Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

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My 16” is a huge disappointment. After swearing off Intel PCs after a disaster ours X1 Carbon, I switched back to a 2013 15” until this month. Figured after six months bugs would be ironed out. Wrong. I’m seeing two major glitches that have macrumors threads dozens of pages long: 1) with an external display connected, dGPU utilization shoots up to 20W at idle. (The rest of machine draws well under 10W at idle.) That wouldn’t be a big deal if the CPU and GPU didn’t share a tight 70W power budget. 2) when connected to an external monitor or dock—I’ve tried two different TB3 docks—the machine kernel panics regularly, usually waking up from sleep.

I’m torn. I don’t want to return the machine because everything else is crap. At least the 16” works well as a laptop so long as you don’t plug anything into the ports. But Apple’s Q&A has seriously gone down the toilet ever since Steve Jobs died. Clearly him throwing staplers at people was the glue holding Apple together.

when connected to an external monitor or dock—I’ve tried two different TB3 docks—the machine kernel panics regularly, usually waking up from sleep.

I had a similar problem, and it turned out that the dock needed a driver. I don't think I've installed a driver for an external device since I switched to Macs years ago, so it never occurred to me that something like a dock would need a driver.

But it turns out that once I installed the vendor's driver, the problems all went away. I'm not sure who's fault that is.

I've had neverending problems with sleep mode on the Macs I've owned (2012 Mac Mini, now 2016 MacBook usually docked) - never really worked out the issue other than entirely disabling sleep when connected to power.

Since 10.15.4, my 16" started having kernel panics while waking up from sleep. Disabling Power Nap seems to mitigate this.

While this is an awful stopgap solution, at least I can get back to work.

Fixed in the latest beta.

I’m on the latest beta and it still kernel panics for me with the same message.

My partner is a graphic designer who loathed her 13" macbook that her work got her. She finally got an upgrade to a 16", i9, 64 gigs of ram.

It runs adobe software like total shit.

I think it's something to do with Catalina + accessing files in Google Drive File Stream + Adobe.

It runs illustrator horribly.

It's basically the saddest thing I've ever seen.

I think I'll get her a 17" XPS for christmas this year.

For what it's worth, I have _never_ had good luck with "big vendor" software (like Adobe) and using any sort of synced cloud-based filestore. I have had untold issues with things and as soon as I moved files local, everything magically went away. Might try that!

You can also set the relevant folders to keep the files always available offline.

Any third-party antivirus or other corporate compliance-ware? Google FS and AV don't work so well together.

I have both of the issues you describe.

Unfortunately, while the kernel panics will most likely be fixed eventually (10.15.4 is a complete shitshow, even by Catalina standards), it seems the dGPU is actually working as designed with the high idle power draw. If you search for “navi multiple monitor power draw” you can find reports of desktop AMD cards that predate the 16” MacBook Pro that exhibit the exact same behaviour. It’s something to do with memory clocks and mismatched resolutions/refresh rates between monitors, and I very much doubt it will ever be addressed via software (if it even can be).

Very annoying as it causes the fans to spin up audibly when you put it under the slightest stress.

Like you I don’t know what to do. I’m able to return it due to the extended return window they have currently, but I have absolutely no intent of switching to Windows or Linux.

> you search for “navi multiple monitor power draw” you can find reports of desktop AMD cards that predate the 16” MacBook Pro that exhibit the exact same behaviour. It’s something to do with memory clocks and mismatched resolutions/refresh rates between monitors, and I very much doubt it will ever be addressed via software (if it even can be).

At least when operating in clamshell mode with one external monitor, I can get the power usage to drop from 20W down to 5W by using switchresx and dropping the refresh rate from 59.88 to 56.88 Hz. When I do that, even light WebGL work doesn’t cause it to exceed 7-8 watts.

It sounds like some work around for the special case of a single external monitor with the internal display closed isn’t kicking in like it’s supposed to.

From the 60+ page MacRumours forum thread about the issue, a lot of people don't have the issue at all in clamshell mode (even without the SwitchResX hackery).

My understanding of the issue is that the card has variable memory clocks to save power. However, to avoid visual distortion/tearing, the clocks can only be changed during the monitor's v-blank. However, when you have multiple monitors, presumably you would need extra circuitry or at least some mechanism ensure each monitor is in sync, or to detect when the blanking intervals match when using monitors with different refresh rates. I don't have a strong knowledge of this sort of thing, so I don't know how exactly this is achieved, but in this case AMD has "solved" the problem by simply running the memory clocks at full tilt 100% of the time, thereby avoiding the need to precisely time changes in speed.

Right. The problem shouldn’t happen at all in clamshell mode because there is just one monitor. But it seems like in certain configurations the MacOS or the driver gets confused.

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