Comment by pja
7 hours ago
The i9 was notorious. Would thermally throttle almost instantly & for any sizeable build job would end up slower than the i7 IIRC.
Intel really made themselves unpopular with Apple during that period.
7 hours ago
The i9 was notorious. Would thermally throttle almost instantly & for any sizeable build job would end up slower than the i7 IIRC.
Intel really made themselves unpopular with Apple during that period.
> Intel really made themselves unpopular with Apple during that period.
You can't tell me that this wasn't known by Apple before shipping the product. Why did they not provide adequate cooling for the CPU?
This was a laptop, so cooling was very constrained. The fans can only be so big & you can only shift so much air in & out of a MacBook.
I presume Apple knew perfectly well but wanted the halo product to sell to those people who will always pay extra for the perceived “top of the line” product. Once Intel branding had created an i9 that was a bigger number than an i7, then Apple was going to sell it.
It was faster than the i7 after all: just not for very long!
My entirely speculative theory is that the poor thermal characteristics of that era of Intel CPUs didn’t really become apparent until quite late in the development process & by that point Apple had probably committed to buying a fair chunk of Intel’s output.
> Intel really made themselves unpopular with Apple during that period.
Intel just reenacted IBM's history with Apple, particularly the G5 era. That CPU was instantly a no-go for anything mobile. In workstations it was cranked ever higher with very poor power-frequency scaling, needing water cooling for the beastly 200W idle power consumption and close to 1kW full throttle.
That went well so was a perfect role model for Intel's i9.