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Comment by stewbrew | Hacker News Reader

What I don't like about framework notebooks is that they seem to be mostly interested in speed, which is why they seemed to choose these P-series CPUs. With a notebook, I'm much more interested in energy consumption (how long can I work off grid), emissions like fan noise and the like. Why no U-series CPUs?

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The U and P series parts are actually the same dies on 12th Gen, but binned. If you set the Power Mode to Best Power Efficiency on Windows or the equivalent power limiting in Linux, you can make a P behave pretty similarly to what a U would (with the Intel DTT settings we used).

Isn't it the H and P series that use the same die, while the U series is a much smaller die (2 instead of 6 P cores)?

You are correct, I misremembered this. The packages are pin compatible, but there are different 2+8 and 6+8 dies this generation. It was 11th Gen where the 15W and 28W were the same die.

Restricting TDP is generally an option on laptops if you really wanted to. Not sure if Framework provides any out of the box TDP switching but software like ThrottleStop can do it.

Yeah. I tried locking some of my older CPUs to, say, 700MHz. Still entirely usable unless I started compiling something, say.

Issue is Intel tries to race to halt which demonstrably saves more power on average. The power consumption of your chip probably is some intrinsic quality related to how the package and die are set up.

Also on Linux most distros have thermald installed and you can change the config to limit the max temperature to defacto throttle power usage. Alternatively, you can modify the RAPL limits to cap power usage directly to taste: https://community.frame.work/t/thermal-management-on-linux-w...

I'd like to point out that Intel allows you to tune the cores for whatever profile you want. Sure, it's not "same performance, less noise", but you can get something like an 80/20 (80% performance, 20% noise) by just scaling back the core frequencies a little. I tune my intel machine down to 8x3.2 Ghz, and can run without fans (on small form factor PC), but sometimes want the full 4+Ghz, but it's loud.

This can be done application-specific, so when you launch a big game or something, it'll spin cores up to max frequency, for example.

Could you please be more specific? Are you talking about Windows or Linux? Do you mind giving some references for how to scale core frequencies application-wise? Thanks.

It's windows only, sadly. https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/download/17881/intel...

There's a very simple menu system to scale up and down the core frequencies, and to select application execution profiles. It comes with internal temp and voltage monitors, and built-in stress tests to benchmark.

My main tips are to remove thermal boost, remove core scaling (the heterogeneous frequencies it assigns when only a few cores are active vs all), and to cap all cores to 3-4Ghz, depending on the quality of your passive cooling.

No bios adjustments needed, no restarts required, and built-in watchdog to revert if things go poorly. Really nice.

Recent, huge bug though: On some platforms, it requires disabling visualization, which limits use of the WSL. That had better be fixed ASAP, it's a big deal.

Well then you are minority.

I want a portable desktop, speed I can bring with me without lugging my 35lb liquid cooler setup with its 4x140mm radiator.

I want something compact and sexy but insanely fast when I “dock” it

The success of the thin-and-light segment, and the MacBook Air in particular, suggests that OP is very much in the majority.

Thin-and-light would mean smaller battery and harder to cool though? It seems consumers are just uninformed and instead buying the sleekest option.

I've got a sleek option because lugging around a brick is a miserable experience. There's a qualitative difference between the XPS 13 that I can whip out on the train, and a desktop replacement laptop that is heavy and big enough to be a bother and barely fits in my backpack.

Power isn't really an issue - I'm never far from an outlet, and I could carry an external battery in a backpack pocket if it really bothered me.

I think a lot of the macbook air's popularity comes from it being the cheapest macbook. Some people want an apple and dont have 2-3k to spend on a laptop.

The term "ultrabook" heavily disagrees with that.

The M1 Air is a wonder as far as I'm concerned. It's very thin and light, fanless, yet I can happily do java dev on it all day and I'm not lacking in capability or waiting around for build and test runs. It rocks.

Are you running your apps in docker?

Should I?

I have docker-desktop for the things I need it for - building the odd linux native image, or running testcontainers for postgres, same as we do when building on linux - and it works great.

But for the day to day stuff, no.

I’ve been considering an M2 air with maxed out ram for development and I’ve been wondering what kind of memory pressure people with Airs are facing.

On Intel I needed 32mb for all the containers at work, with a fairly modest CPU, but I expect my own projects to be a bit lighter.

None of the reviews are useful. All useless junk about exporting 8k videos.

I have an M1 Air where I max out the 16G RAM all the time. It works because swap works painlessly for me, but I would have been really, really happy with 24G (or better 32G). It works but I have unfortunately no breathing room in RAM.

Often, I use 11-18G, rarely I use 20-50G.

Definitely go for M2 Air if you like the form factor (I prefer the M1 Air’s form factor though).

So far I haven't noticed any issues with the 16GB in my air, but then I haven't really been looking for them either. I run a couple of containers in docker desktop, my IDE (IntelliJ) and its builds/test-runs etc, a browser with a doze or so tabs, but little else of any particular 'weight'.

I have heard anecdotal reports of those on 8GB machines facing the spinning beachball from time to time. It's never happened to me.

I've got a maxed out ram M2 that I use for development.

I run Linux in Parallels with 16gb allocated and it runs great at around 50% memory pressure. MacOS compresses the memory that Linux doesn't use and it runs amazing.

We have slightly different use cases as I prefer developing in Linux as opposed to MacOS, but I'd imagine you would be fine depending on how actually memory intensive your containers are?

The thermal throttling the reviews complain about isn't a problem for me, though I prioritize power usage over raw power since I often run it off of solar.

The only person doing that kind of content is Alex Ziskind. He compares various dev tools, build times, ML tools across Apple Silicon, Intel or Mac and PCs.

https://www.youtube.com/c/AlexanderZiskind

He’s the most useful for sure. But I couldn’t find anything about using virtualisation.

Then make that a segment and stop enforcing your unrealistic expectations on the rest of us finally.

Oh wait, it already is but you don’t. I routinely engage in comment sections where a highly juiced up desktop CPU is derided for it’s “heat output” and other such nonsense.

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