
MacBook Pro with i9 chip is throttled due to thermal issues, claims YouTuber - electic
https://www.macrumors.com/2018/07/17/core-i9-chip-macbook-pro-throttling/
======
lebrad
Dave Lee's youtube video is a withering takedown, presented dispassionately.

His argument is such a slam dunk that the article concludes with stunned
disbelief, speculating that maybe there's "something wrong with the MacBook
Pro with Core i9 chip that Lee received".

Yes there's something wrong with it, that was the exact point of his video. Do
people really think he just got a lemon?

~~~
slantyyz
In fairness, Lee criticized the Dell XPS 15's thermals in a video a couple of
days ago. Of course, he also posted a video last week about how he was
starting to hate Apple products.

If you watch a lot of his videos, you'll notice that he almost always talks
about thermals, so it's not surprising to see him focus on that aspect of the
MBP.

~~~
djsumdog
I have a Dell XPS 15 (2017) and the thermals are really bad. I saw constant
throttling in my kernel logs and the laptop sometimes slowed to a crawl when
compiling, running a ton of docker containers, using Light Table or even just
having a ton of browser tabs open.

I finally ditched it a few weeks ago, finally replacing it with a Ryzen 7
desktop.

I'll admit my XPS 15 was a factory refurbished model, so maybe I just got a
lemon. It got so hot the battery is now swelling and it popped out the
trackpad (I think there might be a recall; or if not take it in since that's
gotta be under warranty).

My current laptop is a HP Spectre. It's thicker than the XPS, but I think it's
got a much better cooling solution and preforms better. I don't think I'd
recommend a Dell XPS again.

~~~
_Codemonkeyism
Thermal on my i7 xps13 is abysmal. Never again.

~~~
m_fayer
Same. It's hot, loud, and still never feels as fast as it should.

~~~
kowdermeister
Loud? it's the quietest machine I ever had. No problems so far (9370 model)

~~~
m_fayer
Mine is the 9360 with the i7-8550U. In high performance mode, it's a hair
drier. In balanced, the fan is a constant annoying whine if I have, for
example, Webpack in watch mode, or am typing code quickly and keeping the
IDE's language service active, or if any browser tab has any active JS at all.
Basically if the CPU is at a reasonable speed and at 20% load, constant fan
noise.

It's quiet if I have it in "silent" mode, but then I might as well be using a
350$ machine, as far as performance is concerned.

Maybe you have a slower CPU, or they fixed the thermals in your model?

~~~
spatular
I have 9360 with i5-7200U. I've just checked, fan kicks in after 90 seconds of
sha1sum /dev/zero and stays always on lowest RPMs. 25C ambient. With 50% core
load at 3.1GHz it stays silent most of the time...

~~~
m_fayer
50% at 3.1GHZ would make for one noisy experience here. Either mine's a lemon,
or, more likely, there's no way to get a CPU like the i7-8550U into such a
small case without causing thermal issues.

------
kalleboo
It's summer now and as soon as I plug my MacBook Pro 2017 in to charge, it
starts throttling itself due to the heat of the charging battery. Same thing
happened to the 2012 I had before.

These things just don't have adequate cooling.

~~~
wlll
In the summer I have to unplug one of my external monitors because my (maxed
out) 2014 Macbook Pro gets too hot.

I'm going to try using my linux desktop when it happens next, that at least
has adequate cooling.

~~~
marcelfahle
Same here. 2014 maxed out, doesn't do well in the spanish summer. External
screen mostly stays disconnected, otherwise it throttles down after 30 mins..
Are there not some kind of cooling pads to help with this shit?

------
sgloutnikov
There is another video [1], in which a 2017 i7 outperforms a 2018 i9 in video
compression due to its severe throttling. Sure the benchmarks look great and
are better on the i9, but as someone mentioned, that's like looking at sprint
compared to a longer race.

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ip-
sZfWaVo0&t=04m37s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ip-sZfWaVo0&t=04m37s)

------
owenversteeg
I keep seeing thermal issues come back to bite some of the smartest companies
with products designed by the world's best engineers. Everything from
batteries to laptops to phones is severely affected by heat, and improper
thermal design can lead to some huge issues.

For example, the biggest thing affecting battery life is thermal load. The
biggest thing affecting the maximum sustained power of a laptop or phone is
the thermal design. Anyone can slap a cheap, powerful chip in; good thermal
design is much harder.

I think people are going to start realizing this more and more, especially as
powerful chips get extremely cheap.

~~~
r00fus
Is the Intel upgrade treadmill is starting to show its age?

How much longer can we keep making the chips "faster" when the tradeoff is
increasingly just more thermal issues?

Can't wait for a decent A-series chip MacBook.

~~~
earenndil
The 'intel upgrade treadmill' consists of reducing transistor size and upping
clock; the former of which reduces thermal issues, and the latter of which
increases them.

~~~
saas_co_de
> 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.

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

~~~
saas_co_de
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.

~~~
paulmd
The old chip pulled 33% less than its rated TDP in the real world.

Also, lol if you actually think TDP means anything anymore. Over the last 5
years it's become a marketing number more than anything else. It gives you a
vague category of what power consumption will look like... at base clocks,
under a non-AVX workload. Modern processors will happily blast past their TDP
by 50-100% if there is thermal headroom available.

(And that's where laptops come up short - they can't actually cool a steady-
state load, so these laptops will happily turbo themselves into a wall, and
then once the heatsink is saturated they'll thermally throttle. Looks great in
a 30-second benchmark though!)

~~~
saas_co_de
> The old chip pulled 33% less than its rated TDP in the real world.

That sounds slightly made up. As you mention yourself chips pull vastly
different amounts of power, and put off vastly different amounts of heat
depending on workload.

> lol if you actually think TDP means anything anymore

Yes, it does not mean anything because Intel releases CPUs that exceed their
ratings because they can't get their process right, which is my whole point.

------
bischofs
At this point, people in the Mac hardware engineering leadership need to start
submitting their resignations or being forced out. This kind of sloppy
engineering and lack of product focus is the antithesis of what Apple has
stood for.

If I were Tim Cook I would fire Dan Riccio, and then resign myself and hand
the company over to someone who cares about products and not supply chain
optimization.

Also the whole executive Memoji thing is incredibly stupid and childish.
Please take your jobs more seriously ->
[https://www.apple.com/leadership/](https://www.apple.com/leadership/)

~~~
dewski
The Executive team had nothing to do with the Memoji’s. It was probably
someone from marketing or their web team. Why even bring that up? It doesn’t
help your argument at all.

~~~
0xJRS
Actually I agree with him, it's fairly unprofessional, and i'm usually one for
casual but it just feels immature.

------
Tloewald
Here's a review from a dev who works at NASA:

[http://hrtapps.com/blogs/20180712/](http://hrtapps.com/blogs/20180712/)

Maybe the key point is he isn't running Adobe Premiere.

The thermal issues in modern laptops certainly concern me, but they've been
running hot for a long time now, and being thin doesn't actually change the
surface area significantly.

~~~
cozzyd
Well the single-core test is unlikely to max out the thermal loading on the
CPU. You can see how the scaling from 4-6 cores provides severely diminishing
returns, perhaps due to throttling.

~~~
StillBored
Uh, it turbos in the 4+Ghz range. That is by itself probably going to blow the
45W thermal rating the entire chip has. My gut instinct says that macbook
probably can't even dissipate that over a long period of time. The linked test
seems to indicate the truth of that, and its not unusual for a mac product,
the last one that could probably continuously dissipate the combined cpu+gpu
heat was that crazy ugly mac pro.

Intel didn't invent some new physics to get "high" performance cores crammed
into a laptop, they are just pulling the same stuff the phone market has been
doing for the past few years. Put enough thermal capacitance against the chip
itself to absorb a few multiples of the chips dissipation, allow it to get
really hot, and then throttle it hard. Hope, people keep their benchmark runs
short.

There is a difference between socket 2011/2270 based i7/i9s and their
insufficiently cooled, memory and IO bandwidth starved cousins found in
laptops. Even a fairly low end desktop is going to stomp the most expensive
laptop you can find simply due to physics. Being able to dissipate more heat
means higher performance. Its possible to move the curve up/down depending on
fab processes, or micro-arch, but these days there aren't any miracle cures.
More power equals more performance.

~~~
n1000
Isn't the 4 GHz meant as a boost frequency as thermals allow? The more CPUs
are active the rarer this happens. It becomes problematic when the CPU can't
maintain its base clock speed anymore.

------
drngdds
One of the many downsides of making all your computers like two millimeters
thin.

~~~
symfoniq
Indeed. What ever happened to product differentiation?

~~~
MBCook
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.

~~~
white-flame
They've always been bumping up against this back in the Apple II days, and
systems would overheat then, too. All in the name of Steve Jobs emphasizing
case aesthetics & not wanting fan noise.

~~~
B1FF_PSUVM
Eh, that reminded me of the paper chimneys some people advocated for better
air flow on the original Mac or MacPlus.

(e.g.
[https://www.google.com/search?q=mac+chimney](https://www.google.com/search?q=mac+chimney)
, namely
[https://www.flickr.com/photos/idontlikewords/275104234](https://www.flickr.com/photos/idontlikewords/275104234)
\- some case aesthetics ;-)

------
izacus
Every MacBook Pro I've ever owned locked it self down to low frequency after
running a CPU intensive task for a minute or so.

I thought that was common knowledge? There's NO laptops out there that
wouldn't do that (and NO mobile devices either). This is why desktop
workstations are still so much faster even though they carry same frequency
chips.

~~~
lloeki
I've been doing hours-long CPU+GPU intensive tasks (compiling ghc, number
crunching, playing games like Bioshock Infinite and StarCraft II on a HD4000)
on a bunch of pre-retina MBP and rMBP 13" and they _never_ throttled. Thermal
design and management is spot on, fans stay silent most of the time and kick
in only when load requires it.

Beware of anecdata. Given the stories I hear I would squarely put the various
issues in the realm of thermal paste gone bad, busted fans, or clogged
airducts, and certainly not on intrinsic bad design because I have personal
counterexamples of dozens of various Apple laptops from 2008 to 2016 being
perfectly fine out of the box.

Obviously though, a desktop will beat a laptop's thermal performance any day
but I think this is missing the point.

~~~
n1000
> I've been doing hours-long CPU+GPU intensive tasks (compiling ghc, number
> crunching, playing games like Bioshock Infinite and StarCraft II on a
> HD4000) on a bunch of pre-retina MBP and rMBP 13" and they never throttled.

I find that hard to believe. I have been gaming a lot on MacBook Pro unibodies
and retinas with and without an external GPUs. Especially when the internal
GPU is active, the thermal load is just too high for many games and
applications.

Throttling normally starts in a very subtle way by disabling clock boost and
is hard to notice. Throttling below the base clock is rare and this is where
it becomes really noticeable.

~~~
steve_musk
I thought that was the one of the points of turbo boost? To take advantage of
high clock frequencies for short high intensity hurts while still running at
the base clock for long term work? If the clock speed is staying above the
base clock I wouldn’t consider it a problem.

------
jillesvangurp
I use smcfancontrol on my imac to force the fans to do their thing. The
problem seems to be that osx prefers throttling over turning the machine into
a vacuum cleaner. For me this is the only way to play games. Without
smccontrol throttling kicks in and the fans never go on fully.

------
pasta
This is why the pro desktop market is not dead.

Rendering real time path tracing while designing a house, visualising point
clouds, video editing, sound design, you can do it on a laptop but the pro
market will buy a desktop because it's 'cheaper', more reliable and
upgradeable

------
duxup
I guess the key is that it under-performed vs last model's i7... not that it
has thermal issues. I would think most laptops have some level of thermal
trade offs.

~~~
komocode
My guess is Premier already had optimizations for the 2017 Macbook Pro to
lessen the amount of hits to the throttle threshold temperature.

------
garyrob
Isn't it the case that access to 32GB currently requires more power use (hence
the larger battery), and that more power use necessarily means more thermal
stress? In which case there may be nothing wrong with the thermal paste or the
engineering; it may simply be that Apple came to the conclusion that the 32GB
was more important than the issue of thermal throttling. For my use, I would
readily take computer a little slower than the 2017 model for extremely
compute-intensive, long-running tasks, but that let me use 32GB of memory.

Whether they are dishonestly marketing the machine as being faster is another.

------
ColinWielga
I have been watching Dave2D videos for years. He is one of the best laptop
reviewers on YouTube.

------
satysin
I suspected as much which is why I didn't bother with the ~£300 upgrade from
the default 2.6Ghz i7 to the 2.9Ghz i9.

The MBP already struggled with the old i7 and with no redesign I couldn't see
how they could handle the i9 without extreme thermal throttling. Turns out
they can't but ship it anyway!

------
TillE
After seeing those benchmarks, I'm feeling even better about having just
decided to go for an Aero 15.

I quite like Mac laptops, but I've concluded that I don't really need one.
I'll just grab one of the new (rumored) Mac minis to continue MacOS
development as needed.

------
mrsteveman1
The 2018 MacBook Pro having thermal issues doesn't surprise me after seeing
what my 2015 model does under load, but it's really disappointing since I've
been anxiously waiting for Apple to release new laptops.

This 2015 MacBook Pro will avoid turning the fan on at any cost. I frequently
watch the CPU package heat up to about 190F while the fan is still at 0RPM.

Further, the SMC chip and/or kernel are set to use fairly slow fan speeds
compared to the amount of heat being produced, so even when it does come on,
the system remains hotter than necessary.

But, here's the major problem: it's also become clear that there is a thermal
window where the system is hot enough to cause it to throttle itself, perhaps
somewhere between 140F and 180F, but not hot enough for the SMC to turn the
fan on fast enough _or at all_ , even though it could and should.

So in addition to being really hot and not using the fan to get the heat away
from your lap, it gets _slow at the same time_ , right when it's being used.
The system becomes faster soon after the fan is turned up to the max.

And to top it off, there appear to be two different throttling mechanisms, the
CPU speed can adjust up or down (you can see this with the Intel Power
Gadget), _and_ Apple has some kernel system that will use CPU cycles for
idling instead of scheduling threads that are waiting, which reduces overall
CPU usage, and therefore also heat production.

All combined, it _looks_ like the system is constantly bouncing between
ramping up the CPU frequency to handle load, then wasting some of the
additional CPU time idling to avoid turning the fan on, then turning the fan
on just long enough to get the heat down before turning the fan back _off_
again, and repeat.

------
meesterdude
Well I guess my next machine has to be a PC running linux now. Been waiting to
replace my aging MBP with this latest gen, but this is the the last straw for
me. Charging such a premium and being too lazy (or thin-focused) that it can't
meet it's base clock outside of a freezer is ridiculous.

I just wish I could run OSX in a VM. Linux as a primary desktop isn't quite
there yet.

~~~
tpaschalis
You _could_ run an OSX VM in either Windows or Linux (I'm doing fullscreen
Linux VM on Windows with a Thinkpad, and it's quite good/fast). Idk if there
are issues with licensing, though.

Also, give Linux as a primary desktop a try! What do you believe that's
lacking, from your perspective?

Granted, it's not great out of the box, and some software isn't available, but
if you have a couple of weekends to spare/invest with tinkering, you can have
a pretty and solid desktop workstation setup.

------
mandioca
Macbook “Pro”.

~~~
mirimir
This!

They ought to rename it, and actually sell a professional laptop.

~~~
freetime2
"Pro" is a pretty broad term. I suspect the MacBook Pro is powerful enough for
most professionals who need a computer to do their jobs. I use one
professionally for software development, and it suits my needs just fine.

Sure - there are some professions out there that require more power than a
MacBook Pro can offer. But is it really fair to say it's not "Pro" just
because it can't meet the needs of 100% of all working professionals?

~~~
rubbingalcohol
Is it really fair to say it's not "Pro" just because it doesn't deliver on the
stock rated performance of the hardware it's spec'ed with? Yes, that's fair.

------
jbb67
So... they discovered that there is a reaason that desktop computers have a
large heatsink with a fan many times larger attached... Don't buy a laptop and
expect it's sustained performance to be anywhere near that of a proper desktop
computer. It simply won't be

~~~
lebski88
That's not really it at all. His point is that this laptop is significantly
worse than other laptops in terms of throttling. To the point where the i9
renders slower than the i7 in his testing. That's pretty damning for a $300
upgrade.

------
wareotie
I bought the MacBook Pro 2017 13" without touch bar with an i7. I pretty happy
with it, but, the only thing that bothers me is it gets hot. Hot as hell.
Skype sharing the screen and JetBrains CLion and you get a beautiful roaster.

~~~
pentae
FYI, I went through the same experience as you and returned it after
discovering the non-touchbar model has one less fan. Apple clearly hates the
customers who don't want to buy the touch bar model.

~~~
rsynnott
The non-touchbar laptop uses a lower-TDP part (15W vs 27W or something).

------
llekn
Anybody knows if Apple's ARM chips (iPhone) have better thermal efficiency
(watts/GFLOPs) than the chips in this latest gen?

If this is the case, I think it's just a matter of time for Apple replacing
Intel with their own custom ARM chips.

~~~
lykr0n
You can't really compare ARM and x86_64 chips. I'm going to use a crude
example. Think of the ARM chip being one of those USPS Trucks
([https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/37/Small_US...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/37/Small_USPS_Truck.jpg))
while the x86_64 is a F150 pickup.

Both can drive around and transport things, but the USPS Truck is purpose
build to deliver mail, stop and start frequently, and be reliable. It does a
few things well. On the other hand the F150 is widely produced, can be
customized in many different ways, and is general purpose vehical. Could it do
the function of the USPS Truck? Sure, but it would be slower, cost more to
run, and be less efficient. Could the USPS Truck haul a trailer? Maybe, but it
wouldn't be very good at it. Both are a truck, but both are designed to
different things and excel at different things.

That crude comparison is ARM vs x86_64. ARM is getting there, and for the
specific ARM functions it's more performant than the equivalent x86_64
functions. But once you go outside of what the ARM chip has been specifically
designed for, your performance takes a massive hit. Will ARM be able to take
off in a Macbook? Maybe in a few years, but Apple would need to dump a massive
amount of R&D into their designs before I would think they would consider it
(but who knows?)

~~~
shub
What? They're CPUs. They're designed to run instructions. Intel's chips spend
more energy on the really fancy stuff like huge reorder buffers and extensive
speculation. They get higher IPC at lower MIPS/watt. An i7 isn't going to run
iOS more slowly than whatever Apple calls their latest ARM SoC. It _is_ going
to blow its lid without a big ole heatsink brick on there and a fan too, which
is why smartphones use ARM cores designed for efficiency.

P.S. if anything, ARM is the "general purpose vehicle" in your analogy. x64 is
all about high throughput and high power on a chip you buy and plug in. ARM is
the one where you can get an architecture license and customize the shit out
of it.

~~~
ldh
Not all instructions (or instruction sets) are equivalent.

~~~
shub
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...](https://fuse.wikichip.org/news/1316/a-look-at-caviums-new-high-
performance-arm-microprocessors-and-the-isambard-supercomputer/)

~~~
ebikelaw
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 be hampered by their overly beautiful
instructions.

~~~
StillBored
The other way to think about it is like the v7 thumb modes in comparison to
the original 32-bit predicated instruction set. X86 has a lot of less than
ideal instructions, but they are uncommonly used. So the core instruction set
is quite dense and high performance.

Intel is learning (or knows, depending on your perspective, see goldmont) how
to build highly efficient cores too, but like ARM haven't quite figured out
how to build a super high performance one that is crazy efficient. ARM's
continue to be quite efficient but not particularly performant, while intel's
continue to be quite peformant but not particularly efficient.

Either way, the trend is pretty clear at this point more power
dissipation=more performance.

------
vivan
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.

~~~
daemin
I'm only comfortable doing that after I've got at least 3 years of value out
of it. My current laptop is an aging Zenbook Pro where I've replaced the
custom SSD with an adapter plus an m.2 board.

So maybe if you still want to use the laptop after a few years you can open it
up and give it a bit of a facelift. Maybe applying a whole bunch of thermal
paste will give it a slightly new lease of life?

~~~
vivan
Absolutely - once it is out of warranty and starting to lose performance I'm
happy to mess around. But less so just a few months after I've bought it!

------
lgvln
I’m not surprised. I’m hitting 90C avg, 95% CPU, fan maxed, 25C room temp,
running W10 on a 2016 15in MBP.

~~~
cozzyd
That... seems way too high? Are your vents clogged?

~~~
BigJ1211
This is pretty normal on laptops, my 6700HQ can go up to 95°C. These chips are
rated for up to 100°C (TJunction).

------
slantyyz
The heat off that MBP reminds me of how hot my early 2011 15" MBP got. I
suspect that the heat was the culprit for the GPU failures that gave the 2011
model its notoriety.

~~~
olliej
I thought that was gpu manufacturer issue? I recall Nvidia specifically had a
lot of issues across many oems.

~~~
walru
It was likely a bit of both, but there's one thing that can't be denied, apple
products are built for form over function.

~~~
rsynnott
Apple was by no means the only manufacturer to have trouble with those Nvidia
parts; it was an industry-wide problem.

------
rasz
Macs dont even start running fans until you hit >80C.

~~~
lgvln
I think the correct terminology is “don’t start running the fans at
high(audible) speeds till >80C.

~~~
mustaflex
Apparently they don't start at all until 80C here:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wgeh7ZJRhZU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wgeh7ZJRhZU)

~~~
tedmiston
Mine are running at 2k RPM ~40 C.

------
andromeduck
It's probably because Toronto, where he lives, has been around 27 degrees and
70% humidity the last few days. That's around 7 degrees and 20% humidity above
the typical office climate of around 20 degrees and 50% humidity. That
difference can result in roughly 20% lower dissipation power if the
temperature at the heatsink is around 50-60 degrees which it appears to have
been historically.

That 20% extra dissipation power might be enough to get it from 2.2 to 3 GHz
considering the base clocks are usually where processors have the most
efficient marginal frequency scaling.

IMO, designing the thermal solution + chip combination to reach base clocks at
typical office climates seems reasonably smart/defensible because most places
will be cooler than that most of the year even before AC.

~~~
Improvotter
The i7 was tested in the same circumstances I assume. So it shouldn't matter
how hot or humid it was. The comparison should be valid.

~~~
andromeduck
Yeah I'm not sure what's going on there, the cores on the 2017 had to be
maintaining a sustained 3.7 GHz clock or 0.6 GHz boost for the highest end
option.

Might just be silicon lottery, might be the GPU thermals are interfering or
maybe the 2018 would run faster with 2 cores disabled.

------
yread
Notebookcheck also lookedinto it in the recent review
[https://www.notebookcheck.net/Apple-MacBook-
Pro-13-2018-Touc...](https://www.notebookcheck.net/Apple-MacBook-
Pro-13-2018-Touch-Bar-i5-Laptop-Review.316648.0.html)

------
sniglom
This is not a first for Apple.

I remember buying the 2006 Macbook with a CPU upgrade. A Core 2 Duo with 2GHz
instead of 1.83. Due to heat, the CPU throttled under load and ended up with
the same speed as the standard model.

------
gnrlbzik
Is this due to their focus on iphone and ipad? Probably and very likely, if I
remember, most of their hardware talent had been pulled at some point to work
on things that bring more money, these products get less attention. Looks like
mac line upgrade cycles suffers due to that, don't quote me though....

But on the other hand this is good that it a came out, should be fixed in next
upgrade I would assume, no wonder we got huge bump spec, people voiced their
concerns loudly.

~~~
roryisok
I think it was the software team. MacOS dev team was inexplicably merged with
the IOS dev team and that's when quality of macOS really plummeted, with
laughable security issues every other week

------
cmurf
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 kernel behavior
between XNU vs Linux, and Windows vs Linux on the same hardware.

~~~
Namesareapain
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.

------
tedmiston
All three 15-inch Mid 2018 MBP configurations benchmarked are at the top of
Geekbench for multi-core, only behind iMac Pro and Mac Pro models [1].

Here they are in isolation compared to the 2017 and 2016 15-inch models sorted
by score descending overall:

    
    
        | Model                           | Configuration                            | Score |
        |---------------------------------|------------------------------------------|-------|
        | MacBook Pro (15-inch Mid 2018)  | Intel Core i9-8950HK @ 2.9 GHz (6 cores) | 22547 |
        | MacBook Pro (15-inch Mid 2018)  | Intel Core i7-8850H @ 2.6 GHz (6 cores)  | 21266 |
        | MacBook Pro (15-inch Mid 2018)  | Intel Core i7-8750H @ 2.2 GHz (6 cores)  | 21096 |
        | MacBook Pro (15-inch Mid 2017)  | Intel Core i7-7920HQ @ 3.1 GHz (4 cores) | 15550 |
        | MacBook Pro (15-inch Mid 2017)  | Intel Core i7-7820HQ @ 2.9 GHz (4 cores) | 15251 |
        | MacBook Pro (15-inch Mid 2017)  | Intel Core i7-7700HQ @ 2.8 GHz (4 cores) | 14374 |
        | MacBook Pro (15-inch Late 2016) | Intel Core i7-6920HQ @ 2.9 GHz (4 cores) | 14134 |
        | MacBook Pro (15-inch Late 2016) | Intel Core i7-6820HQ @ 2.7 GHz (4 cores) | 13706 |
        | MacBook Pro (15-inch Late 2016) | Intel Core i7-6700HQ @ 2.6 GHz (4 cores) | 13008 |
    
    

[1]: [https://browser.geekbench.com/mac-
benchmarks](https://browser.geekbench.com/mac-benchmarks)

~~~
zzleeper
Were the benchmarks run on a cooled room? Some years ago, as a student, I paid
$$$ for a Toshiba with 4 cores and hyperthreading, and I could only run them
well on the winter or in a very cool room. In the summer it would reach 100C
and constantly throttle, so I do think that temperature is a key issue, sp.
now with slimmmer laptops

~~~
earenndil
> 100C

Are you sure?? That sounds a bit...hot. Do you mean 100F?

~~~
saagarjha
The insides of computers can frequently reach that range.

~~~
isostatic
My thinkpad shuts down with a CPU temperature of about 100-105. It's currently
idling (98% idle according to top) at 80C, with the CPU clocked down to
1199MHz. The chip is an i5 CPU M 560 @ 2.67GHz

The fan is broken, so it can reach shutdown temperature even when I have the
"powersave" governer set (which I normally do)

------
komocode
So far the last several Macbooks have throttled after X minutes of rendering.
The only real surprise is that the 2018 Macbooks ended up with worse rendering
time. But it does make sense since the i9 is a hotter chip and combine that
with the same thin design...you'll reach the threshold faster...which will
throttle faster.

------
neop1x
Problems with MBP unibody cooling are known for years...
[https://www.google.com/search?q=cooling+macbook+drilled&tbm=...](https://www.google.com/search?q=cooling+macbook+drilled&tbm=isch)

------
nodesocket
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/](http://hrtapps.com/blogs/20180712/)

~~~
endorphone
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 "base" frequency. Run one or two threads and it
can dramatically "overclock". It is the nature of all current chips.

Eh. For the overwhelming majority of users I doubt this would ever be an
issue. Compile a kernel. Apply a filter. Do some convolutions. Every normal
thing will be ridiculously fast. Run a server or workstation style load and it
won't be so good. That has been the case with laptops for time eternal.

~~~
Namesareapain
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!

------
ryzvonusef
When the heading said Youtuber, I thought for sure it would be Louis Rossmann

------
jdhn
I don't know a lot about heat dissipation, but could the slimness of the MBP
be a factor in this? I would think that after a certain point, you wouldn't be
able to get good airflow in such a small space.

~~~
slantyyz
There are multiple factors, but slimness is probably not the only culprit.

I don't think Apple (or most other PC vendors) use the best thermal compound
on their CPUs.

When my early 2011 MBP was having heat problems, I replaced the compound over
the CPU and GPU and got noticeable although not spectacular reductions in
heat.

Of course, that's not something you can do on a "modern" Macbook Pro, since
they're not intended to be user serviceable any more.

~~~
AmVess
They can use an okay quality thermal joint compound if it is applied well. My
Dell's thermal joint compound looked like someone was trying to make a PBJ
sandwich with the stuff. Applied too thickly, and it becomes an insulator. Mac
used to have this problem in the past. I repasted my Dell and got 5F reduction
at load right away.

The problem with all high end mobile CPU's is that they are given a tiny
heatsink and heatpipes which are simply not up to the job. They quickly become
heat soaked and the fans are unable to reduce the heat, so the units throttle.

------
aparashk
The i9 CPU is a K part, therefore, I would think one could conceivably
undervolt/underclock in order to change the thermals on the machine to their
liking. Is there such a tool for Mac OS X?

~~~
asloma
We're talking about a laptop here, which most definitely doesn't contain an
overclockable i9 K processor.

~~~
aparashk
It is according to Intel (otherwise it would not be labeled as i9-8950H __K
__):[https://www.intel.com.au/content/www/au/en/gaming/overclocki...](https://www.intel.com.au/content/www/au/en/gaming/overclocking-
intel-processors.html)

------
notadoc
What an embarrassment. This particular generation of MacBook Pro can't be
abandoned fast enough. Flush the whole thing and start over.

------
throw2016
Apple it seems is happy to be known for iPhones and iPads but for many people
Apple is really about a rich history in computing, computers, good
engineering, design and well built products.

Now especially with the mac business they are reducing the scope and value of
their brand, and becoming purveyors of high value trinkets. This is nothing
short of a tragedy.

There is a difference between a small premium for good engineering, components
choice and design, and profiteering to the point of becoming an extremely
overpriced luxury product with more brand than real value.

------
tjpnz
The biggest shock for me with these laptops came when I tried to do some light
gaming. I'm not talking about recent titles either, my 2017 MBP gets bought to
the brink by KSP at minimum settings with no mods. I understand that I would
be quite rightly criticised for trying to run something like Fortnite but
we're talking about a game here with roots in 2013.

The hardware they put inside the later models has no hope in hell of running
normally with all the thermal issues.

~~~
slededit
KSP can lag on my desktop with a 1080ti. Don't feel too bad.

~~~
zaarn
KSP is largely CPU intensive, the GPU barely matters (You can run KSP on
maximum settings on a RX460 very comfortably with low parts numbers)

------
theabacus
Not surprised given how thin the thing is.

------
seba_dos1
Is this a news? MacBooks aren't particularly known for their excellent thermal
design...

~~~
bluedino
The Retina model is pretty good, actually. A huge improvement over the
original unibody. And the Touchbar models are even better (when comparing 2015
vs 2016)

[https://images.anandtech.com/reviews/mac/retinaMacBookPro/pe...](https://images.anandtech.com/reviews/mac/retinaMacBookPro/perfovertime.jpg)

------
jakecopp
"...'this degree' of thermal throttling..." Very impressive!

------
shiburizu
Genuinely curious: I don't work in the space of CAD, video editing or any
other field that people tend to use to justify the MacBook Pro's ludicrous
pricetag that has some shiny numbers on the tech specs sheet. Do these really
do anything a sufficiently equipped laptop from anyone else can't? Plenty of
options with latest gen Intel and Nvidia 10xx series are out there for less
insane prices. Granted, I don't see many with that much storage space and RAM
but I'd love to hear how some of you have experienced the same workload on
non-Apple devices and felt you should keep buying MacBook.

~~~
nickthemagicman
Yep Its just a million little details that make it such quality. The awesome
UI of the OS. The trackpad is the best trackpad I've ever used. Every other
trackpad feels clumsy after using one. The fact that it's a TRUE linux machine
not just retrofitted Windows linux. The fact that everything just works. The
chance of getting a virus is incredibly small. The time saved in
troubleshooting is worth the price. Operating system upgrades are like 30
bucks vs the 1-200 dollars of every new windows release. Also, the build
quality is the best. I have a macbook that has lasted 10 years and still works
great. Never had a windows machine do that. So the quality, UI, attention to
detail, upgrades, and more make it more than worth the upfront price tag in
hassle saved down the line.

~~~
sehugg
_The fact that it 's a TRUE linux machine_

To be pedantic, a GNU/Darwin/Mach/BSD machine.

~~~
nickthemagicman
Yessir. A flavor of Linux but Linux nonetheless.

~~~
parasubvert
A flavour of UNIX. BSD (and OS X) evolved mostly separately from GNU or Linux,
with some limited cross-over. Even basic CLI tools have subtle differences.
The only Linus Torvalds code in a Mac would be git.

~~~
nickthemagicman
Sorry. you're right my bad. I was thinking Unix but kept typing Linux for some
reason.

A more accurate statement is that it's a true posix compliant Unix based
system down to the metal.

------
ianamartin
You know, I'm so beat down by the state of apple laptops, I don't even care. I
was all ready to spring for a new machine the day these dropped. Until I found
out that they max the 13" model at 16 gigs of ram. I'm so pissed. I don't want
the 15". That's what external monitors are for. I like the portable to be
fucking portable. Jesus. I give up.

~~~
saagarjha
Why do you need 32 GB of ram?

~~~
no1youknowz
Not the op, but I need 32 GB for:-

\- running virtual machines.

\- running MemSQL which requires a minimum of 8GB to be available.

\- running video editing software.

There are probably other reasons, but those are the ones off the top of my
head.

~~~
cs02rm0
Similar to VMs, I run a lot of docker containers, mostly with JVMs in them.

I bought an Intel Hades Canyon with 32GB to run Linux on after the new MBPs
didn't turn up at WWDC. Feeling somewhat relieved right now.

------
matte_black
This problem is easily solved by just having an external cooling solution like
a USB fan tray that sits under the MacBook, and only when you are doing some
heavy tasks.

In normal day to day use most people will not do enough processing to be
affected by thermal issues.

Keeping the form factor of a MacBook is much more important than eliminating
every thermal edge case. People take for granted how much we’ve improved on
old big and heavy laptops (with worse performance even).

~~~
gaius
_This problem is easily solved by just having an external cooling solution
like a USB fan tray that sits under the MacBook_

So, making it an inch or two thicker?

------
rehemiau
Louis Rossmann made a video[1] a while ago presenting how badly optimized is
the cooling on new MacBooks. In short: Apple prefers their MacBook CPU and GPU
to run hot and thermally throttle so that the user is happy because the
machine is quiet, and then, more importantly, Apple is also happy, because
when it overheats often it has a shorter lifespan so you’ll have to buy a new
MacBook after 2-3 years.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wgeh7ZJRhZU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wgeh7ZJRhZU)

edit: Bear in mind these videos are about new MacBooks so there's no way to
predict their usual lifespan. And I'm not saying all of them die after 2-3
years. Apple is simply optimizing for the 90% of users here, people doing
mostly web browsing and using Microsoft Office. This does not put a sustained
load on the CPU/GPU so these users will be fine.

~~~
andromeduck
Running your CPU hotter doesn't significantly affect the lifespan of your
device especially for longer sustained periods unless there's some glaring
design defect as happened to Nvidia.

So that's actually pretty well optimized.

~~~
B1FF_PSUVM
> Running your CPU hotter doesn't significantly affect the lifespan of your
> device

Maybe, but I've seen reliability formulas with fifth powers of temperature,
namely for equivalent ageing of devices.

And 14nm fabrication processes don't exactly improve my expectations of
durability ...

~~~
andromeduck
It helps if you know 14 nm fabrication isn't really 14 nm. The biggest
culprits are electrolytic capacitors and the lipo batteries but the batteries
are far away and the other components are cooled by the air headed into the
fan so neither will actually reach anywhere near the temperature of the CPUs.
Apple also doesn't skimp on components like this especially when it's a core
and obvious part of optimizing for noise so I wouldn't expect it to have an
appreciable impact on the lifespan of the device.

------
chx
This madness is something Apple can only blame themselves for.

It's Steve Jobs' ploy to kill the laptop market. He didn't need the laptop
market, he had the iPhone, he knew of the iPad when he demo'd the Macbook Air.
Today the entire Mac revenue
[https://www.statista.com/statistics/382260/segments-share-
re...](https://www.statista.com/statistics/382260/segments-share-revenue-of-
apple/) is below 10%.

See, he have started the thin craze and everyone copied. But noone needs a
thin laptop. There's no advantage to it whatsoever. People do need lightweight
laptops and well before the Macbook Air we had shockingly lightweight ones, my
Panasonic CF-Y5 was 1.5kg including a DVD ROM more than ten years ago. It had
a protrusion on the lid to create a cushion which made a review to call "the
exterior design of the machine's casing is reminiscent of a Sherman tank
cross-bred with a 1970s sports saloon". It made it 45mm thick at the thickest
point. Still, it was 1.5kg and undestructible.

So, instead of focusing on materials science and building lightweight laptops
in whatever thickness a good cooling system would require everyone is falling
over themselves to produce a thin laptop. Which, of course, can't be properly
cooled. It's just physics. In this case, the Macbook "Pro" is 0.61" high where
the Lenovo P52 (which is Pro for real) is 0.96”. This thinness craze killed
off the convenient bottom dock ports from the business laptops creating these
awkward side docks.

Fantastic trick, Mr Jobs, well played.

~~~
komocode
That's a serious tin-foil hat you got there.

~~~
chx
[https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/9kmkve/thinner-
an...](https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/9kmkve/thinner-and-lighter-
laptops-have-screwed-us-all)

------
nickthemagicman
I develop on a macbook pro for 12 hours a day. Have a bajillion chrome tabs
open, 2-3 ides open, sequel pro, photoshop, slack/skype, utorrent, spotify,
and more....

My macbook pro 2016 i7/16G doesn't even skip a beat.

Unless you're doing 3d graphics or Machine Learning or something...I think for
99.9999999% of POWER USERS a throttled i9 with 32 gigs of RAM is plenty for
the year 2018.

This throttle issue in my opinion is such a minor quibble it feels like
demonization of Mac.

You can focus on the very very very few negatives of Macbooks but in my
opinion at the end of the day it's an incredible machine.

~~~
wlll
I think the main quibble is that the laptop can't even hold it's base clock
speed without throttling.

~~~
nickthemagicman
Yeah but that's like buying a race car and being upset that it's throttled at
300 mph.

99.9999% of people will never go 300mph..unless you're using it in a very
specialized way.

~~~
Thorncorona
No it's like buying a truck for your business and being upset when it can't
tow its advertised load.

~~~
nickthemagicman
It's like buying a chinook to tow a skateboard then being upset that the
chinook can't go it's full 200 mph.

