Macs Are Slower Than PCS. Here’s Why
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I was genuinely fascinated by the number of people that were surprised when the i9s in Macbooks were thermally throttling. Additionally I ended up in a bit of a reddit argument with someone who was adamant that the ipad pro can maintain max GPU output without active cooling.
I guess no matter how much people understand tech, we still want the biggest specs in our computers, even if we sometimes choose to overlook the actual limiting factors.
Either move away the heat, which needs things like heatpipes and fans and stuff that dissipates... or create less heat.
So if you've got no more place for bigger fans, more heatpipes, more surface area to dissipate heat, you can only start to create less heat by throttling your chips.
I think if MBPs were 5 mm thicker, you would have no heat problems at all because you could just build them different.
Make sure laptop manufacturers actually tell people about things like this and give it five years or so. After that, people should have gotten used to the fact that a new computer probably isn't twice as fast as the previous generation.
I'm not using my MBP to render 4k video or maxing all cores of the CPU for sustained periods.
It seems clear to me that for the casual/developer segment, that has eaten up the entire marketshare, having short bursts of peak performance on six cores is perfectly fine for compiling/coding/browsing workloads.
You'll have a hard time convincing me that sustained 100% cpu tasks should be run on portable hardware. Use remote desktop/SSH and a VM/Mac Pro if you need to hit maximum TDP for long periods, RDP has great in-house latency and has the added benefit of your lap not becoming lava.
There's a much better pattern for these tasks, and it isn't using hardware designed to be portable. Just because you can doesn't mean you should.
But aren't MBP's pitched at these types of users as the tool for this type of job? I mean, if you look at the blurb at https://www.apple.com/macbook-pro/ it's pretty much the selling point.
We may know better because we like to understand the underlying tech. But pretty much every content and media producer I've run into over the years isn't that interested. Pretty much in the same way that I'm really not that interested in how my old field engineer company motor's mechanicals work as long as it didn't break down 400 miles from home.
However, like I said, there are superior solutions available for these content/media producers.
Am I supposed to feel bad for them not optimising a tool that is apparently critical for their throughput and suffering mediocrity as a result?
There's an information asymmetry here and if they don't put the effort in to squeeze extra performance out of their equipment then either:
A) Someone who is putting this minimal effort into actually choosing the best tool for their job will usurp them with greater productivity.
B) Render times really aren't a bottleneck compared to the struggle of coming up with content ideas/filming the actual content -- slightly longer running tasks while people slack off and drink coffee are just fine.
I suspect it's actually the latter hence this is really a non-issue.
Linus Media Group have a small render farm, and don't render on any ultrabook, let alone Apples. Its not like they don't know there isn't really the expectation to be able to do that a full speed.
I can completely understand why Apple have gone for the 'provide burst capacity, but keep quiet for as long as possible' route. If you looking to tilt absolutely max performance out of a piece of silicon you just don't buy in that form factor. Linus misunderstands the market, not Apple.
This has been avoided in the phone because Apple are not constrained by what Intel hand them in that space. Maybe things will change with an ARM MBP?
The 'gamer science' scene is obsessed with it, but cooling a processor to 40 degrees for the most part is just a waste of energy, which in a battery powered laptop, is important.
The reality is that these chips will run at 95 degrees for decades.
That tends to be less and less true as semiconductor feature sizes decrease - there are thermal runaway phenomena that can absolutely threaten long-term endurance in CPUs, GPUs or other electronic components. At temperatures as high as 95C, you'll also have to worry about endurance in the packaging, due to e.g. thermal stress. This is a genuine issue and the gamers are quite right in being concerned about it - in fact, their rather extensive experience with running stuff in out-of-spec, "overclocked" conditions means that they can speak with some authoritativeness here.
Not if the keyboard breaks first :)