through the mud in the full sunlight. For that reason, despite that I don't like Apple and I am not a fan of macOS, I decided to buy M1 MBP. This is a lifechanging experience, that laptop. You can even put it on low power mode and won't lose much perfomance and it is absolutely silent. Even if you run a prolonged heavy task and fans kick in, you will barely hear them (ha hope it won't get worse over time and that there will be a way to disconnect them if that is going to be a problem). Oh and no coil whine. Even if my XPS 15 miraculously don't have fans on, you can be sure their noise is inconveniently replaced by distinct coil whine that is just as annoying as fans. I am probably going to buy another macbook, this time the Air one just for leisure and learning.

asdff 4y ago
I'm honestly impressed that so many people in these threads work in environments quiet enough where the fan is the largest source of annoyance. If I'm inside its drowned out by my window AC unit. If I'm outside on the patio its drowned out by my neighbor's window AC unit. If I take it to work then its the hvac vent over my desk that's the dominant source of noise, followed by the construction site across the street. Usually I use third party tools to pin my fan at max speed when I'm doing anything because it keeps the keyboard cooler.