Comment by bigyabai | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bigyabai | Hacker News Reader

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> Macs barely got faster for ages with Intel

Intel chips were getting faster. It's well documented (and glaringly obvious in the i9 16") that Apple just didn't want to accommodate the full TDP. They tweaked their ACPI tables to run the chips until they hit the junction temp so they were both constantly hot and constantly throttling. Apple tweaked all of their Intel chips in this way, which was a software solution to the Apple-designed hardware simply being unable to cope with the thermal stress.

We know this because the Intel Macbook Pro chassis was only ever used to run Apple Silicon chips that were passively cooled, not Pro/Max variants. The old MBP chassis designs are so awful that Apple doesn't consider them viable for cooling ARM CPUs. I blame Ive, not Intel.

> Intel chips were getting faster

Do you consider margin-of-error, single-digit gains to be worth arguing over? Intel offered 14nm for 4 years straight: Skylake, Kaby Lake, Coffee Lake, Coffee Lake Refresh—four different names, same process node, and 3-7% gains each year. Such fast.

> The old MBP chassis designs are so awful that Apple doesn't consider them viable for cooling ARM CPUs

You don't put a 15-20W chip into a thermal system built for 90W+. The old chassis wasn't "too awful" for Apple Silicon, it was completely unnecessary.

The 13" MBP chassis is not built for 90W though, let alone 50W. Intel was making 30W i7 chips and they were still throttling in that chassis. I think we have enough benefit of hindsight to blame Apple's egregious and power-hungry ACPI tables for not throttling to safe temps. I own several other laptops that do not hit 90c, ever.

What's pretty sad, is they could have just slightly underclocked and undervolted the Intel chips for around 95% of the performance without the janky throttling all the time. Whenever I'd spin up my background services in Docker the laptop was nearly unusable for 4-5 minutes and even then should have done better.

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