Why Macs With Apple Silicon Don’t Overheat
Yes, there are exceptions
The move to Apple Silicon has taken Macs to a whole new level. With the advent of custom chips, Apple’s computers have seen a significant performance boost and greater power efficiency, virtually solving the problems of earlier models. The latter suffered from overheating due to their too-thin bodies, which caused so-called thermal throttling, which is the consequence of limiting performance to reduce temperature.
Overheating was thus a major problem and a source of users' criticism. This problem has virtually wholly disappeared with the arrival of Apple Silicon. Apple demonstrated this huge benefit in the form of low power consumption by introducing the MacBook Air with the M1 chip, which lacked a fan or active cooling.
Still, it offers breathtaking performance and has virtually no overheating issues. So in this article, we’ll focus on why Apple computers with Apple Silicon chips don’t face this annoying problem.
Leading Apple Silicon features
As we mentioned above, with the advent of Apple Silicon chips, Macs have improved significantly in terms of performance. However, there is one important fact to note here. Apple’s goal is not to bring the most powerful processors to the market but the most efficient ones in terms of performance/consumption ratio.
That is why it mentions leading performance per watt at its conferences. That is the magic of the Apple platform. Incidentally, this is also why the giant has opted for a completely different architecture and is building its chips on ARM, which use a simplified RISC instruction set. In contrast, traditional processors, such as those from leaders like AMD and Intel, rely on the traditional x86 architecture with a complex CISC instruction set.
As a result, competing processors with the aforementioned Complex Instruction Set can ultimately excel in raw performance, making the leading models significantly outperform the capabilities of Apple’s M1 Ultra, the most powerful chipset from Apple.
However, this performance also comes with a noticeable inconvenience — namely. It has a huge power consumption compared to Apple Silicon, which is subsequently responsible for generating heat and, therefore, possible overheating if the assembly is not cooled efficiently enough. Apple solved the long-standing overheating problem by switching to a simpler architecture, which has been used primarily for mobile phones. ARM chips simply consume significantly less power.
The manufacturing process also plays an important role. Apple relies on its partner TSMC’s advanced technology, which means that current chips are made with a 5nm manufacturing process. In contrast, Intel’s current generation of processors, known as Alder Lake, relies on a 10nm manufacturing process. In reality, however, they cannot be compared unanimously due to the difference in architecture.
Apparent differences can be seen when comparing the power consumption of the Mac mini. The 2020 model, with the M1 chipset, consumes just 6.8W at idle and 39W at full load. The new model built on Apple Silicon thus consumes three times less power under load, which speaks in its favour.
Is Apple Silicon’s efficiency sustainable?
With a bit of exaggeration, overheating on older Macs with Intel processors was practically the daily bread of their users. However, the arrival of the first generation of Apple Silicon chips — the M1, M1 Pro, M1 Max and M1 Ultra — significantly improved Apple’s reputation and eliminated this long-standing problem. So it was expected that the next series would already be better and better.
Unfortunately, after the release of the first Macs with the M2 chip, rumours to the contrary began to circulate. Tests reveal that it is easier to overheat these machines, even though Apple promises more performance and efficiency from the newer chips. So the question arises whether the giant in this regard will eventually run into general platform limitations. Indeed, if such problems have already come with the second-generation base chip, there are concerns about how the next models will fare.
More or less, however, we do not have to worry about such problems. The transition to the new platform and the preparation of chips are the alpha and omega for the proper functioning of Apple computers. We can only conclude that Apple has probably already fixed these problems. At the same time, one fact must be added to the mentioned overheating of Macs with M2.
Overheating only occurs when a Mac is pushed to its limits. Of course, practically no ordinary user of a particular device gets into such situations. Another benefit that at least MacBooks with active cooling bring is a better heat dissipation design, so it is possible to maintain clock speeds even under full load.
For example, according to the chipset chosen, we encounter different materials for the passive heatsink in Mac Studio. Apple knows very well what it is doing here.
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