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Comment by joshstrange | Hacker News Reader

This appears to be working as expected. Here is a graph [0] of the Intel Power Gadget while I ran Cinebench. They are not the same length because it took longer before the update and I cut out the parts before and after. Pretty striking difference IMHO and it never went below base clock after the update. I was worried about my i9 but I'm not anymore. Also if anyone is wondering it went from 780cb -> 860cb but I wouldn't put too much stock in that since I've got other apps open (same apps for both tests) and 3 external monitors attached. Some people report 1100cb score after the fix.

[0] https://www.dropbox.com/s/y30x13mi6ozhg0k/10.16.3S-Fix.png?d...

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Thank you for letting us know.

Hmm my i7 8850H gets 1024cb[0] so I would expect your i9 to do better than 860cb even with some other stuff going on at the same time.

https://i.imgur.com/o83CM33.png

I don’t doubt it can do better, I just have a bunch running in the background and this was right after startup (after applying the patch).

But how do the temperatures differ before & after the update?

From what I've read, it's stable at ~92°C.[0]

That seems damn high to me, but then I'm most familiar with desktops and servers, where you can cool far more aggressively. So is long term ~92°C hard on CPUs?

0) https://www.cnet.com/news/apple-macbook-pro-speed-throttling...

My old MacBook Pro I had for more than 5 years is 90% of the time around 100C. Whenever I'm working or playing. It's still working good.

That's a ridiculous temperature. That is literally the thermal limit for all recent Intel CPUs - they throttle to avoid actual damage at that point. No computer, not even a thin laptop, should be hitting that temperature or anything close to it.

Wow, I've just found https://www.reddit.com/r/techsupportgore/comments/4917wn/ano... but in a different context

100C is the boiling point of water.

I hope there is no water whatsoever in your chips.

Does liquid cooling count

That's not in the chips. The liquid in a cooling loop doesn't get to the temperature of the actual die if it did it wouldn't actually be cooling the die any more. Also the temp reading are down in the die itself and there's a gradient between the die -> heatspreader -> cooling block (air or water) -> 'cooling medium' (ie air/water).

So what? What's the boiling point of water got to do with anything? Is your CPU made of water?

No but your lap is (mostly)

When people say the ‘CPU’ in this thread, they don’t mean the whole main computer unit, if that’s what you’re thinking. They mean just the little chip inside. There’s a cooling system so it isn’t actually anywhere near that hot on your lap.

True. But I've used laptops where the fan exhaust was unbearably hot. And I'm sure that was much cooler than 90°C.

So maybe someone could check exhaust temperature on a 2018 Macbook Pro with i7 under heavy load. I get that the exhaust ports are on the back, near the display hinge. But that still might be iffy, for those who cross their legs.

That I can’t really answer, I didn’t do a ton of benchmarking other than the CPU which I had seen that jagged pattern before so to see it so smooth and not fall under base clock was all I was looking for.

Does the fan seem to run more / higher rpm now?

I have not noticed that, and I did pay attention to that while running Cinebench.

Glad to hear the fix works out for you. It's rare that apple will fix something like this so fast, but it's entirely possible this just slipped past QA since apple doesn't test throttling that thoroughly it seems.

Which is strange if they're not, because their sleek and slim designs would seem to allow a very minimal margin for error on heat dissipation. you would think that would be the subject of quite a bit of testing on the hardware side of things.

Given the history of graphics issues (many of which where related to heat causing capacitors or GPUs to misbehave) I'm not at all surprised that their testing of heat-related issues is subpar to what you would expect. The fact they sell fan-less machines despite a history of heat-related issues in almost every solid-aluminimum-construction laptop they've released seems particularly negligent to me.

EDIT: If you'd like more information than just heresay, watch some of Louis Rossmann's videos on macbook heating problems (the video on tantalum capacitors is particularly interesting).

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