Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: Why are there so few fanless laptops with Intel/AMD?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 127 posts

Re: Ask HN: Why are there so few fanless laptops with Intel/AMD?

#111

Post by Daegalus »

sseagull wrote: post #60
Daegalus wrote: post #12

I was in need of this a while ago. the best I found was the Surface Pro 7 with the i5. it's fanless. runs super well, I installed Linux on it. other than that, everything else I find has weak Celerons in it.

I just bought a Surface Pro 7+ with an i5 and 8gb of memory, and am really liking it. I was looking more for a tablet (with a real OS on it), but it doubles as a laptop in a pinch. I have a more powerful desktop for heavier tasks, and this fills my portable needs very well. (Haven’t put linux on it yet, but maybe soon. WSL is filling that void for now).

Ya I just use mine for some light nighttime coding in bed or just some browsing. Fills that void super easy.

Re: Ask HN: Why are there so few fanless laptops with Intel/AMD?

#112

Post by thrdbndndn »

fauigerzigerk wrote: post #74
thrdbndndn wrote: post #28

In addition to what everyone else have already said: having a fan is hardly a disadvantage for most of customers. So the demand isn't high.

"Hot and noisy" is the most frequent complaint I hear about laptops (also previously about Intel MacBooks). I think OEMs are either misreading the market or they are forced to emphasise other strengths because they can no longer compete with Apple in terms of performance/watt.

> they can no longer compete with Apple

I think that's it, x86 isn't even close at the moment.

You said "Hot and noisy", and making it fanless would only be even hotter or, have significant performance penalty (to a point that even light users won't tolerate.)

My (Windows) ultrabook bought a few years ago could be hot and noisy (and slow) when I'm merely using browsers nowadays, can't imagine what a fanless one would do.

Re: Ask HN: Why are there so few fanless laptops with Intel/AMD?

#113

Post by NathanielK »

gushogg-blake wrote: post #7
mjevans wrote: post #4

Weight and power density are the biggest issues. Some of the lower end APUs (think tablet mode) might work out, but to literally be usable on top of a lap they aren't allowed to get that hot. Tablets mostly spend their energy budget (under normal operation) on illuminating the screen and most of the action content they see would either classify as webpages or video encoded with codecs they have hardware support for d…

Someone should make a laptop that's way heavier/thicker than current models but is also silent, cool, high-performing, and the battery lasts a week.

Just duct tape a USB-C power bank to any modern ultra low power laptop. Especially ones with optional GPUs that don't have one installed. There's even software to treat them like the secondary batteries laptops used to have as an option.[0]

[0] https://github.com/n4ru/FakeSlice

Re: Ask HN: Why are there so few fanless laptops with Intel/AMD?

#114

Post by c_o_n_v_e_x »

c0l0 wrote: post #10

Yeah, I am disappointed that fanless devices have been on the retreat these past several years. My wife's previous laptop was a Lenovo Yoga 710, with a fanless Intel Core m3-6Y30 (Skylake, 2 cores with HT). Performance was more than adequate for her work as a scientist. My current laptop is a Xiaomi Mi Air 12.5, with the same CPU installed. It's powerful enough for everything I do on the go. If I were to replace it,…

In addition to TDP, maximum ambient, case, or junction temperature is an extra dimension that needs to be considered.

Edit: Just did a search of junction temps for 10th, 11th, and 12th gen i5s... all 100C.

Re: Ask HN: Why are there so few fanless laptops with Intel/AMD?

#115

Post by waterlaw »

c0l0 wrote: post #10

Yeah, I am disappointed that fanless devices have been on the retreat these past several years. My wife's previous laptop was a Lenovo Yoga 710, with a fanless Intel Core m3-6Y30 (Skylake, 2 cores with HT). Performance was more than adequate for her work as a scientist. My current laptop is a Xiaomi Mi Air 12.5, with the same CPU installed. It's powerful enough for everything I do on the go. If I were to replace it,…

I bought a fanless quad core Apollo Lake Chromebook and installed Linux on it.

It's not perfect (headphone jack doesn't work), but been really happy so far. Probably the best $ per performance laptop I've ever purchased.

Re: Ask HN: Why are there so few fanless laptops with Intel/AMD?

#118

Post by fmajid »

Redoubts wrote: post #101
fmajid wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And it had abysmal performance, unusable for any development task.

I developed on it just fine, and that’s certainly not the only task a laptop is useful for.

This is *Hacker* News.

I had a Docker build that would take 4 hours on mine when it completed in under 15 minutes on my Mac Mini.

Re: Ask HN: Why are there so few fanless laptops with Intel/AMD?

#119

Post by culopatin »

nerdawson wrote: post #81
microtonal wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the necessity of forced cooling is still there The MacBook Air M1 is passively cooled. I used an M1 Air for a while (switched to M1 Pro) and it would only throttle slightly during very long builds. There have also been many tests where the MacBook Pro M1 (which does have a fan), the fan only spins up after minutes of loading all cores. The MacBook Air M1 shows that it is possible to have a fast [1], passively cooled…

I’ve owned an M1 Pro for a month or so and I have yet to hear the fans spin up once. A Google Meet call on my old Intel MBP would have the fans operating at max.

I’ve maxed out my cpu for 1h recently and the fans are still very hard to hear. It’s a light purr if you put your ear against it.

Re: Ask HN: Why are there so few fanless laptops with Intel/AMD?

#120

Post by rektide »

Personally I think the idea of a fanless laptop is in most cases stupid: having the option to get a lot more performance from you laptop almost universally justifies having a fan (at a low price lightweight & only moderately bulky cost).

More laptops should have fanless modes, where the processor is power limited & only passive cooling is used. I believe this would be possible on many laptops. Perhaps especially gaming laptops could potentially do very well only on their passive mode while not gaming, since they have such a large focus on cooling, but given the extreme flexibility in specifying power limits for chips that's possible these days, I feel like quite a wide range could have a pretty ok passive cooling performance.

It's be wonderful if there was a good standard review process to better explore laptop noise. That seemingly is the objection to fans, yes? Rather than totalize the ask, allowing different routes to success would imo be preferred.

Post reply on HN