You can hear the fan at full load, especially on the M4 Pro. I really wish Apple went with a larger case and fan for that chip, which would allow quieter cooling.
That might be a recent phenomenon caused by the inevitable heat of the CPU getting closer and closer to its limit? Like explained in this video: https://youtu.be/AOlXmv9EiPo
My Mac Mini M2 never does any noise, even when I run FFMpeg the fans don’t spike. It just gets slightly warmer. Still, unless I’m doing these high CPU bound activities, every time I touch it it’s cold as if it was turned off, which is very different than my previous Intel one that was always either warm or super hot.
So it's not such a good deal after all and it also means that a lot of regular people won't get those updates (because they either don't know how or can't be bothered to make an account).
With 32 GiB of memory it's just too slow. A laptop, to me, is supposed to be a device much like a phone in that I can just flip it open and do what I need to do, suspend is supposed to be that, but if I don't charge my Dell precision every single day it'll just run down to 0 for absolutely no reason.
It's crazy how unreliable CPUs have become in the last 5 years or so, both AMD and Intel. And it seems they're all running at their limit from the factory, whereas 10-20 years ago they usually had ample headroom for overclocking.
I do. I've been buying Intel for the same reason as the author: I build machines that don't have glitches and mysterious failures and driver issues and all the rest of the garbage one sees PC assemblers inflict on themselves. Make conservative choices and leave ample headroom and you get a solid machine with no problems.
I've never overclocked anything and I've never felt I've missed out in any way. I really can't imagine spending even one minute trying to squeeze 5% or whatnot tweaking voltages and dealing with plumbing and roaring fans. I want to use the machine, not hotrod it.
I would rather Intel et al. leave a few percent "on the table" and sell things that work, for years on end without failure and without a lot of care and feeding. Lately it looks like a crapshoot trying to identify components that don't kill themselves.
How about you "overclock" (overvolt, unlock TDP etc.)?
This is about sane, stable defaults. If you want the extra performance far beyond the CPUs sweet-spot it should be made explicit you're forfeiting the stability headrooms.
Because I'm not a CPU engineer, and neither are you. Neither of us can claim anything about fucking around with CPU clocks and voltages or anything else about any of this. If you want to screw around in BIOS settings and learn where all the sharp edges are and spend your time like this, enjoy. I've never done this nonsense and I never will.
I know enough to tweak the "voltage" slider down a few numbers, and that's enough to get more stability. Otherwise, I vote with my wallet, and don't buy CPUs that break, which is why companies don't generally make CPUs that break.
>which is why companies don't generally make CPUs that break.
Well, that's the issue, isn't it? Both Intel and AMD (resp. their board partners) had issues in recent times stemming from the increasingly aggressive push to the limit for those last few %.
TBF using more conservative energy profiles will bring stability and safety. To that effect in Windows the default profile effectively debuffs the CPU and most people will be fine that way.
So now you're saying just accept the fact that they come pushed past their limits, and the limits are misrepresented. Factory configuration runs them faster than they could in a stable fashion.
You could also get the idea that vendors sometimes make strange decisions which increase neither performance nor reliability.
For example, various brands of motherboards are / were known to basically blow up AMD CPUs when using AMP/XMP, with the root cause being that they jacked an uncore rail way up. Many people claimed they did this to improve stability, but overclockers now that that rail has a sweet spot for stability and they went way beyond it (so much so that the actual silicon failed and burned a hole in itself with some low-ish probability).
The 7800X3D is amazing here, runs extremely cool and stable, you can push it far above its defaults and it still won’t get to 80C even with air cooling. Mine was running between 60-70 under load with PBO set to high. Unfortunately it seems its successor is not that great :/
The 7000 series of CPUs is NOT known for running cool, unlike the AMD 5000 series (which are basically server CPUs repurposed for desktop usage). In the 7000 series, AMD decided to just increase the power of each CPU and that's where most of the performance gains are coming from - but power consumption is 40-50% higher than with similar 5000-series CPUs.
When you use EcoMode with them you only lose ~5% performance, but are still ~30% ahead of the corresponding 5000-series CPU. You can reduce PPT/TDP even further while still ahead.
The only reason the 7800x3d is power efficient is because it simply can't use much power, and so it runs at a better spot of the efficiency curve. Most of the CPUs won't use more than ~88w without doing manual overclocking (not pbo). Compare that to e.g. a 7600x that's 2 cores fewer on the same architecture and will happily pull over 130w.
And even if could push it higher, they run very hot compared to other CPUs at the same power usage as a combination of AMD's very thick IHS, the compute chiplets being small/power dense and 7000 series X3D cache being on top of the compute chiplet unlike 9000 series that has it on the bottom.
The 9800x3d limited in the same way will be both mildly more power efficient from faster cores and run cooler because of the cache location. The only reason it's hotter is that it's allowed to use significantly more power, usually up to 150w stock, for which you'd have to remove the IHS on the 7800X3D if you didn't want to see magic smoke
>dropping support for CPUs that are only a few years old
Isn't it only 2017 CPUs and older? So that's at least ~9 years of free updates (free updates stop at the end of 2026 with the extension), which is frankly better than most other OSs.
If you include paid ESU updates it's at least ~11 years and if you include LTSC it's even way longer than that.
There are many things we can complain about when it comes to Windows, but I wouldn't say long term support is one of them. It's generally better than macOS or Linux distros, not to mention smartphones.
> Isn't it only 2017 CPUs and older? So that's at least ~9 years of free updates (free updates stop at the end of 2026 with the extension), which is frankly better than most other OSs.
That's the indictment of the industry, not a praise for Microsoft.
I’ve had too many circular discussions of this issue on HN already, but arrests are a low bar. You can find examples of people being arrested for stupid reasons in pretty much any country if you google for it. The exact reasons might vary, but any individual police officer being a moron at any moment can lead to someone being arrested.
There are also some examples of people being convicted for questionable reasons, but the UK is far from the only country with laws against hate speech. It is really the US that is the outlier in having a fundamental legal guarantee of the right to hate speech.
Are there similar examples from Europe or the West? I know there are restrictions for promoting Nazism in some countries, but the UK seems to be an outlier when it comes to censoring offensive content in general.
It seems to be an outlier because news coverage in English-speaking media tends to report on the UK more than other European countries, for various reasons.
It’s super easy to find examples if you look for them. In fact, this example from Spain is far worse than any of the examples you’re likely to find in the UK:
The thing is, it’s not an important part of a certain unmentionable person’s political strategy to portray Spain as an authoritarian hellhole. So you won’t hear nearly as much about cases like this.
Look at the actual measurements. The Zenfone was roughly the same size as the standard Galaxy S series and iPhones at the time. Definitely not tiny, not even compact.
The Asus Zenfones were not compact phones. They were almost exactly the same size as the regular iPhones and Galaxy S phones at the time (slightly narrower but thicker). And expecting them to sell well against those two is unreasonable.
You can hear the fan at full load, especially on the M4 Pro. I really wish Apple went with a larger case and fan for that chip, which would allow quieter cooling.
Also, many units are affected by idle (power supply) buzzing: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/255853533?sortBy=rank
The Mac Mini is quieter than a typical PC, but it's not literally silent like, say, a smartphone.