I sit firm in my belief that the best thing Microsoft could do for their laptop ecosystem is to add support for a "max fan speed" slider somewhere prominent in the Windows UI.
People want the option to make their laptop silent or nearly silent. And when users do need the power, they generally prefer a slightly slower laptop at a reasonable volume rather than the roar of a jet engine.
Laptop manufacturers want their devices to score high on benchmarks. The best way to do that is to add a fan that can become very loud.
The incentives are not aligned.
All laptops should be designed to operate passively 100% of the time, if the owner so chooses. I doubt manufacturers will go that route unless Microsoft nudges them towards it. It would have downstream effects on how review sites benchmark laptops (i.e., at various power draws/noise levels producing a curve rather than a single number), which would have downstream effects on what CPU designers optimize for. It'd be great for consumers.
Stop demanding paper thin laptops. My work Dell rarely turns on its fan unless an AV scan is in progress and even then it's rather tolerable. It isn't a fashionable thickness so has plenty of internal volume for heat distribution.
I want a very thick laptop with many fans. It should be chonky and with personality like an old sun tadpole unix labtop, not svlete and artsy liek a 2000s macbook. I like the white noise and if it helps preformance all the better.
"Thin and fanless" aren't that hard, just use any low power CPU.
But then people also want fast.
Apple does this by buying out TSMC's capacity for the latest process nodes and then taking the performance/efficiency trade off in favor of efficiency, so they get something with similar performance and lower power consumption. But then they charge you $400 for $50 worth of RAM and solder it so you can't upgrade it yourself.
The thing to realize is that fans are not required to spin, and the difference between the faster and slower processors are the clock speed rather than the transistors. So what you want is exactly what the OP requested: A laptop with fans in it, but you can turn them off. Then the CPU gets capped at a 15W TDP, has basically the same single-thread performance but is slower on threaded workloads, and it's no longer possible for Chrome to make your laptop loud.
But if you want to open up Blender you still have the option to move up the fan slider and make it go faster.
I know everyone on this site loves to hate on soldered ram, but my impression is most people don’t understand that soldered ram is not the same thing as regular ram modules. They are literally different memory chips (LPDDR vs DDR) . When built to a specific chip my understanding is you can design for tighter timings and higher bandwidth which is important for the gpu. The M1 shipped with very fast LPDDR4X running at 4266MT/s which was even pretty fast by XMP desktop speeds at the time (2020). There are real engineering advantages to soldered ram especially if the memory controller has need designed with to take advantage of it. I guess it is similar to how gpu memory configurations are specialized and not modular.
The first is the timings, which is nominally real but it was never a huge difference. Moreover, the new CAMM standard aims to address this and basically does. The legacy SODIMM standard wasn't great and is essentially what caused this.
The second is the bus width. If you use slotted memory and want a wide bus then you need at least one slot per channel and then you could end up needing a lot of slots. This isn't impossible -- servers do it -- but there is a cost attached to it.
But this doesn't apply to systems that aren't using a wide bus. The base M3 has the same bus width as ordinary dual-channel PCs. The Pro has the equivalent of four channels or, for the newer generation, three. That's still not a crazy number in a high end system. With CAMM it would only be two modules, since the modules are each 128-bit. By way of comparison, Threadripper has four or eight channels and modern servers have dozens.
Fast is relative. The Ryzen HX 370 has a TDP configurable down to 15W and at that power level it could be run fanless and would be faster than the M1, but it's still faster yet if you give it 54W and raise the clock speed.
The premise is that others can now use the same process as the M1 did to make fanless CPUs. Which they can, but they could always make fanless CPUs. The issue is that people also want them to be fast, which is not an absolute measurement fixed for all time, it's relative to competing contemporary systems with more cooling, which will always be faster.
You're asking for a benchmark result for a CPU which just came out and has a configurable TDP that hardly anybody is going to have set to its lowest value, if they even disclose it, much less have done so in a test against the original M1. If you think a source for that even exists you can provide a link.
But the result seems pretty obvious. Even the 7nm Ryzen U-series at 15W (e.g. 7730U) was beating the 5nm M1 on multi-threaded workloads and the HX 370 is well ahead of both on single-thread performance. Single-thread workloads aren't significantly power limited, so to not be the case the Zen5 HX 370 would have to be slower than the Zen3 7730U on threaded workloads at the same TDP, which seems unlikely.
>But the result seems pretty obvious. Even the 7nm Ryzen U-series at 15W (e.g. 7730U) was beating the 5nm M1 on multi-threaded workloads and the HX 370 is well ahead of both on single-thread performance. Single-thread workloads aren't significantly power limited, so to not be the case the Zen5 HX 370 would have to be slower than the Zen3 7730U on threaded workloads at the same TDP, which seems unlikely.
Again, would like a source on that. Please no Cinebench R23.
Faster in everything, ST and MT. ST difference is significant, MT difference is huge. Obviously this is expected because in this comparison AMD has the process advantage, but the expected thing is indeed what happens.
Let's not use Passmark MT. Stick to the better benchmarks that are optimized for both ARM and x86. GB5 and GB6, M1 is faster in MT despite having 4 fewer cores. If you can find SPEC scores, that'd be great too.
HX 370 vs M1, what's the perf/watt for SPEC and GB5/6 and Cinebench 2024?
HX370 consumes a lot more power. Hence, there aren't any fanless laptops available for it.
4 years later, AMD's chips still can't work in a fanless laptop.
> Let's not use Passmark MT. Stick to the better benchmarks that are optimized for both ARM and x86.
At some point you just run out of benchmarks. The majority of benchmarks people ordinarily use already don't run on Macs.
> GB5 and GB6, M1 is faster in MT despite having 4 fewer cores.
It has the same number of cores as the 7730U. Half the M1's cores are E-cores, but that should be an advantage on a comparison at a given power level because E-cores have better performance per watt. The M1 gets within the margin of error of the same MT score on the benchmark you actually like even though the M1 is built on a newer process.
> HX 370 vs M1, what's the perf/watt for SPEC and GB5/6 and Cinebench 2024?
You keep asking for benchmarks that probably nobody has published.
> HX370 consumes a lot more power. Hence, there aren't any fanless laptops available for it.
It has a configurable TDP down to 15W. You can make a laptop that passively dissipates 15W. But you can also make a laptop with a fan in it which is capable of higher performance from the same silicon and then have a setting for "silent mode" that lets you switch between them at will. People generally like that better so that's what they make.
>At some point you just run out of benchmarks. The majority of benchmarks people ordinarily use already don't run on Macs.
You just need GB5 or GB6. They are correlated to SPEC. Anything else is sort of worthless in 2024.
>It has the same number of cores as the 7730U. Half the M1's cores are E-cores, but that should be an advantage on a comparison at a given power level because E-cores have better performance per watt. The M1 gets within the margin of error of the same MT score on the benchmark you actually like even though the M1 is built on a newer process.
You're right, the 7730U does have 8 cores only. My mistake.
OP has already cited sufficient stats to prove his point, and you're looping on reply for different sources.
Why don't you supply your own sources? You're making a claim just the same as the OP, without providing any evidence in your favor. A good faith responder would do the legwork to provide a researched counterpoint.
To anybody that has actually been paying attention to CPU evolution over the years, the process node has clearly been the main differentiator between CPU performance. Intel had the process advantage and thus the CPU advantage, and now they don't.
Architecture matters too, but does not result anywhere near an order of magnitude difference, conventionally.
And this AMD processor is not the one specified in the OP (Ryzen HX 370) and is not on the same process node as the m1, thus not valid to prove your counterpoint.
You are comparing a 7nm processor to a 5nm one, and yet the gap isn't even very large. Which was entirely the OPs point.
Does a 5nm AMD chip perform similarly to the 5nm Apple chip at the same wattage? (Again, performance does not increase linearly with wattage, as you're likely to cite something violating this logic in the next response)
You seem to not understand the point being discussed though, so no reason to discuss further
>You are comparing a 7nm processor to a 5nm one, and yet the gap isn't even very large. Which was entirely the OPs point.
The gap is huge. AMD's 7nm chip typically uses ~5x more power than the M1 and is still slower.
>Does a 5nm AMD chip perform similarly to the 5nm Apple chip at the same wattage? (Again, performance does not increase linearly with wattage, as you're likely to cite something violating this logic in the next response)
No it does not. Apple's chips are significantly more efficient.
>You seem to not understand the point being discussed though, so no reason to discuss further
Don't run Windows and you don't need fast. Unfortunately Linux on notebooks is always a dice roll of random features (cam, fingerprint, ..) not working.
There is a lot of older hardware running like crap because Windows just bloats up.
So is running MacOS on non-apple laptops or running windows on chromebooks. Preinstalled is another story, of course, you paid someone to make sure all those random features work.
That said, defaults seem often wrong and defaults matter. For instance, I recently got an HP Elitebook with an amd 7840hs because for some reason the _u version was tied to a lower res screen. By default it runs high powered and then the fan is loud enough to be annoying. Set it it to balanced or low power and the fan is inaudible.
The cheapest MacBook Air is $1000, and it's more like $1500+ if you want a reasonable amount of RAM and storage. There are similarly expensive Windows laptops available that are fanless.
I spent $1700 or so on my M1 Air not too long after they were released. A ThinkPad X1 Carbon would have cost me more money for massively worse performance. Quality costs more.
The difference is that a 4800U would be looking pretty bad vs a HX370 while the M1 still looks decent 4 years later (especially when that HX370 is unplugged).
For $1200 you can easily pick up a decent refurb MBP - these are apple refurbs for example. OOS but an example of what you can find if you look around a bit.
Then use a desktop. Like most people I want my laptop paper thin: at least Apple understands that correctly. My daily laptop driver is a "LG Gram" which is especially slick, thin and light (lighter than any Mac laptop) and it's no slouch: 24 GB of RAM for example. And it's basically quiet: I don't even know if it has any fan (I own it since years and never heard a fan).
I'll take a slightly slower laptop if it means it's much quieter. But there's no way I'm going back to the bricks we used to have in 90s/2000s.
If you need a 4090 GPU, buy a desktop and call it a day. For everything else, you can get plenty of power, fast NVMe M.2 SSD, lots of RAM in a paper thin laptop.
> add support for a "max fan speed" slider somewhere prominent in the Windows UI.
Isn't that what the "power settings" do? It's a slider at the bottom right, hidden in a tray icon. Sure, it only has three positions and also influences battery consumption but it pretty much does what you want. (Not sure if windows 11 kept this though)
It might also be good to mandate 10+ hours of battery life when the laptop is in power saving mode. A number of laptops that'd otherwise have decent battery life are hampered by things like half-baked power management of discrete GPUs that doesn't completely cut power supply to those components. Manufacturers should be more heavily testing under this mode.
A few misbehaving CSS filters can make my discreet GPU turn on and at that point my battery life is a goner. Not sure who to blame in that scenario.
There was an old bug in FF around 2018 where a tab using a GPU would prevent a Windows laptop from ever sleeping. That ended up destroying that laptop's battery after it got thrown in my backpack and overheated a couple times.
Seems like this could be fixed by a system setting that disables automatic graphic switching which can be controlled by power profiles. That way the user can set the machine to use iGPU only when on battery, regardless of what programs want.
>I sit firm in my belief that the best thing Microsoft could do for their laptop ecosystem is to add support for a "max fan speed" slider somewhere prominent in the Windows UI
A closed source application for controlling one's fan...umm no thank you.
I never will understand the reasoning behind why people are so afraid of releasing their source code. Looks like a weekend project; does he expect to make a living out of a weekend project?
Is that the best developer insult in your repertoire?
>does he expect to make a living out of a weekend project?
Trying to make money from writing SW is not illegal. The free market will decide.
>A closed source application for controlling one's fan...umm no thank you.
Well since you think it's only a weekend project, why don't you put your money where your mouth is and spend a weekend developing a FOSS fan control app if you need one?
In this case, every OEM will just copy it and slap their name on it. He released it as freeware and he has every right to do so. You have no right to others work.
I don't know anything about Windows, but at least on Mac, I've been using TGPro for years [0]. I'd assume there is something similar in the Windows world.
In normal conditions my M1 mac can control its fans just fine, but when I travel to hot places like Vietnam... I just keep the fans on more often and my machine doesn't get nearly as hot. I end up having to open it up after a few months and clean out the fans, but that's fine.
Some recent asus ROG/TUF 2022+ models have fine tuning available via "armoury crate" or "g-helper" (non-proprietary, fan/community supported, code on github).
Disabling a dGpu and reducing power can yeld some impressive results for battery life. Allows also defining fan speed curves depending on temperature.
I don't mind fans at all, in fact I find fan noises a little soothing (a childhood thing, we didn't have AC). Everyone has different priorities, personally I'd prefer to not have throttled performance.
People want the option to make their laptop silent or nearly silent. And when users do need the power, they generally prefer a slightly slower laptop at a reasonable volume rather than the roar of a jet engine.
Laptop manufacturers want their devices to score high on benchmarks. The best way to do that is to add a fan that can become very loud.
The incentives are not aligned.
All laptops should be designed to operate passively 100% of the time, if the owner so chooses. I doubt manufacturers will go that route unless Microsoft nudges them towards it. It would have downstream effects on how review sites benchmark laptops (i.e., at various power draws/noise levels producing a curve rather than a single number), which would have downstream effects on what CPU designers optimize for. It'd be great for consumers.