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

91–100 of 127 posts

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

#91

Post by simne »

wildrhythms wrote: post #70
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…

Has Apple cracked the code with the M1 Air? It's light. It runs a 'heavy OS'. Three's no fans, and no noise.

Apple have very special business model, more "all inhouse" than other major producers.

So we don't know, how much this costs for them, and even, is M1 project profitable.

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

#92

Post by kcartlidge »

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.

> 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.

With a deep-travel backlit keyboard, FreeDOS, WordPerfect 5.1, DataEase 4.53, SuperCalc 5, and JPI TopSpeed Modula-2. (Oh, and Elite+, Prince of Persia, and the Infocom back catalogue for down-time).

Seriously. My dream machine.

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

#93

Post by guilamu »

bytehowl wrote: post #88
guilamu wrote: post #49

My answer: the mind-blowingly cheap, good and passive Acer Swift 1 with a quad-core last gen pentium n6000. I've been buying dozens of those for people at work since 5 years now (first ones with n5000) and I still have to hear a single complaint about it. The only point of failure of that thing is the charging port, proprietary, not usb c.

What is your use case for those?

Web browsing, office apps, media consumption on the excellent (for the price) IPS panel.

Also to be noted : one of the lightest 14 inches on the market with an excellent battery life.

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

#94

Post by xbar »

ataru wrote: post #6

I think it is market forces. Fanless laptops can be made, but the bulk of the market seeks reasonable performance at the best price. I think it doesn't matter much, as you can take a standard laptop and restrict the clock speed, and the fan will never turn on.

You are precisely right.

And laptop marketing focuses primarily on CPU speed, which is an error. It drives running CPUs at speeds that create non-linear heat/power graphs without much consideration to total system performance.

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

#95

Post by [deleted] »

threeseed wrote: post #40
langsoul-com wrote: post #23

M1 is arm, whilst Intel and amd aren't. Perhaps there'll be general laptops with arm chips that won't have fans.

There is nothing inherently special about ARM that makes it use less power. Apple simply invested a huge amount of resources and had the benefit of optimising the SOC specifically for the OS.

[deleted]

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

#96

Post by hombre_fatal »

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.

Same. Even when I realize some process has been using 100% CPU for a while the fans still don’t turn on.

This used to be how I found runaway processes on my previous Intel based MBP.

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

#97

Post by bytehowl »

guilamu wrote: post #93
bytehowl wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is your use case for those?

Web browsing, office apps, media consumption on the excellent (for the price) IPS panel. Also to be noted : one of the lightest 14 inches on the market with an excellent battery life.

Yeah, for those kinds of tasks they should be fine. I think OP was asking about laptops useful for more involved workloads, though.

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

#98

Post by Beltalowda »

microtonal wrote: post #22
formerly_proven wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You can blame the noise of the fan on the push for crazy flat laptops though. There's no reason a still light but thicker laptop couldn't use a larger slower moving fan. Well, other than the perception of thick as heavy and thus bad. FWIW I've taken apart many laptops over many generations and the general trend seems to be that OEMs always use a cooling solution that's just-so good enough, regardless of available s…

When you give an OEM a 40 % reduction in power through a new CPU generation It's the same with workstations. Although they have plenty of room, but OEMs often install barely-capable CPU coolers that are noisy (rather than something like a large Noctua cooler that can keep most CPUs cool with barely any noise). Or another big annoyance: many OEMs (even reputable brands like Dell) install a PSU that is just enough for…

> many OEMs (even reputable brands like Dell) install a PSU that is just enough for the load.

I'm not sure what the current technology is like as I haven't built a PC in a long time, but it used to be the case that efficiency would drop off quite rapidly if you underpower it. e.g. your fancy 600W 95% efficiency PSU would only be 60% efficiency at 200W power draw.

> OEMs often install barely-capable CPU coolers that are noisy (rather than something like a large Noctua cooler that can keep most CPUs cool with barely any noise).

My old AMD Athlon mainboard came with a very rattly and noise cooler for the chipset; I ended up replacing it with an after-market heat-sink that I got for €10. Pretty bad design IMO, but it saved ~€3 on the mainboard price.

A lot of the old Atom CPUs (Atom 330 etc.) had fanless CPUs, but because they were almost always paired with an old inefficient chipset they all came with a little cooler on the chipset. Ended up replacing a few of those, too.

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

#99

Post by Beltalowda »

My ThinkPad x270 (i7-7600U) operates without using the fan for most things; only when compiling things for more than ~15 seconds do the fan turn on (and when opening Slack). Can probably tweak it a bit more by adjusting the limits and/or adjusting the upper CPU frequency limit, but I haven't bothered.

I do run Linux, and have a fairly light-weight environment (dwm etc.) I don't know how much that matters.

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

#100

Post by Gorgo »

Gorgo wrote: post #78
replygirl wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

oh no, it keeps falling over!

Aluminium and magnesium are quite light so that should not be a problem - especially not if the space previously taken up by those hot parts is filled by using a larger battery. The think may weigh 2kg instead of 1.5kg and it may be a few mm thicker. It also should have fewer problems in getting rid of heat (which translates to better performance) and the autonomy should be significantly increased due to that larger…

No post body was provided.
Post reply on HN