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Re: undefined

#21
post #2

Oh yes! My brand new macbook pro had been sitting at 300% kernel process usage ever since I bought it. I thought it was just ridiculously badly optimized. Why doesn’t the system inform you when it’s spinning it’s wheels with no work just to cool down it’s chassis?

I think that’s sort of what the kernel_task usage is now: it’s minimally documented, but I guess the scheduler is now designed to attempt to throttle the system it it’s overheating.

To monitor throttling, you may run:

    pmset -g thermlog

Re: undefined

#22

I tried this and it doesn't work. Turns out my MacBook was throttling to 30% due to overheating. This happens more frequently if you drive the GPU with an external monitor. Unfortunately the OS does nothing to notify you of overheating and throttling, which is an insanely stupid oversight by apple. I only found out because I noticed that the computer ran fine while running the AC, so I installed an app through Brew c…

Unfortunately this is a very common problem with basically all modern high-end laptops that have a macbook-like form factor (e.g. not bulky gaming laptops with lots of cooling & ventilation). It's just not physically possible to make a machine that combines high end power hungry hardware, adequate cooling for that hardware, and a compact form factor. It's very sad that this is such a widespread problem and that there…

At one point in time I went whole-hog on a 17 inch gaming laptop that I treated as basically a folding desktop, it's this absolutely garantuan ASUS thing where the entire rear of it is one huge heatsink unit for the CPU and GPU. If you intentionally consider it from the design perspective of something that will only be relocated once every few weeks or months, and is certainly a lot lighter than a mini-ITX desktop PC and traditional monitor, it can be a good solution. Sadly, the touchpad on it is nowhere near as well refined as the apple version.

I can comfortably leave that thing spending 8-12 hours to encode a HEVC/H265 codec 4K video without worrying about it melting down.

Re: undefined

#23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately this is a very common problem with basically all modern high-end laptops that have a macbook-like form factor (e.g. not bulky gaming laptops with lots of cooling & ventilation). It's just not physically possible to make a machine that combines high end power hungry hardware, adequate cooling for that hardware, and a compact form factor. It's very sad that this is such a widespread problem and that there…

At one point in time I went whole-hog on a 17 inch gaming laptop that I treated as basically a folding desktop, it's this absolutely garantuan ASUS thing where the entire rear of it is one huge heatsink unit for the CPU and GPU. If you intentionally consider it from the design perspective of something that will only be relocated once every few weeks or months, and is certainly a lot lighter than a mini-ITX desktop PC…

Even "gaming" laptops have come a decent ways in size/form factor. I picked up a Zephyrus G15 a bit ago and it's pretty portable while having the ability to sink a good amount of wattage.

Re: undefined

#24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At one point in time I went whole-hog on a 17 inch gaming laptop that I treated as basically a folding desktop, it's this absolutely garantuan ASUS thing where the entire rear of it is one huge heatsink unit for the CPU and GPU. If you intentionally consider it from the design perspective of something that will only be relocated once every few weeks or months, and is certainly a lot lighter than a mini-ITX desktop PC…

Even "gaming" laptops have come a decent ways in size/form factor. I picked up a Zephyrus G15 a bit ago and it's pretty portable while having the ability to sink a good amount of wattage.

yeah I just checked and the modern version of my 17 inch laptop monster, which is about 8.1 pounds, is down to 5.95 pounds in a 17 inch version with an intel 11800 something mobile CPU, and geforce 3070 in it. Probably still has a huge external power brick.

Re: undefined

#25

I tried this and it doesn't work. Turns out my MacBook was throttling to 30% due to overheating. This happens more frequently if you drive the GPU with an external monitor. Unfortunately the OS does nothing to notify you of overheating and throttling, which is an insanely stupid oversight by apple. I only found out because I noticed that the computer ran fine while running the AC, so I installed an app through Brew c…

It seems like a good marketing ploy to me. The default behaviour for an apple owner is to buy a new one when it's not running as well as theyd like

Re: undefined

#26

I tried this and it doesn't work. Turns out my MacBook was throttling to 30% due to overheating. This happens more frequently if you drive the GPU with an external monitor. Unfortunately the OS does nothing to notify you of overheating and throttling, which is an insanely stupid oversight by apple. I only found out because I noticed that the computer ran fine while running the AC, so I installed an app through Brew c…

Unfortunately this is a very common problem with basically all modern high-end laptops that have a macbook-like form factor (e.g. not bulky gaming laptops with lots of cooling & ventilation). It's just not physically possible to make a machine that combines high end power hungry hardware, adequate cooling for that hardware, and a compact form factor. It's very sad that this is such a widespread problem and that there…

> It's just not physically possible to make a machine that combines high end power hungry hardware, adequate cooling for that hardware, and a compact form factor.

My 16” Intel MBP has this issue. My 13” M1 MBP does not.

Re: undefined

#27

I tried this and it doesn't work. Turns out my MacBook was throttling to 30% due to overheating. This happens more frequently if you drive the GPU with an external monitor. Unfortunately the OS does nothing to notify you of overheating and throttling, which is an insanely stupid oversight by apple. I only found out because I noticed that the computer ran fine while running the AC, so I installed an app through Brew c…

Have you tried using 'powermetrics'?

    sudo powermetrics --samplers smc |grep -i "GPU die temperature"

    sudo powermetrics --samplers smc |grep -i "CPU die temperature"
It's proactive, but at least it is a useful tool.

Re: undefined

#28
post #16
post #3

My 2019 16-inch MacBook Pro (2.3ghz i9/64gb ram) becomes unusable with 2 of the LG 5k monitors plugged in (one on each side). Worst MacBook I have ever owned.

There is a fix coming for the 5500m heat/wattage issues in the next OS thankfully. The MacOS drivers for RDNA are apparently just crap. This problem wasn’t present on the Vega GPUs, and it isn’t present while booted into Windows. To think this lasted all the way through Catalina and Big Sur is insane.

Where did you read this? I'd love to know more.

Do you know if this fix also applies to the 5300m?

Re: undefined

#29
I suspect there's another related reason for high kernel_task % CPU: your battery is very low and your charger is underpowered. It seems to throttle your CPU usage to avoid exhausting the battery while charging, and this throttling shows up in the same way as thermal throttling.

I discovered this by accident when I plugged my MBP into my phone charger instead of my laptop charger. I need to mark the cables somehow, or replace the phone charger with a laptop charger just in case...

Re: undefined

#30

I also recently discovered that something like 12% of CPU on my 2020 macbook air is used whenever I'm in a room with anything greater than perfect silence, by 'coreaudiod', because it apparently is constantly listening to the microphone built in near the keyboard and spending cpu cycles trying to filter out background noise. Apparently running the signal desktop app in the background is enough to keep coreaudiod cons…

> If you really want to see slack waste CPU and battery, leave a channel open that somebody has pasted a high FPS animated GIF into

This is basically an attack especially if you post a couple of them. My god.

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