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Macs May Be Getting 'Pro Mode' Option to Boost Performance, According to macOS Catalina Beta

I wonder if anyone can see through the marketing of this "Pro Mode". It seems to me that the 16 inch MacBook Pro, Mac Mini, etc are all suffering form random freezing and other problems with GPU, etc. This Pro Mode may be a Apple work-around to help the Intel I9 and other heat driven problems.

"Pro Mode - To enable your expensive Apple product to do the job we sold it to do, but it can't, without freezing, so we are now going to put your fans on full throttle, increase noice to compete with your new FORCE FIRE MacBook Pro speakers, reduce your battery life, put more wear on the fans and other parts (hope you have Apple Care).......

Go search the Apple forums for MacBook 16 Inch freezing. It seems any stressful workload you put on the new Macbooks will result in freezing, which most suspect is due to heat. Apple has been SILENT on this. So be sure to use your new $3000+ Apple computer with care and don't ask it to work too hard....
 
Coryincali said:
I wonder if anyone can see through the marketing of this "Pro Mode". It seems to me that the 16 inch MacBook Pro, Mac Mini, etc are all suffering form random freezing and other problems with GPU, etc. This Pro Mode may be a Apple work-around to help the Intel I9 and other heat driven problems.

"Pro Mode - To enable your expensive Apple product to do the job we sold it to do, but it can't, without freezing, so we are now going to put your fans on full throttle, increase noice to compete with your new FORCE FIRE MacBook Pro speakers, reduce your battery life, put more wear on the fans and other parts (hope you have Apple Care).......

Go search the Apple forums for MacBook 16 Inch freezing. It seems any stressful workload you put on the new Macbooks will result in freezing, which most suspect is due to heat. Apple has been SILENT on this. So be sure to use your new $3000+ Apple computer with care and don't ask it to work too hard....
Click to expand...

Freezing issue from using EGPU only or eGPU issues separate?

I have one and several of devs of mine at work have them as well, we have no freezing issues with them. They work as expected and if what you're saying is true, we'd see it from every youtuber that's been using them for weeks. I haven't heard anything.

I suspect the problem with eGPU is because of the thunderbolt controller; using it via external monitor reduces the full load by 10-20W because the controller itself heats up and reduce the overall cooling capacity on the GPU/CPU together. Which is expected for now until Intel brings it onboard their CPU (they're doing it for Ice Lake but not Comet Lake).
 
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konqerror said:
Before everybody acts like it's stupid or innovative, Dell, Lenovo, HP have had this feature for at least a decade, along with lap mode and quiet mode.

View attachment 888389
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No, what Dell and co. do is nothing more than tweaking the Windows power options. You can choose between better performance and better battery life. Windows has always been like that. OS X has just always been stuck in "Better battery life" mode.
 
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MikhailT said:
Turn off SIP.
I haven’t gotten a single prompt since the initial update.
Click to expand...
SIP stands for System Integrity Protection...why would you ever want to leave that off?? I'm not saying there would never be a reason to turn it off, because I myself have disabled it when I was messing around with dual-booting Linux and some custom boot loader stuff, but it was only temporary and then I re-enabled it.

That might be one of the most careless things I can think of any Mac owner doing...
 
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brinary001 said:
SIP stands for System Integrity Protection...why would you ever want to leave that off?? I'm not saying there would never be a reason to turn it off, because I myself have disabled it when I was messing around with dual-booting Linux and some custom boot loader stuff, but it was only temporary and then I re-enabled it.

That might be one of the most careless things I can think of any Mac owner doing...
Click to expand...

I don't. I'm telling the user to turn it off if he's annoyed and doesn't care about the prompts that is actually important.

I haven't gotten any prompts since the update was installed and that was with SIP enabled.
 
thejadedmonkey said:
No, what Dell and co. do is nothing more than tweaking the Windows power options. You can choose between better performance and better battery life. Windows has always been like that. OS X has just always been stuck in "Better battery life" mode.
Click to expand...

Great job not reading any of the 3 detailed screenshots.
 
Well, sounds like a boondoggle at first glance, but if done properly it can yield benefits (although it also might reduce overall life-span). Let's hope Apple does what MS (supposedly) does and reduces the priority of non-essential processes when in Pro mode. Otherwise there will be extremely limited benefit: Assuming the fans would already push to full RPM when necessary (this is a totally different story if Apple's "100%" fan speed wasn't actually 100%), you can't really get more performance out of processors pegged at full load. You *can* cool them off again faster if you don't have a sustained full load. So that you have more time before throttling sets in when the processors again hit full load. So in the end this might have almost zero benefit to something like Handbrake if it was already pegging the CPUs close to 100%, but might be pretty useful to something like gaming, where CPU and GPU demand can spike wildly and where having an additional 5 or 10 seconds before throttling begins can be really important. If anything related to gaming *can* be really important in the first place. Which it probably can't. I'll stop typing now.
 
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How about a Low Power Mode that disables Turbo Boost and forces iGPU instead of dGPU. That would be great for when battery life is required over performance.
 
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joelhinch said:
How about a Low Power Mode that disables Turbo Boost and forces iGPU instead of dGPU. That would be great for when battery life is required over performance.
Click to expand...

Actually, some level of Turbo Boost saves power because the chip can complete the work faster and drop into low power idle, switching off the power draw from things like cache. Intel's Skylake+ CPUs are smart enough to realize this, they automatically analyze workload, and compute what level of Turbo Boost or throttling will save the most power and run there. The whole system is called Hardware P-states (HWP) and sold as Intel Speed Shift.
 
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MikhailT said:
Freezing issue from using EGPU only or eGPU issues separate?

I have one and several of devs of mine at work have them as well, we have no freezing issues with them. They work as expected and if what you're saying is true, we'd see it from every youtuber that's been using them for weeks. I haven't heard anything.

I suspect the problem with eGPU is because of the thunderbolt controller; using it via external monitor reduces the full load by 10-20W because the controller itself heats up and reduce the overall cooling capacity on the GPU/CPU together. Which is expected for now until Intel brings it onboard their CPU (they're doing it for Ice Lake but not Comet Lake).
Click to expand...

It seems to be specific to the MacBook Pro 16 Inch I9 models. And there are new post from new purchasers every day....So its not a small few.

It seems to only occur when putting load on the CPU. I experienced this during my first day, when installing my app and getting things "setup". It froze 3 times within 24 hours. Once things calmed down and the CPU was not being PUSHED, things are good. But the moment you ask the CPU to do some real work....HEAT...FREEZE.

But the Pro Mode feature screams to be......."Apple computers can't handle hard workloads without the fans roaring."
 
Dear Apple,
Do a "keyboard backtrack" move and release Snow Leopard again for all Macs, and call it macOS Pro. We'll look the other way and won't complain, I promise.
I left a glass of milk and cookies on the chimney for you, TC.
 
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So will this finally speed up my 2018 Core i9 MBP and prevent thermal throttling? I would appreciate this but I guess the thermal design is just too bad.
 
Coryincali said:
It seems to be specific to the MacBook Pro 16 Inch I9 models. And there are new post from new purchasers every day....So its not a small few.

It seems to only occur when putting load on the CPU. I experienced this during my first day, when installing my app and getting things "setup". It froze 3 times within 24 hours. Once things calmed down and the CPU was not being PUSHED, things are good. But the moment you ask the CPU to do some real work....HEAT...FREEZE.

But the Pro Mode feature screams to be......."Apple computers can't handle hard workloads without the fans roaring."
Click to expand...

Yea, we use 8-core i9 models as we compile code all the time, that pushes all cores to the full load and we can hear the fans. We don't notice any freezing at all but we do notice OS is slower to use because there's not enough CPU.

Just to be clear, when you say freezing, what do you mean exactly? Freezing usually means you can't do anything; the mouse/keyboard/OS is not interacting. The OS being slower or stuttering to react is not freezing.
 
Meanwhile, at the weekly meeting of the Apple Marketing Department:

“Ah, just slap Pro on it and ship.”
 
MikhailT said:
Freezing issue from using EGPU only or eGPU issues separate?
Click to expand...

The main issue RIGHT NOW is with the METAL drivers for AMD 5000 series in macOS Catalina 10.15.2. The drivers just are not good. There are major issues with rendering artifacts and issues when being used for compute.

Physically, there is nothing wrong. It is almost entirely visual artifact issues and extremely scattered performance. It's very repeatable in After Effects with the Mercury Engine via GPU acceleration with a bunch of different effects. This has been personally observed in MBP16,1 with 5500M and also with RX 5700XT in eGPU. The same issues do NOT exist in Mojave with RX 580.

Apple (and AMD?) have a lot of work to do with these drivers before W5700X is released, especially if they want to hold off a bunch of really angry customers with deep pockets spending $6K+ on desktops.
 
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