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Comment by mjg59 | Hacker News Reader

> "now you have more performance than they wanted you to have"

"An unthrottled CPU without any OS-level policy will generate enough heat that the case temperature may rise to levels that violate safety regulations" can certainly be interpreted as "now you have more performance than they wanted you to have", yes.

> FYI, it is painfully obvious that you're toeing some sort of company line here.

I work for a company that develops trucks. While thermal dissipation is something that we do need to worry about, I can promise that it is absolutely not at the scale involved here. I've also been pretty consistent in criticising Intel for refusing to document DPTF. Whose company line do you think I'm toeing here?

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Despite literally zero evidence of that actually being a problem in practice?

I've also been pretty consistent in criticising Intel for refusing to document DPTF. Whose company line do you think I'm toeing here?

Not Intel, but there's plenty of evidence that DPTF just cripples performance; and why else would you jump in to an article about unlocking manufacturer-crippled products with FUD like "not the correct approach"? It's like posting "may cause processor damage" and advocating for stock speeds on every article about overclocking.

For the record, I've been overclocking (not at extreme or competitive levels) since the early 90s and haven't killed any hardware because of it. The system I'm posting this from has been on a 50% overclock for over a decade and it's still rock-solid stable.

> Despite literally zero evidence of that actually being a problem in practice?

Sustained contact with metal at a temperature as low as 45C is sufficient to cause discomfort, and it's a surprisingly small rise above that before you can actually cause burns (https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/document?repid=rep1&type=pdf&d...). Skin temperature is a standard input to DPTF policies, and during my testing I was certainly able to get the skin temperature of my test laptop well above that level - DPTF would trigger throttling instead.

> why else would you jump in to an article about unlocking manufacturer-crippled products with FUD like "not the correct approach"?

DPTF defaults to a "safe" configuration, where "safe" is a euphemism for "almost unusably slow". If what you care about is your laptop not being almost unusably slow, it's reasonable to choose an approach that obtains that without introducing any additional thermal concerns. If what you care about is obtaining the absolute maximum performance possible from your hardware with no regard to any safety or longevity concerns, then yes, implementing the DPTF policy is probably not what you want to do. But recommending the latter without providing any information about the tradeoffs is irresponsible.

For a layman's overview of this, Linus from LinusTechTips gives a basic rundown of the relevant safety regulation and some numbers in one of his videos featuring the M1 Macbook Air and its cooling solution.[1]

[1]: https://youtu.be/ghDvyItIHTY?t=319

> Despite literally zero evidence of that actually being a problem in practice?

You choosing to not even look for evidence so you could make an argument in ignorance does not automatically mean it doesn't exist. This is literally the first google result for "laptop case temperature causing burns": https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4292129/

Also look at this fun condition: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erythema_ab_igne

> Temperatures between 43 and 47 °C can cause this skin condition; modern laptops can generate temperatures in this range. Indeed, laptops with powerful processors can reach temperatures of 50 °C and be associated with burns.

Some more results:

https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4n04r793

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/23164210_Thigh_Burn...

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3853603/

Maybe you should read my rebuttal first? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35026981

So your rebuttal consists of "just put it off your legs, duh". Got it.

That's a flagged and dead reply to a sibling comment which would look schizophrenic as a response to this one - on top of everything else that is already wrong with it.

Seems like there are quite a few other reasons why someone would "jump in", including being a relative expert. Maybe you could think of a few others yourself?

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