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Comment by stagger87 | Hacker News Reader

Which is still a 1.2 GHz base clock.

Because wasting energy on a 4 GHz base clock is completely pointless (and so is your criticism) if you can adjust frequency as needed. 99% of the time 1GHz is sufficient. It’s only when you launch the browser that a faster CPU is useful, not when you’re reading through a website

> Because wasting energy on a 4 GHz base clock is completely pointless

That's not how base clock works. Base clock is not min clock. Base clock is what it's "guaranteed" to hit under sustained load if TDP is respected. It's the TDP clock. A 4ghz base clock CPU will still be far, far below that when idle.

The problem is that it ramps up by 250 Mhz increments, over a period of several seconds, and that can be extremely noticeable in some workflows.

I went from an 6700HQ (2.6 Ghz base) to a 10710U (1.1 Ghz base) and the difference is definitely there, and it's jarring enough to the point where I kind of regret it. It feels like a huge step backwards, despite the latter CPU being four generations ahead.

Did you make sure that your turbo button was pressed? Honestly, this is why I just stick to naturally aspirated CPUs.

The first thing I notice in that comparison is that one chip is rated for a 45W TDP and other is 15-25W. While I think these cross-segment comparisons are exciting and show great progress, it's just not fair to the electrons.

Surprising. What device are you using?

This does not seem to be the case for my i7-8565U nor my older m3-something. The 8565U for example feels just as snappy as my desktop i7-6700, except it’ll throttle after about 30s.

> The problem is that it ramps up by 250 Mhz increments

Isn't this completely down to the cpu frequency governor in the OS?

My impression was that this "stepping" is customisable, at least in linux, I regularly step my CPU manually even.

I'm not sure what Apple has here, but maybe it's not what you expect.

I'm on Windows 10 and I'm not aware of a built-in method to change the CPU multiplier.

How windows does things and how other operating systems do things, in the wise words of Jayne Cobb "ain't exactly but similar".

With modern noteboock CPUs the base clock is only a loose indicator for how a CPU will perform. The CPU will still be downclocked and undervolted depending on the load.

Don't you know? Higher is always better! 5 Ghz in my laptop, plz!

And turbos up to 3.8 GHz. We’ll see, but I suspect it’ll spend a lot of time above 3 GHz

At a 9W TDP the chip wont spend any more than a few seconds at boost clock.

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