4 ms·

You don't design your cooling system to maintain peak turbo consumption. Thermal Design Power is 45W.

• speedgoose 3y ago
  Why not? With max 45W it would throttle a lot under heavy loads.
  • tjoff 3y ago
    This is not a bitcoin mining rig. And no, it wouldn't start to throttle, it would stop turbo. And the primary purpose of turbo is to get short bursts that the CPU might not even be able to maintain regardless of cooling system. Designing the cooling system to keep up with that is by definition overkill. Which might be fine! Overkill can be fun. But it kind of goes in the face with a small system like a NUC.
    • speedgoose 3y ago
      Alright, but if you stop the turbo mode doesn't that invalidate a lot of CPU benchmarks? Is the CPU much slower than what we could believe it is in real life? But fair enough, let's assume 45W and not 95W. It's still a lot more than the Mac Mini.
      • tjoff 3y ago
        You won't stop the turbo mode, it is still working as designed... Yes, for the first time in eternity apple has an edge in hardware. The solution is obviously to go all in in their walled garden ... profit? You pick software ecosystem first, then you pick the hardware to run it. As such NUC vs. Mac Mini is apples vs. oranges.
        • speedgoose 3y ago
          If you already run ARM Linux VMs, it’s not much differences. The VMs host will run macOS instead of Linux but that’s not the end of the world.
          • tjoff 3y ago
            As if the typical use case is to run ARM Linux VMs... But fine. The typical solution, if VMs are your use case, is to use a hypervisor, such as XCP-NG, proxmox, ESXi etc. But if you want to shoehorn in OS X just for the sake of it, sure, that will work. But I guess you'd have to be pretty deep into apples ecosystem to even consider that. And with VMs you typically want RAM and disk-space, and if you pick such a closed ecosystem that is going to be a real bummer.
            • speedgoose 3y ago
              If most of the devops people already use macs, it’s not too crazy. But that’s a good point. I would say that we are in the DIY infrastructure world as deploying VMs on a Mac mini or NUC isn’t really following the industry best practices, but installing proxmox on a amd64 box is probably easier.
              • jojobas 3y ago
                The VMs that mac-wielding DevOps guys deploy don't go into their laptops.