Comment by thayne
12 hours ago
From what I can tell, you can get more total performance from intel/amd, but at the cost of more power draw, which besides needing more cooling also means shorter battery life.
And even on my desktop, where battery life doesn't matter, I wouldn't mind my CPU needing less cooling.
I say this as someone who will probably never own a mac.
Yeah, I would say that historically low power draw and low heat just haven’t been dominant priorities in the x86 world. If it can be “fixed” by pushing the fans harder and building in a bigger battery (or PSU), that’s good enough.
This is a natural major conflict with the qualities of a laptop that’s good at being a laptop, but yeah, I’d prefer that my custom built tower be efficient, cool, inaudible, and a small as reasonably possible without severely impinging expandability.
I’ve heard of people building desktops around mobile x86 CPUs soldered onto ITX/mATX boards, which sounds like it might be the solution that mainstream manufacturers don’t want to give us. Even a modest desktop cooling solution is vastly more capable than what can be fit into a laptop and so should keep such a CPU chilly with ease.