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Comment by wallaBBB | Hacker News Reader

Question that comes to mind - Is M2 (with thermal issue on new Air) affected considering how RAM is packed there?

What thermal issues? All I've seen so far are people who don't seem to understand how passive cooling works, despite the M1 Air being out for two years and working the same way.

Perhaps OP came across this recent article - Reviewers agree: The M2 MacBook Air has a heat problem - https://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/m2-macbook-air-revie... .

Is it really a problem if it's designed to thermally throttle?

It is if you are expecting maximum performance.

Perhaps that’s the problem. Their expectations are unrealistic. Did Apple promise no thermal throttle?

Marketing usually talks about unthrottled speed only, including Apple's here as far as I have seen.

A fanless laptop that throttles under sustained load doesn't have a heat problem.

This review of Lenovo's new Thinkpad X1 Yoga is what a heat problem looks like:

>Unfortunately, the laptop got uncomfortably hot in its Best performance mode during testing, even with light workloads.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/07/review-lenovos-think...

A laptop with two fans that gets too hot to comfortably touch, even under light workloads, unless you set it to throttle all the time? That's a heat problem.

The M2 chip generates more heat than the M1, with 20% more transistors and about a 12% higher clock speed. M2 Mac Pro has thermal issues compared to M1 Mac Pro as well, even with the fan.

mac pro doesn’t have m1/2

They were likely referring to the laptop Macbook Pro, not the desktop Mac Pro.

I think it's just expectations, people expected a brand new laptop should be able to perform fully without throttling. And that the throttling is designed as a crutch to prevent hardware damage.

One can draw different thresholds, ie. 100% performance for x amount of time before throttling happens etc..

That’s the key I’ve heard. Yes the M2 throttles in the Air (where the M1 would sometimes) and the 13” (where the M1 was fine).

But the M2, throttling included, was still 10-20% faster than the M1 when it never throttled. Sorry but I don’t remember the exact numbers.

So basically it’s sort of a non-issue. You were promised a faster laptop and you got one. Yes it’s not up to it’s theoretical potential but it’s not like it’s at 100% or less what the M1 did.

The 13” is kind of a weird computer anyway. The 14” and 16” will be a much bigger test. We’ll see how that fairs.

There are very few thin and light laptops that can reach thermal equilibrium with their CPUs boosting and under 100 % load. The M2 Air is no different from the M1 Air or any other competitor, it even throttles LESS than the M1 Air.

This whole thing just doesn't make sense, according to the youtubers the M1 Air was half computer and half the Second Coming of Christ (and it's a lovely machine, I have one), and then the next generation comes, IMPROVES both the performance and the thermal behavior, and suddenly there's an issue.

May also depend on the efficacy of the throttle. A crude throttle that cuts TDP 20% but cuts performance 50% is a bad user experience.

It could be interesting in the future to talk about platform-constrained performance. In other words, take two 28W chips in 15W platforms. Both can boost for short periods. But how do each perform when throttled to 15W?

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