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

#221

Post by clappski » Wed, Jul 18, 2018, 8:47 AM UTC

saas_co_de wrote: post #187

gambiting wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same here. 13 inch XPS, coil whine is insane. Had the motherboard replaced 3 times, no improvement. It was a replacement for my ageing Air 13", and I honestly wish I didn't swap. At first glance it's just as nice, the build quality and form factor are identical - and then you start using it, and see that Dell charges just as much if not more than Apple, but quality of several different elements is ages behind apple.

I was thinking about getting an XPS 15 soon so this gives me pause. > Dell charges just as much if not more than Apple Not even close. XPS 15 with 6 core, 16GB RAM, 256GB SSD is $1500. MBP is $2400 for the same specs. What I really like on the XPS 15 is the 97 WHR battery. I haven't seen any other notebook with this capacity.

I bought a Nvidia/i7 XPS 15 in March and have never understood the coil whine complaints, yeah there is some but nothing too bad (comparable to my 2012 MacBook Air). Alternately everyone else has super hearing or I’m deaf, YMMV.

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

#222

Post by zaarn » Wed, Jul 18, 2018, 8:48 AM UTC

coldtea wrote: post #208

wukerplank wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In all fairness: If you sell a >3000€ laptop, people should expect to get the full value out of it. Maybe it's hard to cool CPUs in thin laptops. But then don't let people pay for expensive upgrades that have no performance benefit.

> In all fairness: If you sell a >3000€ laptop, people should expect to get the full value out of it. The full value out of it includes: 1) It not being short-lived by rampant overheating (even if it's within cpu tolerances) 2) It being quiet as you expect a MBP to be It's not supposed to render 6K 3D all day at full speed in the tropics...

I think it's supposed to render for a few dozen minutes fairly fast though and it fails at that. And I don't think it was 6K 3D footage either, considering the render time it was probably closer to 1080p60.

"You're using it wrong" (ie, "it's not supposed for" with different wording) has been a long time excuse for many Apple failures at this point and I'm tired of it.

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

#223

Post by vivan » Wed, Jul 18, 2018, 8:51 AM UTC

This isn't a problem solely with the MacBook Pro - it affects most of the "ultralight" laptops these days.

My XPS 13 (lovely machine, thermal issues aside) has been RMA'd 3 times because it overheated. It still gets far too hot and throttles itself so I've had to underclock it and turn off "turbo" mode. Other users have mentioned that simply repasting the CPU has caused massive improvements in temps, but I'm personally not comfortable with messing around inside a $2000 laptop.

Users shouldn't have to cripple their hardware or actually fix components to make it work properly.

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

#224

Post by amiga-workbench » Wed, Jul 18, 2018, 8:53 AM UTC

MBCook wrote: post #39

symfoniq wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed. What ever happened to product differentiation?

To be fair they’ve always been bumping up against this since they don’t like to put tons of fans in their laptops. While this obviously shouldn’t happen, it seems like something you could easily predict might be a flaw if you knew that one had to exist.

Oh they put the fans in there, they just don't spin them up until components are half desoldering themselves off the board.

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

#225

Post by Namesareapain » Wed, Jul 18, 2018, 8:57 AM UTC

cmurf wrote: post #21

Is this throttling in the chip itself? Or is it something that e.g. Linux (the kernel) needs to be taught specifically for make/model? Or some combination of the two? And is it possible that the in-chip limiter is more of an emergency limit, and hitting it regularly can result in long term consequences if the kernel doesn't do aggressive enough limiting? I just see really different behavior with heat, fans, and kerne…

I am not sure why you are referring to Linux (macos kernel is XNU), but the firmware of the chip is in charge of controlling the CPU clockspeed and the only reason it is hitting this limiter is because the CPU does not have correct cooling, nothing to do with the OS.

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

#226

Post by aequitas » Wed, Jul 18, 2018, 8:59 AM UTC

paulmd wrote: post #206

aequitas wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When working as intern at an Apple store more than 10 years back the instructions from Apple for reassembly would always tell to put a huge amount of thermal grease on the CPU. So much that it would be squirted out from under the heatblock in large blobs. I always found it odd as I was used to add just as much as was needed without spilling over. Never read any research on it though so I'm curious what was the right…

If a bare-die CPU or GPU is not fully covered, the uncovered portions will rapidly become hot and the chip may die (especially if the thermal sensors are covered and cannot detect this). This is different from modern desktop processors where there is an IHS to help spread the heat around - there is a very real danger to insufficient paste application on a bare die. In contrast, since modern thermal pastes are non-con…

I think that might be the reason indeed. It's better to err on the safe side.

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

#227

Post by Namesareapain » Wed, Jul 18, 2018, 9:05 AM UTC

endorphone wrote: post #48

nodesocket wrote: post #7

That's seems to contradict a recent benchmark/post [1] which showed impressive CPU performance from the i9 MacBook Pro. [1] http://hrtapps.com/blogs/20180712/

They really do test different things. In this case he is testing video renders from Premiere Pro, which renders for tens of minutes at 100%. It's apparently an outrageously inefficient app as well as the Windows version of it renders the same output in a fraction of the time (which invalidates it as a test, really). All modern chips thermally throttle. Run a heavy AVX2 workload and you'll often go below the so-called…

BS! All modern chips do not thermally throttle!

Only ones in systems that have not been designed correctly!

The fact that the Aero x15 he tested with the 2.2Ghz base clock 6 core i7 can all core boost to 3.1Ghz in the same workload that brings the macbook pro far below it's base clock speed proves that!

P.S, it does not matter what program it is running, throttling is a hardware flaw!

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

#228

Post by andromeduck » Wed, Jul 18, 2018, 9:07 AM UTC

gaius wrote: post #219

coldtea wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which "creative" workloads? Video, 3D, and photography mostly require sustained GPU. For audio, it's more the CPU.

I expect the GPU generates heat as well. Which is why all the interest in external enclosures. This entire thread is baffling to me. Everyone rushing to justify buying a new high performance laptop which they don’t mind throttling because they never needed the performance in the first place??

Does the internal GPU generate enough heat to throttle under typical conditions? Having the option for external GPUs is a completely different story.

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

#229

Post by saas_co_de » Wed, Jul 18, 2018, 9:14 AM UTC

paulmd wrote: post #214

saas_co_de wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> consists of reducing transistor size It used to. The problem here is that they have not been able to ship next gen chips and so they started shipping a 6-core chip on the same process as the old 4-core, and that doesn't work so well.

The chip works fine. Apple used an insufficient cooling solution, Dell XPS laptops with a better cooling solution are doing fine.

The new chip has the exact same TDP rating as the old one. Unless Apple has made their thermal solution worse (highly unlikely) it is Intel that is fudging the TDP ratings.

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

#230

Post by ant6n » Wed, Jul 18, 2018, 9:14 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…

Most memory is data.

Code density is important, but you can just double the icache. Given that icache is often smaller than dcache, it seems that's not the major bottleneck.

Also, if code density is so important, why did arm drop Thumb when they switched to 64bit?