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Comment by owenversteeg | Hacker News Reader

I keep seeing thermal issues come back to bite some of the smartest companies with products designed by the world's best engineers. Everything from batteries to laptops to phones is severely affected by heat, and improper thermal design can lead to some huge issues.

For example, the biggest thing affecting battery life is thermal load. The biggest thing affecting the maximum sustained power of a laptop or phone is the thermal design. Anyone can slap a cheap, powerful chip in; good thermal design is much harder.

I think people are going to start realizing this more and more, especially as powerful chips get extremely cheap.

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Don't forget the infamous Xbox 360 Red Ring of Death, caused by incorrect thermal management causing balls on a BGA package to lift from the board underneath as it deflected.

Which is ironically also how you fixed it. I'll never forget the "magic" of wrapping my Xbox 360 in several towels and overheat for 30 minutes to supposedly resolder it back together. It worked for another 6 months after that until it completely and finally died.

The problem was more precisely that thermal variations combined with the way the heatsink was attached and pushing on the middle of the CPU repeatedly warped the board due to thermal expansion, causing the balls to unseat. Heating the thing would help reseat the BGA thanks to thermal expansion but would certainly not reflow soldering (not enough heat).

The proper fix was to try to reseat the BGA by whatever means and change the way the heatsink was attached so that pressure on the BGA/board was even. I did that on two units and they survived for years after their first RRoD, and on a third unit right from the get go, and that one never suffered of any issue.

The Xbox 360 is the only thing I’ve ever bought the 3rd-party warranty for at an electronics store. I don’t really know why I did it that day, but I sure was happy to have paid the $20 or whatever when I wound up exchanging FIVE of them before I got one that lasted more than a few months. What a mess.

Is the Intel upgrade treadmill is starting to show its age?

How much longer can we keep making the chips "faster" when the tradeoff is increasingly just more thermal issues?

Can't wait for a decent A-series chip MacBook.

Well, we could go back to having laptops that are thicker than a Bic pen and have actual cooling systems in them. I have physical spiral bound paper notebooks that are thicker and heavier than my work notebook.

Why do you think putting an ARM in a laptop will solve anything? If you want 5-8 year old x86 performance buy a HP envy and see how well your full blown desktop apps run.

https://www.cnet.com/reviews/hp-envy-x2-snapdragon-835-revie...

Apple's A11 benchmarks twice as fast as the Snapdragon 835. And if Apple was going to put an ARM in a laptop, they would surely design a chip specific to that use case with even higher performance than one that has to go into a passively-cooled smartphone.

(not saying I'm convinced an Apple ARM would actually outperform the x86 but that waving around Snapdragon machine doesn't prove your point)

I don’t want an iPad for my laptop (I love my iPad but it’s utterly unfit for anything but browsing around)

The 'intel upgrade treadmill' consists of reducing transistor size and upping clock; the former of which reduces thermal issues, and the latter of which increases them.

> consists of reducing transistor size

It used to. The problem here is that they have not been able to ship next gen chips and so they started shipping a 6-core chip on the same process as the old 4-core, and that doesn't work so well.

The chip works fine. Apple used an insufficient cooling solution, Dell XPS laptops with a better cooling solution are doing fine.

The new chip has the exact same TDP rating as the old one. Unless Apple has made their thermal solution worse (highly unlikely) it is Intel that is fudging the TDP ratings.

The old chip pulled 33% less than its rated TDP in the real world.

Also, lol if you actually think TDP means anything anymore. Over the last 5 years it's become a marketing number more than anything else. It gives you a vague category of what power consumption will look like... at base clocks, under a non-AVX workload. Modern processors will happily blast past their TDP by 50-100% if there is thermal headroom available.

(And that's where laptops come up short - they can't actually cool a steady-state load, so these laptops will happily turbo themselves into a wall, and then once the heatsink is saturated they'll thermally throttle. Looks great in a 30-second benchmark though!)

> The old chip pulled 33% less than its rated TDP in the real world.

That sounds slightly made up. As you mention yourself chips pull vastly different amounts of power, and put off vastly different amounts of heat depending on workload.

> lol if you actually think TDP means anything anymore

Yes, it does not mean anything because Intel releases CPUs that exceed their ratings because they can't get their process right, which is my whole point.

You're assuming Apple's thermal solution was adequate to begin with.

No one has been able to reduce transistor size as easily as they used to.

That's really interesting. Do you have any suggestions on some further reading?

some of it in Apple's case can be ascribed to their quest for reducing the thickness of the laptops to the point we lost not only ports it may be affecting their ability to adequately cool them

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