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Apple had been sandbagging the Intel chips for several generations of macbook with anemic cooling solutions, poor thermal throttling curves, and fans that wait

Apple had been sandbagging the Intel chips for several generations of macbook with anemic cooling solutions, poor thermal throttling curves, and fans that wait until the last moment to turn on. To the extent that the fastest CPUs available in Macbook Pros did not outperform lower models, because both became thermally saturated. When properly cooled, the Intel silicon tends to perform a lot better. Additionally, both Intel and AMD manufacturer CPUs for HEDT and servers which are far beyond anything Apple is fabricating at the moment. Apple has no response to Epyc, Threadripper, or higher end Xeon. Similarly, Apple has no equivalent to Intel, AMD, and Nvidia discrete GPUs. Apple made a quality cell phone chip, and managed to exploit chiplets and chip-to-chip interconnects to double and quadruple it into a decent APU. But it's still an APU, just one segment addressed by current x86 designs.

kristianp 3y ago
> Apple had been sandbagging the Intel chips for several generations of macbook with anemic cooling solutions I don't think that was deliberate. Apple has a long history of not cooling their computers enough.
- yakz 3y ago
  I had never even considered it was deliberate. In hindsight, doing it deliberately seems pretty smart, at least from a “let’s juice the intro” perspective, but that would have been a really big bet.
  - timschmidt 3y ago
    It's an interesting question right? Do you think Apple never tested multiple configurations of their leading computer (specifically the higher end ones) over multiple generations, or do you think they knew what they were doing?
  - evilduck 3y ago
    Microsoft Surface Laptops were trying for similar form factors and having the same thermal problems at the same time, this isn't a grand conspiracy, all Intel laptops were suffering.
- alwayslikethis 3y ago
  They still do it. Apple silicon macs run at 100+ degrees at load. Apple would rather run their chips hot than turn on the fans, which may or may not be justified. We don't really see chips dying from high temps, especially for typical workloads a casual user would use.
  - gryn 3y ago
    Just wait for them to get a little older and you'll probably have a wave of motherboards dying in the future like what happened with the MBPs from around 2011 - 2013 with apple denying it for years until the threats of class action lawsuits before offering replacements with other motherboards that also fail.
  - doublepg23 3y ago
    That’s pretty common for modern CPUs. Look at the temps for Ryzen 7xxx series.
cookingmyserver 3y ago
> When properly cooled, the Intel silicon tends to perform a lot better. Of course, but the average Joe does not want to wear ear protection when running their laptop. Nor do they want the battery to last 40 minutes or have it be huge brick, or have to pour liquid nitrogen on it to not get it to not thermal throttle. Apple innovated by making chips that fit the form and function most people need in their personal devices. They don't need to be the absolute fastest, but innovation isn't solely tied to the computing power of a processor. It make sense that Intel excels in the market segment where people do need to wear ear protection to go near their products. If they need to crank in an extra 30 watts to achieve their new better compute then so be it. We don't know the specifics of the conversations between Apple and Intel. Hopefully for Intel it was just the fact that they didn't want to innovate for personal computing processors and not that they couldn't.
- ericmay 3y ago
  It's always curious to me how Apple's superior products are somehow some other company's fault.
- timschmidt 3y ago
  It seems like you think I'm trying to dunk on Apple. I am not. Apple Silicon is a great first showing for them. Performance simply isn't better than Ryzen APUs running in the same power envelope. And power usage is what you'd expect of silicon running on the latest node. Further, some of Apple's choices - bringing memory on package, only two display outputs - caused regressions for their users compared to the previous Intel offerings. I wouldn't call what Apple did innovation - they followed predictable development trajectories - more integration. They licensed ARM's instruction set, Imagination's PowerVR GPU, most of the major system busses (PCIe, Thunderbolt, USB 3, Displayport, etc), they bonded chiplets together with TSMC's packaging and chip-to-chip communication technologies, and they made extensions (like optional x86 memory ordering for all ARM instructions which removes a lot of the work of emulation). Incidentally, Apple kicked off it's chip design efforts by purchasing PA Semi. Those folks had all the power management chip design expertise already. But again, it's been a good first showing for Apple. I think they were smart to ship on-package DRAM in a consumer device. Now is about the right time for the CPU to be absorbing DRAM, as can be seen by AMD's 3D VCache in another form. And it's cool for Apple folks to have their own cool thing. Yay y'all. But I've run Linux for 20 years, I've run Linux on every computer I can get my hands on in that time, and through that lens, Apple silicon performs like any x86 APU in a midrange laptop or desktop. And as regards noise, I never hear the fans on my 7800x3D / 3090Ti, and it is very very noticeably faster than my M1 Mac. Apple Silicon's great, it's just for laptops and midrange desktops right now.
jdewerd 3y ago
Absolutely ridiculous. No, Apple did not juice the M1 by giving it better cooling than x86. Quite the opposite, they took a big chunk of their design+process wins to the bank and exchanged them for even cooler and quieter operation because that's what they wanted all along. Cool and quiet was a deliverable. It's absurd to point out that apple could have gotten higher perf from x86 at higher power as if it's some kind of win for intel. Yes, obviously they could have, that's true of every chip ever. They could take it even further and cool every macbook with liquid nitrogen and require lugging around a huge tank of the stuff just to read your email! They don't, because that's dumb. Apple goes even further than most laptop manufacturers and thinks that hissing fans and low battery life are dumb too. This leads them to low power as a design constraint and what matters is what performance a chip can deliver within that constraint. That's the perspective from which the M1 was designed and that's the perspective from which it delivered in spades.
- timschmidt 3y ago
  Maybe it's not clear to everyone... hot transistors waste more power as heat. It's a feedback loop. And it doesn't require liquid nitrogen to nip in the bud. Running the chip hot benefits no one. Kicking on a fan, and racing to idle without throttling would use less battery power. I'm not sure what's so upsetting about the assertion that chips composed of a similar number of transistors, on a similar process node, cooled similarly, might function similarly. Because when all variables are controlled for, that's what I see.
  - zamadatix 3y ago
    Even taking the latest Intel has to offer with the Core Ultra 9 185H in a system with active cooling and putting it up against the fanless model of the M1 MacBook Air comes out equal in performance at more than triple the power usage - 3 years after the fact. It's got nothing to do with a feedback loop, there is less cooling capacity and not even a fan on the Apple model, the fan wasn't somehow needed for the performance level. Not that a conspiracy of Apple to run all their MacBooks like shit for many years prior to switching all to make Intel look bad is a bit ludicrous - if the problem was ever that the fans weren't on enough they would have just turned them up. Turns out, they can remove them instead! The one place I agree with you is in the > ~16 core space (Server style) with TBs of RAM, where total performance density is more important than power, they don't bother to really compete. Where I differ slightly is I don't think there is anything about the technical design that prevents this, just look how Epyc trounced Intel in the space by using a bunch of 8 core chip modules instead of building a monolith, rather they just don't have interest in serving that space. If Apple was able to turn a phone chip into something with the multicore performance of a 24 core 13900k it doesn't exactly scream "architectural limitation" to me.
whynotminot 3y ago
Intel stopped making good chips for the things Apple cared about: efficient, cool designs that can run well with great battery life in attractive consumer products. Apple "sandbagging" was them desperately trying to get a poor Intel product to work in laptops they wanted to be thin and light. Even today though their designs haven't really changed all that much--in fact the MacBook Air is actually just as thin and now even completely fan-less. It just has a chip in it that doesn't suck.
- timschmidt 3y ago
  Intel makes plenty of chips in the 15W and even 5W envelopes to this day. MSI just built a gaming handheld with one.
  - whynotminot 3y ago
    At those envelopes they are nowhere near as good as what Apple makes. Even if Intel makes a thing that doesn't mean it's actually any good. I had some of those Intel ULV parts back in the day. They sucked.
    - timschmidt 3y ago
      I'm not sure what you had back in the day, but even Intel's E cores these days are spritely. Gone are the days of slow Atom cores. Pretty sure an equivalently clocked Intel E core of today beats the fastest Intel core ever shipped in an Apple product.
      - whynotminot 3y ago
        Neither here nor there--when Apple needed Intel to ship a decent, performant core that didn't overheat and chew through battery life, they could not. Apple switched to their own silicon, and life for their customers has radically improved. Maybe Intel has a great E Core now. Good for them if they do.
        3y ago
doublepg23 3y ago
I don’t think that was the case. I believe Apple believed Intels roadmap as much as anyone and them repeatedly not delivering inspired them to move.
GrumpySloth 3y ago
They didn’t sabotage them. The CPUs just didn’t align with Apple’s goals. It’s not like they gave the M1 CPUs the cooling that Intel didn’t get. My Mac Mini M1 never spins up its fans and everything is fine. I love it. If it did, I’d consider it a downgrade.
- jeffbee 3y ago
  I don't think Apple "sabotaged" them but it is true that the M1 series came with very different thermal design parameters than the terminal Intel models. Apple's Intel laptops would ramp chip power to the max as soon as anything happened. Apple's M1 ramps very, very slowly, dwelling for hundreds of milliseconds at each voltage before stepping up. These are decisions that are in the OEM's hands and not dictated by Intel.
_yb2s 3y ago
It's not possible to cool those Intel cpus better and still have good battery life, and quiet operation in a compact laptop form factor. The last Intel macbooks would get very hot and very loud when running hard, and kill the battery in minutes... my M1 never makes a sound or feels even slightly warm to the touch when running hard, yet is a heck of a lot more powerful, and can run hard all day long on a single battery charge.
eigen 3y ago
2019 15" Macbook Pro with i9-9980HK has 1383/6280 Geekbench score. [1] generic user submitted Intel Core i9-9980HK has 1421/6269 Geekbench score. [2] a <3% difference doesn't seem like Apple sandbagging with anemic cooling. [1] https://browser.geekbench.com/macs/macbook-pro-15-inch-mid-2019-intel-core-i9-9980hk-2-4-ghz-8-cores https://browser.geekbench.com/macs/macbook-pro-15-inch-mid-2... [2] https://browser.geekbench.com/processors/intel-core-i9-9980hk https://browser.geekbench.com/processors/intel-core-i9-9980h...

kristianp 3y ago

> Apple had been sandbagging the Intel chips for several generations of macbook with anemic cooling solutions I don't think that was deliberate. Apple has a long history of not cooling their computers enough.

yakz 3y ago
I had never even considered it was deliberate. In hindsight, doing it deliberately seems pretty smart, at least from a “let’s juice the intro” perspective, but that would have been a really big bet.
- timschmidt 3y ago
  It's an interesting question right? Do you think Apple never tested multiple configurations of their leading computer (specifically the higher end ones) over multiple generations, or do you think they knew what they were doing?
- evilduck 3y ago
  Microsoft Surface Laptops were trying for similar form factors and having the same thermal problems at the same time, this isn't a grand conspiracy, all Intel laptops were suffering.
alwayslikethis 3y ago
They still do it. Apple silicon macs run at 100+ degrees at load. Apple would rather run their chips hot than turn on the fans, which may or may not be justified. We don't really see chips dying from high temps, especially for typical workloads a casual user would use.
- gryn 3y ago
  Just wait for them to get a little older and you'll probably have a wave of motherboards dying in the future like what happened with the MBPs from around 2011 - 2013 with apple denying it for years until the threats of class action lawsuits before offering replacements with other motherboards that also fail.
- doublepg23 3y ago
  That’s pretty common for modern CPUs. Look at the temps for Ryzen 7xxx series.

cookingmyserver 3y ago

> When properly cooled, the Intel silicon tends to perform a lot better. Of course, but the average Joe does not want to wear ear protection when running their laptop. Nor do they want the battery to last 40 minutes or have it be huge brick, or have to pour liquid nitrogen on it to not get it to not thermal throttle. Apple innovated by making chips that fit the form and function most people need in their personal devices. They don't need to be the absolute fastest, but innovation isn't solely tied to the computing power of a processor. It make sense that Intel excels in the market segment where people do need to wear ear protection to go near their products. If they need to crank in an extra 30 watts to achieve their new better compute then so be it. We don't know the specifics of the conversations between Apple and Intel. Hopefully for Intel it was just the fact that they didn't want to innovate for personal computing processors and not that they couldn't.

ericmay 3y ago
It's always curious to me how Apple's superior products are somehow some other company's fault.
timschmidt 3y ago
It seems like you think I'm trying to dunk on Apple. I am not. Apple Silicon is a great first showing for them. Performance simply isn't better than Ryzen APUs running in the same power envelope. And power usage is what you'd expect of silicon running on the latest node. Further, some of Apple's choices - bringing memory on package, only two display outputs - caused regressions for their users compared to the previous Intel offerings. I wouldn't call what Apple did innovation - they followed predictable development trajectories - more integration. They licensed ARM's instruction set, Imagination's PowerVR GPU, most of the major system busses (PCIe, Thunderbolt, USB 3, Displayport, etc), they bonded chiplets together with TSMC's packaging and chip-to-chip communication technologies, and they made extensions (like optional x86 memory ordering for all ARM instructions which removes a lot of the work of emulation). Incidentally, Apple kicked off it's chip design efforts by purchasing PA Semi. Those folks had all the power management chip design expertise already. But again, it's been a good first showing for Apple. I think they were smart to ship on-package DRAM in a consumer device. Now is about the right time for the CPU to be absorbing DRAM, as can be seen by AMD's 3D VCache in another form. And it's cool for Apple folks to have their own cool thing. Yay y'all. But I've run Linux for 20 years, I've run Linux on every computer I can get my hands on in that time, and through that lens, Apple silicon performs like any x86 APU in a midrange laptop or desktop. And as regards noise, I never hear the fans on my 7800x3D / 3090Ti, and it is very very noticeably faster than my M1 Mac. Apple Silicon's great, it's just for laptops and midrange desktops right now.

jdewerd 3y ago

Absolutely ridiculous. No, Apple did not juice the M1 by giving it better cooling than x86. Quite the opposite, they took a big chunk of their design+process wins to the bank and exchanged them for even cooler and quieter operation because that's what they wanted all along. Cool and quiet was a deliverable. It's absurd to point out that apple could have gotten higher perf from x86 at higher power as if it's some kind of win for intel. Yes, obviously they could have, that's true of every chip ever. They could take it even further and cool every macbook with liquid nitrogen and require lugging around a huge tank of the stuff just to read your email! They don't, because that's dumb. Apple goes even further than most laptop manufacturers and thinks that hissing fans and low battery life are dumb too. This leads them to low power as a design constraint and what matters is what performance a chip can deliver within that constraint. That's the perspective from which the M1 was designed and that's the perspective from which it delivered in spades.

timschmidt 3y ago
Maybe it's not clear to everyone... hot transistors waste more power as heat. It's a feedback loop. And it doesn't require liquid nitrogen to nip in the bud. Running the chip hot benefits no one. Kicking on a fan, and racing to idle without throttling would use less battery power. I'm not sure what's so upsetting about the assertion that chips composed of a similar number of transistors, on a similar process node, cooled similarly, might function similarly. Because when all variables are controlled for, that's what I see.
- zamadatix 3y ago
  Even taking the latest Intel has to offer with the Core Ultra 9 185H in a system with active cooling and putting it up against the fanless model of the M1 MacBook Air comes out equal in performance at more than triple the power usage - 3 years after the fact. It's got nothing to do with a feedback loop, there is less cooling capacity and not even a fan on the Apple model, the fan wasn't somehow needed for the performance level. Not that a conspiracy of Apple to run all their MacBooks like shit for many years prior to switching all to make Intel look bad is a bit ludicrous - if the problem was ever that the fans weren't on enough they would have just turned them up. Turns out, they can remove them instead! The one place I agree with you is in the > ~16 core space (Server style) with TBs of RAM, where total performance density is more important than power, they don't bother to really compete. Where I differ slightly is I don't think there is anything about the technical design that prevents this, just look how Epyc trounced Intel in the space by using a bunch of 8 core chip modules instead of building a monolith, rather they just don't have interest in serving that space. If Apple was able to turn a phone chip into something with the multicore performance of a 24 core 13900k it doesn't exactly scream "architectural limitation" to me.

whynotminot 3y ago

Intel stopped making good chips for the things Apple cared about: efficient, cool designs that can run well with great battery life in attractive consumer products. Apple "sandbagging" was them desperately trying to get a poor Intel product to work in laptops they wanted to be thin and light. Even today though their designs haven't really changed all that much--in fact the MacBook Air is actually just as thin and now even completely fan-less. It just has a chip in it that doesn't suck.

timschmidt 3y ago
Intel makes plenty of chips in the 15W and even 5W envelopes to this day. MSI just built a gaming handheld with one.
- whynotminot 3y ago
  At those envelopes they are nowhere near as good as what Apple makes. Even if Intel makes a thing that doesn't mean it's actually any good. I had some of those Intel ULV parts back in the day. They sucked.
  - timschmidt 3y ago
    I'm not sure what you had back in the day, but even Intel's E cores these days are spritely. Gone are the days of slow Atom cores. Pretty sure an equivalently clocked Intel E core of today beats the fastest Intel core ever shipped in an Apple product.
    - whynotminot 3y ago
      Neither here nor there--when Apple needed Intel to ship a decent, performant core that didn't overheat and chew through battery life, they could not. Apple switched to their own silicon, and life for their customers has radically improved. Maybe Intel has a great E Core now. Good for them if they do.
      - 3y ago

doublepg23 3y ago

I don’t think that was the case. I believe Apple believed Intels roadmap as much as anyone and them repeatedly not delivering inspired them to move.

GrumpySloth 3y ago

They didn’t sabotage them. The CPUs just didn’t align with Apple’s goals. It’s not like they gave the M1 CPUs the cooling that Intel didn’t get. My Mac Mini M1 never spins up its fans and everything is fine. I love it. If it did, I’d consider it a downgrade.

jeffbee 3y ago
I don't think Apple "sabotaged" them but it is true that the M1 series came with very different thermal design parameters than the terminal Intel models. Apple's Intel laptops would ramp chip power to the max as soon as anything happened. Apple's M1 ramps very, very slowly, dwelling for hundreds of milliseconds at each voltage before stepping up. These are decisions that are in the OEM's hands and not dictated by Intel.

_yb2s 3y ago

It's not possible to cool those Intel cpus better and still have good battery life, and quiet operation in a compact laptop form factor. The last Intel macbooks would get very hot and very loud when running hard, and kill the battery in minutes... my M1 never makes a sound or feels even slightly warm to the touch when running hard, yet is a heck of a lot more powerful, and can run hard all day long on a single battery charge.

eigen 3y ago

2019 15" Macbook Pro with i9-9980HK has 1383/6280 Geekbench score. [1] generic user submitted Intel Core i9-9980HK has 1421/6269 Geekbench score. [2] a <3% difference doesn't seem like Apple sandbagging with anemic cooling. [1] https://browser.geekbench.com/macs/macbook-pro-15-inch-mid-2019-intel-core-i9-9980hk-2-4-ghz-8-cores https://browser.geekbench.com/macs/macbook-pro-15-inch-mid-2... [2] https://browser.geekbench.com/processors/intel-core-i9-9980hk https://browser.geekbench.com/processors/intel-core-i9-9980h...