M2 MacBook Pro Thermal Concerns

https://mjtsai.com/blog/2022/07/05/m2-mac-thermal-concerns/

by rukshn • 4 years ago

12 11 4 years ago

rowanG0775• 4 years ago

Wow this really saddens me. The reason I'm donating to Asahi Linux is to get a non thermally constrained small laptop. Currently I have a liquid metaled 9310 XPS 13 with thermal pads to connect the heatsink with the case. I still have to disable turbo boost to not have it throttle under sustained load. And the huge cavaet that you can burn yourself on the underside if it's under heavy you load.

I'd hoped I could stop hacking around soon and get a sane thermal experience. But this shows Apple doesn't really care either. A non combined workload brings it to it's knees.

foldr• 4 years ago

It generally makes sense for a laptop to allow the CPU to do more work than can be sustainably cooled, since short duration high CPU workloads are common. You could view such a laptop as ‘thermally constrained’, or you could view it as maximizing the performance potential of the chasis by allowing a temporary boost. (Really, the performance of any practical laptop is heavily constrained by considerations of cooling and battery life.)

I think these complaints would make more sense if you specified some specific performance figures that you’d like your laptop to be able to sustain indefinitely. Otherwise you could ‘fix’ the issue just by downclocking the CPU.

rowanG0775• 4 years ago

There is no short burst high performance needs I have. the only thing where I need high performance is playing older games, compiling and watching 4k video. None of these are burst oriented. I honestly don't know any daily workload that requires short time bursts. Personally I feel Intel/AMD just do it for marketing BS.

gandalfff• 4 years ago

My personal hypothesis is that TSMC's timelines for Apple slipped and the M2 was originally supposed to be a cooler 3nm chip. Instead we have hotter GPU cores built on the same 5nm process.

M2 MacBook Pro Thermal Concerns

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