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Apple could have decided that after all the complaining about why you did not throw x processor in
Can you imagine the hue and cry if apple didn't offer the i9.

Back to the overheating, both Dell and Apple are using the same exact enclosure they have for years, yet with coffee lake the processor runs a lot hotter it seems then its predecessor. I don't mean just the i9 runs hot but i7 and i5. Some computer makers redesigned their laptops and provided better cooling, Razer, MSI and others. I think some makers just assumed that they'd not need to worry about thermals and plopped coffee lake into their existing cases.
 
It's possible but it hasn't been listed in any of the breakdowns of the A10X architecture that I've seen. Here's a screenshot of the A10 Fusion used in the iPad 2018 model. (The A10 Fusion is on the left).

ItuaVnO.png


Here's an example of throttling:

If you play Fortnite for iOS with the power supply connected through the Lightning port, the screen will dim and the frame rate will drop after some time of both playing and charging.

If you play Fornite for iOS only on battery, rarely does the screen dim or the frame rate drop.

Charging the battery causes heat and overheating causes iOS to throttle the CPU. But the CPU isn't under a heavier load when charging.

So, my conclusion was that the thermometer is only on the battery and not the CPU.


I understand what you are staying, but the absence of the on-die sensor on a 3rd party chip scan is not evidence of absence - after all the structures are very small and not described by the designers themselves. (for other ppl reading this thread) here is an old article with a couple of sensors on different chip areas - no idea how many gates / area though:

https://www.semanticscholar.org/pap...971eb5e20b6eee2feec189109fdff6efbfca/figure/1

Now, it may be possible that there is no throttling on battery because other parts of the system are the ones that are thermally limited:

"If you play Fortnite for iOS with the power supply connected through the Lightning port, the screen will dim and the frame rate will drop after some time of both playing and charging."

If the die to case Rjc is very low, and the CPU thermal limit, is, say 100C, whereas other parts (e.g. battery) have a lower thermal limit, say 50C for the battery - then is could be causing the throttling - especially when charging.

tl;dr: I am fully convinced there is a temp . sensor on the Axx CPU - but it may not be getting triggered as other temp. sensors are limiting sub-system performance.

Anyway... I hope that this works out for soon to be 2018 MBP owners, like myself (well, hopefully - if no other untoward issues pop up with the 2018 model)
 
Can you imagine the hue and cry if apple didn't offer the i9.

Back to the overheating, both Dell and Apple are using the same exact enclosure they have for years, yet with coffee lake the processor runs a lot hotter it seems then its predecessor. I don't mean just the i9 runs hot but i7 and i5. Some computer makers redesigned their laptops and provided better cooling, Razer, MSI and others. I think some makers just assumed that they'd not need to worry about thermals and plopped coffee lake into their existing cases.
The question is why is it running hotter if it is supposedly the same TDP. Is it possible the released version of High Sierra needs tweaking to the fan speed code for this build (I was notified of an update pending today)... Is it possible that the early ones off the manufacturing like have an issue with too much paste and that tweaking the production line will fix the problem? I think it is still to early to know.
 
If that's part of the issue yes, I agree. The i9 does run very hot, I don't think anyone will disagree, coffee lake has been out long enough to have a good body of evidence, but apple markets itself has a premium product, it charges us a premium price, am I wrong to expect a premium experience? I don't think anyone can deny that the i9 is not performing as it should
No I completely agree Apple shouldn’t have offered this chip in this chassis, knowing (they must have) that the cooling solution was inadequate. Having said that, if the i9 remains more performant than the i7 they technically are offering an upgrade and technically they don’t guarantee a certain level of performance from the chips, just that one is on average faster than the other. But I think intel offering this chip at all is probably the bigger issue.
 
I can't believe Apple would push something so defective. This is some Lenovo-style crap. Waiting to see more tests.

Have you been following their Mac product launches since 2016?
[doublepost=1531911650][/doublepost]

The intel TDP is for base clock only.
An Intel cpu will exceed TDP if conditions enable it. But yeah. If the cooling is inadequate you end up with this scenario...
 
No, I'm not claiming that at all, I'm claiming that apple tested it, and knew it had thermal issues but still released it.

Apple, like any other experienced laptop maker, knew that the i9 would run hotter. That's the "thermal issue", and it's true of every laptop with an i9. The claim that the MBP with the i9 is slower performing than the i7 because of thermal throttling under normal conditions sounds contrived to me. I can think of a wide variety of ways a YouTube video could mislead the viewer about what the actual temperature conditions were for the testing.
 
The i9 is likely faster at responding to burst workloads on a mostly idle machine.

Like most “normie” end user notebooks or desktops.

UNLIKE most workstation type machines.

The type that professionals use....
 
he claim that the MBP with the i9 is slower performing than the i7 because of thermal throttling under normal conditions sounds contrived to me.
I think the issue is you're paying a premium for the i9 configuration and so people who do that, feel they need to the extra horsepower. So in the end, while they're spending even more money they're actually get worse performance. Time is money for many professionals and if a brand new computer that they paid a lot of money for runs slower then the prior generation or a lower end configuration then I'd say that's a big problem.
 
You think Intel being late on the 10nm die shrink is unrelated to the 8th gen CPU running hot and being generally bad at overclocking? Interesting.
I have no thoughts on that topic. My response to lecorsaire was about his immediate "it wasn't Apple's fault, it was Intel". As I said to him in a previous post, Intel didn't design the chassis, decide to offer the chip as an upgrade, or come up with the thermal solution. He wasn't trying to address the issue, he was trying to deflect blame.
 
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UNLIKE most workstation type machines.

The type that professionals use...
I think that's the issue, people who opt for the i9 may very well be needing it for longer processing tasks, like rendering and that's where the issues are cropping up. My usage is more like what you mentioned, burst like. While this has me a bit concerned about my MBP order, I think my usage will be such that I'll not be throttling (I bought the i7)
 
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I understand what you are staying, but the absence of the on-die sensor on a 3rd party chip scan is not evidence of absence - after all the structures are very small and not described by the designers themselves. (for other ppl reading this thread) here is an old article with a couple of sensors on different chip areas - no idea how many gates / area though:

https://www.semanticscholar.org/pap...971eb5e20b6eee2feec189109fdff6efbfca/figure/1

Now, it may be possible that there is no throttling on battery because other parts of the system are the ones that are thermally limited:

"If you play Fortnite for iOS with the power supply connected through the Lightning port, the screen will dim and the frame rate will drop after some time of both playing and charging."

If the die to case Rjc is very low, and the CPU thermal limit, is, say 100C, whereas other parts (e.g. battery) have a lower thermal limit, say 50C for the battery - then is could be causing the throttling - especially when charging.

tl;dr: I am fully convinced there is a temp . sensor on the Axx CPU - but it may not be getting triggered as other temp. sensors are limiting sub-system performance.

Anyway... I hope that this works out for soon to be 2018 MBP owners, like myself (well, hopefully - if no other untoward issues pop up with the 2018 model)

That is a helpful diagram, thank you!

From my research, even through a C-level Darwin and Foundation hack, there is no API that I am aware of that provides the CPU temperature for iOS. This data is accessible in macOS and let’s you gauge if your CPU is overheating. The CPU temperature is provided by a sensor on the fan.

Since the A10X is a fan-less chip, there may not be a need for a sensor. If it overheats, like when it’s too hot outside, you can’t cool it. The system just shuts off. This could be accomplished through the battery, though.

The sensor, for my own curiosity, would be interesting for game developers.

I don’t make games, but the CPU temperature could provide a benchmark for 3D games.
 
Ah, but because some random guy on YouTube made the claim it is Mac Rumors front page news! LOL.
It’s not just some random guy. He is a well-known, prominent, trustworthy tech blogger who tests and reviews hundreds of products. He knows what he’s talking about.
 
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Have you been following their Mac product launches since 2016?
[doublepost=1531911650][/doublepost]

The intel TDP is for base clock only.
An Intel cpu will exceed TDP if conditions enable it. But yeah. If the cooling is inadequate you end up with this scenario...

I am well aware of it BUT you have failed to read anything about the tests etc. It is throttling even at BASE clock. (i.e. the throttling is to less than 2.9 base clock -- not in turbo)
[doublepost=1531912976][/doublepost]
It’s not just some random guy. He is a well-known, prominent, trustworthy tech blogger who tests and reviews hundreds of products. He knows what he’s talking about.
It is the many stages of grief... denial and shooting the messenger... but this is not politics... this is just tech.
 
I think the issue is you're paying a premium for the i9 configuration and so people who do that, feel they need to the extra horsepower. So in the end, while they're spending even more money they're actually get worse performance.

Again, this isn't proven. Like I said, there's all kinds of different ways a YouTube video could mislead the viewer in regards to the conditions for the testing. The idea that Apple would just release the i9 for the hell of it without testing is baloney.
 
Apple should include in the box 2 ice bags. One to place under the machine and the other to place on top of the head of the buyer who just spent $5k on a machine that's slower than last year's.
 
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Again, this isn't proven. Like I said, there's all kinds of different ways a YouTube video could mislead the viewer in regards to the conditions for the testing. The idea that Apple would just release the i9 for the hell of it without testing is baloney.
I take people with a proven track record at their word -- until they prove their word is no longer trustworthy. I see no reason to discount his results. I will of course wait for one of my most trusted sources Anandtech to test it - but my gut says they will find the same.
 
Might I submit to you that the timing of the new MacBook Pro launch and the release of this YouTube’s first video (complaining about being disappointed with Apple’s lack of current gen processors after so long) was not entirely coincidental? It was seen by a large number of people. Phil Schiller could have seen it and said “man this doesn’t look good for us, let’s just go ahead and surprise people by launching the new line a little early”

The timing and lack of press and keynote for the new hardware took a lot of people by surprise.

This theory would also explain why they released the i9 before it was truly ready.

Also, it’s not unheard of for Apple to pivot because of criticism of someone famous - see Taylor Swift and Apple Music free trial.
 
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I wonder if the base 15” i7 will throttle less than the i9,less heat than i9 and so the i7 will be better in performance than the i9 for tasks that take longer than seconds/minutes?!
 
My take on this is that :

- Apple is fully aware of the issue.
- and they still released it because....they had to. Almost all other PCs chose to do it (while having the same issues), and if Apple didn’t release an i9 machine, everyone would still be lamenting how they are behind the PC industry. What matters to most of the press and bloggers is the superficial aspects, the specs on paper.
- so Apple probably did some marketing thinking and decided that the damage of being blasted for having a laptop that can’t handle its i9 processor is lower than the damage of being blasted for not having an updated machine at all.

The question then becomes, why hasn’t Apple anticipated the cooling requirements adequately? Why did they see fit to use an older and allegedly inadequate cooling solution?
 
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So, set your AC to freezing if you want a faster computer... got it!

Or use it outside in a (Buffalo) New York winter!

Premiere tries to use the CPU as much as possible by going full 100% utilization. The problem with throttling is that there's a severe penalty if you do hit the temperature threshold.

Final Cut keeps it under 100% cpu utilization (either that's intentionally done in code, or simply because it's being offloaded by GPU, not sure). Even without full GPU acceleration, Final Cut would still likely complete a render vs Premiere. Just compare the throttling dips. First is Final Cut, and second image is Premiere.

6EJ2GNU.jpg

zvjIzGK.jpg



Not sure if people were expecting Macbooks to be able to withstand 100% CPU utilization for hours. If you were, then the past couple of generations have had the same issue.

The only thing surprising is that the 2018 ended up being slower than 2017 laptops. One explanation is that Premier/Final Cut have 2017 Macbook specific optimizations and they're still working on optimizing it for 2018.

I'm wondering how big of a factor Premiere is in the equation. The video below does a similar test and the 2017 model does win, but it's a FCPX test and the 2018 MBP does hold it's base clock speed throughout the test.

I've always found Premiere and AME to utilize a lot more of the CPU and be all over the map regarding speed, heat, etc.


It is not possible to claim the MBP is a "Pro" computer and then claim you can not use all professional software with it.

To be fair, this isn't so much Apple's fault as it is Intel's. Intel has really dropped the ball in the past couple of years. If they don't right the ship soon, AMD will take over the CPU game for a while. They are late with everything and are having lots of trouble shrinking the dies.

This is Apple's fault because Apple designed the chassis, the cooling system, and the CPU.

I am surprised that no one has tried putting Intel's 15W quad-core CPUs in a 45W chassis like the MBP. According to tests, Intel's U-series CPUs can maintain their top boost frequency on ALL four CPU cores in a chassis designed for a 45W TDP CPU. E.g. The 15W i7 8550 4C/8T CPU has a base clock of 1.8GHz and is configurable up to a base clock of 2.0GHz at 25W with Turbo Boosts going up to 4GHz @1C / 4GHz @2C / 3.7GHz @4C. Apple's 15" MBP should be able to sustain 3.7GHz on 4 cores given the chassis. Would this not perform better and have longer battery life than the currently throttled CPUs in the MBP?

I realize this would require Intel iGPUs; however the Iris Pro variants seem to run hot and if Apple is going to include dGPUs and push eGPUs then the issue is moot.

I saw my 2.6 i7's CPU score on Cinebench drop significantly the first couple of days when hot, but it has seemed to stabilize in the range of 965 down to 880 or so.

I'm impressed with this release performance-wise.

A four core i7 has completely different characteristics than a six core i9. The two don't compare.
 
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