MacBook Pro with i9 chip is throttled due to thermal issues, claims YouTuber • Hacker News Board

Re: MacBook Pro with i9 chip is throttled due to thermal issues, claims YouTuber

#141

Post by anothergoogler » Wed, Jul 18, 2018, 5:12 AM UTC

djsumdog wrote: post #140

slantyyz wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In fairness, Lee criticized the Dell XPS 15's thermals in a video a couple of days ago. Of course, he also posted a video last week about how he was starting to hate Apple products. If you watch a lot of his videos, you'll notice that he almost always talks about thermals, so it's not surprising to see him focus on that aspect of the MBP.

I have a Dell XPS 15 (2017) and the thermals are really bad. I saw constant throttling in my kernel logs and the laptop sometimes slowed to a crawl when compiling, running a ton of docker containers, using Light Table or even just having a ton of browser tabs open. I finally ditched it a few weeks ago, finally replacing it with a Ryzen 7 desktop. I'll admit my XPS 15 was a factory refurbished model, so maybe I just g…

The higher end Latitudes seem like a better comparison to the MBP, I'd be interested to know how they stack up (thermal and otherwise).

Re: MacBook Pro with i9 chip is throttled due to thermal issues, claims YouTuber

#142

Post by newnewpdro » Wed, Jul 18, 2018, 5:16 AM UTC

LyndsySimon wrote: post #94

newnewpdro wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That doesn't strike me as particularly noteworthy/unexpected.

You don’t think it’s unreasonable that a laptop should work in daylight?

My experience with various portable computing devices over the years is that they overheat and shutdown to protect themselves when used in direct sunlight combined with warm to hot ambient air temperatures.

I do not expect the manufacturers to overbuild the thermal capacity such that this isn't a problem, not when we're talking about portable devices which (appreciably) prioritize compactness and lightness.

In the past I would have to shade my laptop while using it to play MP3s from the passenger seat with the convertible top down while on road trips through Nevada, to prevent if from overheating in the direct sunlight. It never crossed my mind that this was some kind of failure on IBM's part, the machine was already pushing the limits of what was possible at the time in the interests of being small and light.

Re: MacBook Pro with i9 chip is throttled due to thermal issues, claims YouTuber

#143

Post by pasta » Wed, Jul 18, 2018, 5:17 AM UTC

This is why the pro desktop market is not dead.

Rendering real time path tracing while designing a house, visualising point clouds, video editing, sound design, you can do it on a laptop but the pro market will buy a desktop because it's 'cheaper', more reliable and upgradeable

Re: MacBook Pro with i9 chip is throttled due to thermal issues, claims YouTuber

#144

Post by vesrah » Wed, Jul 18, 2018, 5:21 AM UTC

wtallis wrote: post #97

dear wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah but I don't think buying a race car and use it to race should be considered as "using it in a very specialized way".

I think the better car analogy here would be buying an expensive luxury sports car and being disappointed that it couldn't keep pace with a real race car on the track. No laptop can be an equal to a real workstation unless you don't actually need a workstation to begin with.

Or buying something like a Corvette Z06, taking it to the track, and realizing they go into limp mode if you try to hot lap the thing if you're a decent driver... and this is a real thing, they do.

Re: MacBook Pro with i9 chip is throttled due to thermal issues, claims YouTuber

#145

Post by pmontra » Wed, Jul 18, 2018, 5:23 AM UTC

chx wrote: post #75

This madness is something Apple can only blame themselves for. It's Steve Jobs' ploy to kill the laptop market. He didn't need the laptop market, he had the iPhone, he knew of the iPad when he demo'd the Macbook Air. Today the entire Mac revenue https://www.statista.com/statistics/382260/segments-share-re... is below 10%. See, he have started the thin craze and everyone copied. But noone needs a thin laptop. There's…

Panasonic CF Y5, interesting machine with some uncommon features https://www.trustedreviews.com/reviews/panasonic-toughbook-c...

Re: MacBook Pro with i9 chip is throttled due to thermal issues, claims YouTuber

#146

Post by StillBored » Wed, Jul 18, 2018, 5:24 AM UTC

cozzyd wrote: post #100

Tloewald wrote: post #87

Here's a review from a dev who works at NASA: http://hrtapps.com/blogs/20180712/ Maybe the key point is he isn't running Adobe Premiere. The thermal issues in modern laptops certainly concern me, but they've been running hot for a long time now, and being thin doesn't actually change the surface area significantly.

Well the single-core test is unlikely to max out the thermal loading on the CPU. You can see how the scaling from 4-6 cores provides severely diminishing returns, perhaps due to throttling.

Uh, it turbos in the 4+Ghz range. That is by itself probably going to blow the 45W thermal rating the entire chip has. My gut instinct says that macbook probably can't even dissipate that over a long period of time. The linked test seems to indicate the truth of that, and its not unusual for a mac product, the last one that could probably continuously dissipate the combined cpu+gpu heat was that crazy ugly mac pro.

Intel didn't invent some new physics to get "high" performance cores crammed into a laptop, they are just pulling the same stuff the phone market has been doing for the past few years. Put enough thermal capacitance against the chip itself to absorb a few multiples of the chips dissipation, allow it to get really hot, and then throttle it hard. Hope, people keep their benchmark runs short.

There is a difference between socket 2011/2270 based i7/i9s and their insufficiently cooled, memory and IO bandwidth starved cousins found in laptops. Even a fairly low end desktop is going to stomp the most expensive laptop you can find simply due to physics. Being able to dissipate more heat means higher performance. Its possible to move the curve up/down depending on fab processes, or micro-arch, but these days there aren't any miracle cures. More power equals more performance.

Re: MacBook Pro with i9 chip is throttled due to thermal issues, claims YouTuber

#147

Post by eropple » Wed, Jul 18, 2018, 5:25 AM UTC

djsumdog wrote: post #140

slantyyz wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In fairness, Lee criticized the Dell XPS 15's thermals in a video a couple of days ago. Of course, he also posted a video last week about how he was starting to hate Apple products. If you watch a lot of his videos, you'll notice that he almost always talks about thermals, so it's not surprising to see him focus on that aspect of the MBP.

I have a Dell XPS 15 (2017) and the thermals are really bad. I saw constant throttling in my kernel logs and the laptop sometimes slowed to a crawl when compiling, running a ton of docker containers, using Light Table or even just having a ton of browser tabs open. I finally ditched it a few weeks ago, finally replacing it with a Ryzen 7 desktop. I'll admit my XPS 15 was a factory refurbished model, so maybe I just g…

YMMV, but in addition to a dodgy (manufacturer defect) and oddly designed (strangely shaped modifier keys) keyboard, my HP Spectre got really hot under comparatively minor load.

Re: MacBook Pro with i9 chip is throttled due to thermal issues, claims YouTuber

#148

Post by StillBored » Wed, Jul 18, 2018, 5:29 AM UTC

r00fus wrote: post #60

owenversteeg wrote: post #17

I keep seeing thermal issues come back to bite some of the smartest companies with products designed by the world's best engineers. Everything from batteries to laptops to phones is severely affected by heat, and improper thermal design can lead to some huge issues. For example, the biggest thing affecting battery life is thermal load. The biggest thing affecting the maximum sustained power of a laptop or phone is th…

Is the Intel upgrade treadmill is starting to show its age? How much longer can we keep making the chips "faster" when the tradeoff is increasingly just more thermal issues? Can't wait for a decent A-series chip MacBook.

Why do you think putting an ARM in a laptop will solve anything? If you want 5-8 year old x86 performance buy a HP envy and see how well your full blown desktop apps run.

https://www.cnet.com/reviews/hp-envy-x2-snapdragon-835-revie...

Re: MacBook Pro with i9 chip is throttled due to thermal issues, claims YouTuber

#149

Post by lgregg » Wed, Jul 18, 2018, 5:43 AM UTC

kalleboo wrote: post #33

It's summer now and as soon as I plug my MacBook Pro 2017 in to charge, it starts throttling itself due to the heat of the charging battery. Same thing happened to the 2012 I had before. These things just don't have adequate cooling.

I have to run an accessory fan stand under my MBP.

Re: MacBook Pro with i9 chip is throttled due to thermal issues, claims YouTuber

#150

Post by StillBored » Wed, Jul 18, 2018, 5:44 AM UTC

ebikelaw wrote: post #134

shub wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're not that different, either. It's been a long time since high-performance cores were executing the instructions as fetched and not translating into µops. The stuff Intel does on their chips works on ARM too. People are doing it, and it's working[0]. That makes a hell of a lot more difference on throughput than what ISA is implemented. [0] https://fuse.wikichip.org/news/1316/a-look-at-caviums-new-hi...

Actually the x86 instruction format is key to Intel's performance dominance. It happens to be rather dense in terms of instruction per byte, and it turns out that instruction cache hit rate (and iTLB hit rate) are extremely important to high performance. Rather than the naive view that x86 is somehow saddled with its ancient and ugly instruction set, it's actually all of the RISC-like architectures that turn out to b…

The other way to think about it is like the v7 thumb modes in comparison to the original 32-bit predicated instruction set. X86 has a lot of less than ideal instructions, but they are uncommonly used. So the core instruction set is quite dense and high performance.

Intel is learning (or knows, depending on your perspective, see goldmont) how to build highly efficient cores too, but like ARM haven't quite figured out how to build a super high performance one that is crazy efficient. ARM's continue to be quite efficient but not particularly performant, while intel's continue to be quite peformant but not particularly efficient.

Either way, the trend is pretty clear at this point more power dissipation=more performance.