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Comment by rowanG077 | Hacker News Reader

It is much more efficient. It's also more powerful. You can see in one of their benchmarks they hit 90+W of package power. I doubt it can sustain this. The "turbo-mode" Apple has announced for the 16-inch version also indicates that it will be significantly thermally limited.

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In my Lenovo Legion 5, in performance mode, the CPU is configured to draw up to 70W, and the GPU is configured to draw up to 115W. It's able to do this just fine for gaming sessions. Yes, the fans are quite audible while doing this. I think in contrast, having to handle about half that power draw overall should be attainable. For sure, it's now a very large SoC, so the heat might be a bit more concentrated and require some engineering to cool. But it doesn't seem like it should be a showstopping concern. Of course, you can wait for additional reviews and see if anyone addresses longer, more sustained load testing.

I don't doubt it's physically possible. I doubt Apple implemented it. So I rather wait till there is some hard data. Apple could also have implemented proper cooling for their Intel laptops but they didn't.

That's perfectly understandable. It's a major purchase decision.

But also, I'm not aware of anyone that implemented "proper cooling" sufficient to handle the last few generations of Intel chips (at least at the high end.) I read reviews of a variety of machines. All of them had issues with throttling.

I was so happy when the Ryzen 4000 mobile chips were reviewed and did not require elaborate cooling systems just to perform their regular duties. I would be shocked if the 2021 Macbook Pro 14/16" have issues with thermal throttling.

I haven't seen too many benchmarks yet, but Dave2D ran a "Cinebench R23" test in a both a single benchmark and thirty minute loop. [1] He saw that the score remained the same after the 30 minutes.

He also reported that the loudest fan noise he could get was 38dB, with typical loads under 30dB. [2]

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[1] - https://youtu.be/IhqCC70ZfDM?t=360

[2] - https://youtu.be/IhqCC70ZfDM?t=438

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