Thermal Throttling Explained
What Is It, How Foes It Manifest Itself, And How Does It Prevent It?
If you are not entirely proficient in information technology but would still like to broaden your horizons, it might be useful to know what thermal throttling is. Most often, you can encounter this term in processors, in the world of Apple, specifically in the case of the 13″ MacBook Pro and the newer MacBook Air. But thermal throttling is found in Apple laptops and classic desktop computers or laptops from other brands. So let’s get thermal throttling straight in this article.
What is thermal throttling?
To begin with, it would be nice to translate the term thermal throttling into English, which will help many of you understand it better. Thermal throttling can be loosely translated into English as “cutting” power due to high temperature. As I mentioned in the introduction, it occurs in various chips.
For example, the main processor, the graphics card chip, or other hardware components. Most often, it manifests itself when you give your device a hard time with several different tasks — for example, rendering a video, running several applications at once, or gaming.
Humans thermal throttling
We can apply it to humans to give you a better idea of thermal throttling. Walking, your body does not heat up and works without any problems. However, as soon as you start running (multi-tasking), you run, and after a while, you start sweating and panting. If you are in good shape (would-be cooling system), then running doesn’t give you problems. Otherwise, you have to stop and breathe (thermal throttling). A good cooling system will allow you to run at maximum performance for longer.
How does it manifest itself?
For the processor to handle all these actions, it needs to “wake up” from sleep mode and start working hard. The processor then increases its frequency to the maximum possible or deploys the so-called Turbo Boost (see below). When the frequency is increased and the performance is generally boosted, the processor starts to heat up, even to temperatures of 100 degrees Celsius. While processors are built to run at high temperatures, too much is too much.
Once a processor hits a certain temperature threshold, its performance must be reduced precisely because of the high temperature to avoid permanent damage to the hardware — and this is called thermal throttling. Different coolers and cooling systems help to reduce temperatures. Still, in some cases, the cooling is undersized, and the processor is insufficient, which is the case with newer, smaller MacBooks… but it’s not always the fault of the computer manufacturer (see again below).
Intel, Turbo Boost and thermal throttling
The term thermal throttling is becoming more and more familiar with Intel processors. These processors have the so-called Turbo Boost function, which “overclock” the processor. For example, the latest 13″ MacBook Pro has a base quad-core Intel Core i5 processor that runs at 1.4 GHz. With Turbo Boost, the clock can get up to 3.9 GHz.
The processor has no problem at base clock speed, but once it is “overclocked” with Turbo Boost, its performance and temperature will increase. The device often cannot keep these temperatures down, so thermal throttling comes into play again. Generally, on newer, smaller MacBooks, the processor can only run at Turbo Boost’s clock speed for a few tens of seconds. So the chase for better numbers on paper is completely pointless in this case.
Thermal throttling
It is not always the fault of the computer manufacturer. But the problem, in this case, may not be entirely on the computer manufacturer’s side. Apple is trying to make MacBooks smaller and smaller, which of course, doesn’t help ventilation either, but it still has a pretty good cooling design. Unfortunately, the problem in these cases is often on the Intel side, whose latest processors have higher and higher actual TDP (Thermal Design Power).
Practically speaking, the TDP of a processor is the maximum thermal power that the processor’s heatsink must be able to dissipate. The actual TDP of Intel’s latest 10th generation mobile processors is around 130W, according to tests, which is a lot for cooling a small computer like the 13″ MacBook Pro (or MacBook Air).
So Intel, in particular, should do its part to reduce the maximum TDP of its processors — rival AMD is showing that it’s not that difficult. Apple could also improve its cooling, of course, at the cost of slightly increasing the size of the machine. But the blame, in this case, lies primarily with Intel.
The solution?
MacBook overheating problems could soon be solved by Apple switching to its ARM processors, which it has been working on for a long time. Intel has recently emerged as an unsuitable source of processors for Apple computers because of its poor TDP and “inability” to innovate.
Competitor AMD has outperformed Intel on all fronts, and it can be observed that Intel has not hit the limits of silicon. So let’s hope that the overheating of Apple computers will be solved soon — either by Intel’s awareness, better cooling or by Apple’s switch to ARM processors, which most likely won’t have monstrous TDP.
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