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Comment by smallstepforman | Hacker News Reader

MacBookPro’s are dual GPU systens, a low power low performance Intel iris Pro and also a dedicated nVidia/AMD discrete GPU. The nVidia GPU kicks in when you run OpenGL/Metal apps or when you plug in an external monitor. My MBP is well behaved when I dont plug in an external monitor, and noisy/hot when I do. This is with both OSX and Linux. Funny enough, Haiku is silent on the same hardware (no 2nd screen though).

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Intel stopped offering Iris Pro after Skylake.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Graphics_Technology#Skyl...

The last Macbook Pro with Iris Pro graphics is the Mid-2015 15-inch Macbook Pro.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacBook_Pro#Technical_specific...

The Mac in the article in particular is a 2019 16-inch model.

It still has an Intel GPU: Intel UHD Graphics 630.

Too bad it can’t be used with external monitors. It’s probably quite power efficient.

Yes, but it is not correct to claim Macbook Pros are Iris Pros. They are Intel graphics.

Intel GPUs (including the UHD Graphics 630) can be used with external monitors. HP, Dell, Lenovo, Acer etc all do it.

In fact, in 2013-2015, Macbook Pros were available with ONLY Intel graphics, and supported external monitors.

The reason why you cannot do it with dual-GPU Macbook Pros is that Apple has their own display muxing solution that requires the discrete GPU to be powered up to use external monitors (presumably the ports are attached to the discrete GPU).

Of course it is. The 13" MBPro and Intel Air work great with external monitor.

Well the MacBook is silent even when the dGPU is on if it's rendering at 1440p HiDPI for me. Hot and noisy at normal 1440p.

Problem is, pci-e lines connected to tb3 ports is physically connected just to amd dgpu in mbp16.

They did use NVIDIA GPU's but they don't.

I am not sure about this part:

>y MBP is well behaved when I dont plug in an external monitor, and noisy/hot when I do. This is with both OSX and Linux.

Because it doesn't on my laptops and screen.

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