MacBook Pro (Mid 2018) Throttling may be due to GPU | Hacker News Reader

MacBook Pro (Mid 2018) Throttling may be due to GPU

geekbench.com

28 pointspieterr10 comments

Instead of taxing the CPU with running their benchmarking app they resort to compile it. This reminds me of this [0] interview they gave on XDA-developers:

"One of the things we’ve done in four is we’ve started pausing in between the workloads. Mostly because of thermally constrained devices like these fanless laptops, smartphones, and all that sort of thing."

If we have a CPU benchmark that tries to treat CPUs nicely and avoids any throttling, then what is the purpose of this CPU benchmark?

[0] https://www.xda-developers.com/geekbench-ceo-fireside-chat-p...

"My recommendation? If your work doesn’t involve long-running tasks that are CPU- and GPU-intensive (such as Premiere) then the new MacBook Pro should provide a considerable increase in performance."

So it's perfectly fine as long as you don't use it for Pro-grade workloads. Seems about right.

so compiling software is not a Pro-grade workload? I would say it does not fit _all_ Pro-grade workloads.

Compiling is definitely CPU intensive

But it’s usually not GPU intensive.

The implication is that taxing BOTH the CPU and the GPU will cause performance issues. Something like compiling, which is usually just CPU intensive bursts, should see a performance improvement.

This waterproof coat is fine, as long as you don't go out in continuous rainfall.

this information is still useful for someone else, like developers who doesn't care much about GPU workload

To quote Louis Rossmann, "Apple should have their discrete GPU license revoked". That was when he was repairing heat related GPU damage on like 2012 MBPs.

The Blackmagic/Apple external GPU might help, though it has its' own issues - it doesn't actually speed up Adobe apps.

https://youtu.be/TwLjimAEDL8

It may be worth turning off the discrete GPU in some instances - https://codyschrank.github.io/gSwitch/ - that makes a big difference to thermals on my current late 2013 mbpro with Nvidia GPU.

BTW - any recommendations for MB Pro cooling solutions, beyond the usual stand with a fan?

Not that anyone should be thrilled by this news but this is, to me, at least a little more reasonable. I think for a vast majority of professional workloads (video/3D modeling excluded) this is a reasonable trade off. The same way I don't complain about network latency trying to saturate my NIC. I look at performance in and around the expected load with a margin for head room.

I suspect that anyone doing big time rendering work needs a beefier desktop / external GPU anyway.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com