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Comment by jpalomaki | Hacker News Reader

I was surprised to notice that the XPS 15 comes also with quad core CPUs and supports 32GB max memory. Interesting option for those looking for desktop level performance in reasonably sized package.

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Anyone know how thermal management is on high-end laptop-version Skylakes? I have a three-year-old Dell Precision 15" with a quad core i7 (Sandy Bridge) at work. If I throw work at all the cores simultaneously, it takes about 60 seconds before it starts throttling the CPU to avoid thermal overload... Which makes it a bit useless IMO. Has this improved recently?

My i7-6700HQ (Lenovo Ideapad Y700) has been behaving much better under high load than the old Sandy Bridge i7-2630QM (Samsung RC512) I had been using. Though it being a "gaming" design with extra vents and heat exchangers may be helping there.

I have the 6700HQ in an XPS-15, it never seems to throttle - for example earlier today when I built firefox with -j8 it just pegged all cores and never let up.

I can be a tad noisy in this situation as you would expect, but from what I have seen - and reviews back me up - it doesn't throttle.

Same here. Even the fan noise is quite acceptable in comparison with my old HP pavilion. The XPS sounds like a light breeze, whereas the HP sounded like a vacuum cleaner.

You mean that in addition to showing all cores fully used, the frequency didn't drop below base?

Yes exactly.

Thanks! Exactly what I was wondering.

According to this review http://www.notebookcheck.net/Dell-XPS-15-2016-9550-InfinityE... it has a serious heat problem.

Wow, that is one thorough review. But it looks like it confirms that throttling only occurs on battery power, never on AC power.

It does throttle on AC power. Look at the "temperature" paragraph

It's an absolute beast of a computer: expensive, but I'm glad I bought it.

The only real downside is battery life - it's better than a MBP 13 with Bootcamp but not even close to the MBP with OSX.

Do you run Linux or Windows on it? I'd expect to be able to add quite a few hours to its battery life with the right Distro.

By "right distro" do you mean "wait for the kernel to do all the right things"?

BIOS 1.1.9 gives ASPM and PC states up to 8. Linux 4.6 should give i915 PSR. Linux will do proper nvme power management once someone (me?) gets around to it.

Even Linux 4.4 is really quite good on this laptop.

PSR on skl is still disabled by default, because there's some corner cases we haven't fixed yet. In case you wonder: more recent platforms shut down more of the chip in PSR, and we haven't yet wired up the power management calls to wake it up again if we need it for those cases. Hopefully addressed in 4.7. Meanwhile you can enable it manually with i915.enable_psr=1 on the kernel cmdline and see whether it works in your case.

Linux, I've been burned before using Linux as host OS on a laptop (suspend not working).

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