Comment by lloeki | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lloeki | Hacker News Reader

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I've been doing hours-long CPU+GPU intensive tasks (compiling ghc, number crunching, playing games like Bioshock Infinite and StarCraft II on a HD4000) on a bunch of pre-retina MBP and rMBP 13" and they never throttled. Thermal design and management is spot on, fans stay silent most of the time and kick in only when load requires it.

Beware of anecdata. Given the stories I hear I would squarely put the various issues in the realm of thermal paste gone bad, busted fans, or clogged airducts, and certainly not on intrinsic bad design because I have personal counterexamples of dozens of various Apple laptops from 2008 to 2016 being perfectly fine out of the box.

Obviously though, a desktop will beat a laptop's thermal performance any day but I think this is missing the point.

> I've been doing hours-long CPU+GPU intensive tasks (compiling ghc, number crunching, playing games like Bioshock Infinite and StarCraft II on a HD4000) on a bunch of pre-retina MBP and rMBP 13" and they never throttled.

I find that hard to believe. I have been gaming a lot on MacBook Pro unibodies and retinas with and without an external GPUs. Especially when the internal GPU is active, the thermal load is just too high for many games and applications.

Throttling normally starts in a very subtle way by disabling clock boost and is hard to notice. Throttling below the base clock is rare and this is where it becomes really noticeable.

I thought that was the one of the points of turbo boost? To take advantage of high clock frequencies for short high intensity hurts while still running at the base clock for long term work? If the clock speed is staying above the base clock I wouldn’t consider it a problem.

It isn't throttling if it is operating at or above base clock.

My data comes directly from monitoring the CPU frequencies as I was doing development work. There's an intel tool that gives you that data in realtime.

I did mostly only have the 15" MBPs, but thermal throttling is a fact of life on pretty much all mobile devices. I do mobile development work and having mobile CPUs run at full frequency for more than a minute or two is pretty much impossible.

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