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Comment by partiallypro | Hacker News Reader

Most consumers don't care about wattage on a desktop, and when you compare the prices they are similar and it loses.

Many people do care - many Americans have subsidized low power but that’s not globally true and even if your power is free a hot CPU means you’re listening to fan noise and heating up the room. In a cold winter that’s not bad but I knew people who had to do things like leave their office doors open for cooling.

the people you describe aren't buying $7k desktops

They certainly are. Being able to pay for the extra power doesn’t mean you like fan noise, not to mention the people who are doing things like video production in a trailer where overheating is a concern. I used to support scientists who didn’t appreciate the heat 4 workstations made in their shared offices, either.

A dedicated GPU with more die area and its own large fan will run both cooler and quieter when its power limit is reduced to match the performance of the Apple chip.

More watts in = more heat out.

It doesn’t matter if the cooling solution gets the chops’s surface temperature lower if it’s heating the room twice as fast.

Chip surface temperature is not a useful metric for this purpose.

The die area matters in terms of how much performance you can still get out of it when lowering the power to match up with the (not actually) more efficient integrated chip.

If Apple clocked their GPU to match the performance of a comparable dedicated chip, it would be just as inefficient, noisy and hot. Except they can not do even do that. They turned a limitation of the design into a supposed feature.

>many Americans have subsidized low power

Source?

You have confused HN population with general US population

Kind of. I did a quick comparison this morning between a MacPro and a similar high-end Dell workstation and the prices are similar.

https://twitter.com/0xDEADBEEFCAFE/status/166747612998729728...

I wonder how long you have to run the Apple chip to save enough on electricity to make the price difference worthwhile? Does it only drop to one human lifetime in places where energy cost is insanely high?

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