Hacker News Reader

Comment by dingle_thunk | Hacker News Reader

I suppose given that this is two M1 Max glued together, assuming cooling is a solved problem, the max SOC power consumption just twice as high as usual, plus interconnect overhead. Right? Based on the thermal and power consumption characteristics of previous chips I would not be surprised if say ~120W is the max power draw of this thing.

edit: Of course the M1 max only shipped in laptops, so... who knows.

View on HN

The M1 Max hits 100w in a laptop form factor with 'real' workloads when hitting CPU and GPU simultaneously (or at least not parasitic ones like prime95 & furmark). So this is probably >200w, unless it's been power limited and thus performs worse than 2x M1 Max's do anyway.

Does the M1 Max throttle when hit with hitting CPU & GPU at the same time? 14 inch would be most interesting to me.

> assuming cooling is a solved problem

I’d assume that’s what most of the chonk is about, no?

> Based on the thermal and power consumption characteristics of previous chips I would not be surprised if say ~120W is the max power draw of this thing.

The Max could be brought up to 90W or so.

I wouldn't assume heat is solved as it's been Apples weak point in the past. The cube would crack, g5 iMac's would melt capacitors, MacBooks would burn users' laps.

Those issues were all almost 20 years ago.

If you think this is still a problem, you haven't used any recent Macs. The current MB Air and MB Pro both run very cool even under prolonged heavy loads.

Apple's management of any and all heat issues has been far better than any competitors for a while now.

> Apple's management of any and all heat issues has been far better than any competitors for a while now.

Only if you define "for a while" as "since a year ago with the introduction of the M1".

Apple refused to make a thicker laptop or one with better ventilation to adequately cool the CPUs & GPUs they were sticking in them. They were among if not the worst of them all at handling the heat of the components they were using. Until the M1 Pro & Max rolled around, anyway, and suddenly they got thicker, with feet that raise it farther off the desk, and absolutely massive amount of vents all over 3 sides of the machine. Curious timing on that...

The last intel macs run way too hot still. They get up over 80dC. The 2014 ones would hard reboot when building large Java projects.

To be fair the current Dells do the same.

Haha what are you smoking, my 2018 macpro laptop was constantly throttling under heavy load, its thermal management was terrible

I didn't say that particular model was perfect. I said Apple has been doing far better than competitors. Which is true. I set up and used hundreds of Macs and hundreds of PCs in 2018 as part of my job. I am pretty confident as to which performed better overall thermally.

And of course, Apple has made huge progress since then (M1, better thermal designs, new fan designs which are quieter and more efficient) whereas PC makers have made basically zero progress.

You said "Those issues were all almost 20 years ago."

The "huge progress since then" was a year ago.

Your timeline is a little bit made up.

Two thirds of the volume seems to be dedicated to cooling. Assuming they’re not complete idiots, they must be doing something!

> Assuming they’re not complete idiots

https://www.theverge.com/22967776/apple-magic-mouse-charging...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com