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Purchase 8 Core or 10 Core GPU ?
- Thread starter harleymhs
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Should be negligible, from what I could gather, the 10 cores seem to be running a lower frequency, which saves energy. But I can't find the source anymore.
I have seen some comments or interviews saying the 10 core runs at lower frequency too. However from some reviews I have seen the package power of the 10 core GPU is higher than 8 core GPU with the same tasks.
I predict around 30 - 40 minutes lesser battery life than the 8 core GPU for light web browsing according to what happen in M1 7 vs 8 core GPU.
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Anything needing sustained performance is going to suffer on the MacBook Air. 3D Games fall into that category. Once the SoC becomes heat soaked it is going to throttle. The extra two cores will probably cause the entire SoC to be heat soaked faster than the 8 core GPU. Ultimately though, you are going to find any MBA throttling when playing 3D games. I suspect that the performance improvements of the extra 2 cores will be negligible during a long game session for that reason.
Get the 10 GPU core M2 if you use the GPU for short burst purposes. For anything longer you aren't going to get much benefit though it is likely to be a bit faster than the 8 GPU core.
I’d still prefer 10-core GPU as it’s the base design. I’d rather not have a “handicapped” chip where 2 of the original cores were found to be unstable, so parts of it were disabled. It feels like buying a house but with one room sealed off, you didn’t pay for it, you can’t go there, but you know it’s still there, who knows what’s back there?
I'm thinking more Minecraft... Sounds like you're saying 8 v 10 core for that is no different.
I mean just put it on a laptop cooler if you need more sustained performance. In any case I got a 10 core to replace my base model as i just want the most powerful fanless machine i could get.
I have no idea how intense Minecraft is. For example, I can run the 2013 Unigine OpenGL Valley benchmark for several minutes and my M2 MacBook Air never throttles. I get up to about 85 °C and that's it. So I imagine my 10 cores does better than 8 cores on FPS. But we know that Shadow of the Tomb Raider can cause the M2 MBA to throttle and the FPS between the M2 8 GPU core and 10 GPU core seems to be the same.
In my previous response I said that the Unigine Valley benchmark didn't throttle. That turns out to be incorrect. I ran the benchmark a second time with Ultra settings at 1710x1112 and ran powermetrics (via asitop) and could see my 10 GPU M2 thermal throttle. The asitop tool shows when the SoC starts to throttle. Peak package power was 18.5W with GPU peak at 9.9W and CPU peak at 6.2W. After the M2 started to throttle package power dropped continuously until it hit about 9W then seemed to level off. The GPU power dropped down to about 3.5W over the same period.
Interestingly the temperatures peaked about 90 °C and then dropped over time to about 70 °C and settled around there. So the throttling isn't temperature based or it doesn't seem that way. I'm using my own temperature monitor app so it might have bugs and maybe isn't showing the peak temperature (oddly the temperature sensors of the M2 are named completely differently than the M1.)
So there is pretty severe GPU throttling with 3D animation over time. It took over 3 minutes before I saw any throttling but then the throttle indicator stayed on until I stopped the benchmark. I don't have an 8 GPU core M2 MacBook Air to test on so I don't know what the characteristics of that MBA look like over the same time period. But the benchmark is free and available and powermetrics is built in to macOS so anyone with an 8 GPU core M2 could compare.
Unigine Valley Benchmark
asitop
I'VE ALREADY SPENT $400.00 MORE FOR RAM AND SSD STORAGE, SO I'M STICKING WITH 8 CORE GPU. I THINKI'LL BE FINE.
Me 2.. I speced my MBA M2 with 8 core , 1 TB, 16GB .. I heard some people saying that the 10 core will use more battery.