And weirdly one of the major design changes for the new M1 Pro & Max machines were significantly improved cooling. Weird how suddenly Apple cared about airflow when it was their 100w SoC in the machine instead of Intel's....
if i run same vscode dotnetcore workload on m1 air, that thing lasts atleast 10hours on battery and no heat whatsover. better, the compile time is usually faster than 3800 bucks worth dell precision (on a 1200 bucks laptop)
First off the M1 Air has no fans.
Second the MBP 16" was the one with the improved cooling, so it wasn't throttled randomly by using the wrong charging port.
And finally the whole reason the M1s are so well cooled is there's no 100W SoC, or 200W probably when you consider the additional dedicated GPU in my 16".
My M1 has a 10W TDP!
10!
I don't think the GPU alone in my 16" could have been cooled by a solution handling 10W.
-
Also note: in your other comments you keep mixing TDP and wall power draw, my 16" would have had higher wall power than my M1 Air by far.
Even the M1 Mac Mini maxed out at like 30W from the wall: https://images.anandtech.com/graphs/graph16252/119344.png
And my M1 has a lower rated version of that (10W vs 24W)
For desktops I don't care about TDP but a laptop is the exact opposite.
Your M1 Air doesn't have an M1 Pro or Max, either, which I clearly specified. Why are you talking about M1 power draw in your response when that's not the SoC in question?
> Also note: in your other comments you keep mixing TDP and wall power draw,
Power in == heat out. CPUs don't do mechanical work, all power is converted to heat.
If the 'TDP' is less than peak power draw (and is actually respected in some form), it simply means the SoC is intended to power throttle after a duration. But that's so far not the case for any of the M1's, so claimed TDP is fully irrelevant as it's seemingly not enforced in any way. Which isn't unique to Apple fwiw, AMD's claimed TDPs are equally irrelevant.
You're free to bring in your third option which clobbers it even further, but an $800 fanless machine also clobbers it so it's a perfectly valid comparison when trying to counter weird claims that Apple only just now started working on proper cooling...
tl;dr: How can you claim the old 16" is only being beat because Apple just now started to care about cooling when a fanless machine also beats it? -
Also TDP is an advertising figure but when you're talking about orders of magnitude it's a perfectly fine way to talk about parts as long as you stay consistent in TDP vs wall draw
Wall draw to wall draw, my M1 Air draws under 30W and beats a 16" drawing over 100W
TDP to TDP my M1 is 10W to a 16" closer to 100W.
In both cases it should be obvious why cooling is less of an issue...
This is completely incorrect. You cannot compare TDPs in any meaningful way except kinda within a single vendor's single generation. There's no standard definition for TDP, so it cannot be generally compared across brands.
And for most brands TDP doesn't have any useful meaning, further eliminating any value to be had from it.
> Wall draw to wall draw, my M1 Air draws under 30W and beats a 16" drawing over 100W
Are you sure? What workload(s)? How did you measure power draw? And 16" isn't a CPU/SoC, so what are you even comparing against? Your M1 Air sure as shit isn't beating the current 100w 16" after all. So I'm guessing you're comparing against a previous MBP 16" of some unknown variety, which one specifically in which configuration?
> TDP to TDP my M1 is 10W to a 16" closer to 100W.
Apple never shipped an Intel CPU with a 100w TDP in any MBP of any size. So not only is this comparison meaningless, you're not even using the right numbers. The i9-9980HK that I'm guessing you're referring to is a 45w TDP. But see above about you can't compare TDPs, they have no meaning.
The older ones got really toasty, but it's not like the XPS faired better in the thermal design department.
Both these had their own quirks, (I returned the XPS I got from my place of work twice because I couldn't stand the insane amount of coil whine)
Been running the 2019 MBP since it was released and it's been a pretty pleasant experience overal. Only issue I've had was with external displays drawing too much power, which was fixed by forcing the refresh rate to 59.98Hz.
The previous setup was closer to 200W SoC (100W each for CPU and GPU) than 100W total.
From Anandtech[0]:
> Finally, stressing out both CPU and GPU at the same time, the SoC goes up to 92W package power and 120W wall active power.
2. Yes, you can burn the battery quickly under heavy use. I've killed it easily in about 2 hours during heavy Unity work.
3. When I was doing that, I did experience heavy fan output, about as loud and as hot as my 2018 15" MacBook Pro. After the heavy utilization stopped, it cooled down much more quickly than the older Intel machine.
[0] https://www.anandtech.com/show/17024/apple-m1-max-performanc...
[1] https://www.notebookcheck.net/Apple-MacBook-Pro-14-2021-M1-P... , in the "Battery Runtime" and "Power Consumption" sections near the bottom.
In a 16” at least, the Max can go up to 92W per anandtech’s initial test, and display + ram + rest brings the wallplug draw to 120.