With the transition to the use of its own processors, derived from those used in its iPhone and iPad, the company led by Tim Cook carried out a viral marketing campaign against PCs. Suddenly at Intel, AMD and NVIDIA they didn’t know how to make processors and graphics. Apple had arrived with a vitaminized mobile processor to revolutionize the world, and a lot of propaganda along the way. This is why it is ironic that the MacBook Pro M2 have performance issues due to temperature.
Physics is very bloody and we would all like to have a small and compact computer, but with the maximum possible power. Unfortunately, both things are not possible and, therefore, when you want to sell both concepts to people in the same product, there is something wrong. The problem is aggravated when beauty becomes your main sales value and ends up causing an imbalance. In Apple computers this is already common and it is not a surprise to find it with the recently launched MacBook Pro M2.
MacBook Pro M2s have temperature issues
Apple’s big mistake with its new laptop has been to place a single fan for coolingwhich must be working all the time at 7200 RPM endlessly. Even so, can’t keep the temperature low enough enough for the processor in the MacBook Pro M2 to maintain stable clock speeds. That is, they have a system of poor cooling.
And what happens when the MacBook Pro M2 goes into temperature problems? Well, thermal drowning takes effect and in a few milliseconds a processor that barely consumes 30 W lowers its consumption to just over 7 W. what it means clock speed cutbacks of the components:
- The performance cores cut their speed 3200 MHz to 1894 MHz.
- In addition, the efficiency cores lower their clock speed from 2228MHz to 1444MHz.
- The cutest beast is in the integrated GPUwhat about the 1393MHz to 289MHz.
Well this occurs in a continuous cycle in which the computer fluctuates between these two consumption modes intermittently. That is, when the laptop gets hot, then the speeds are lowered and, therefore, it works at a percentage of its power. On the other hand, when it is enough, it goes back to maximum speeds. This in countries like Spain where we reach high temperatures and where they are usually common is fateful. The price of the simplest model of the MacBook Pro M2 is € 1,619, so these performance cuts are not acceptable.
A problem that they have been dragging for a long time
We have to start from the basis that thermal drowning is a negative consequence of highly integrated systems. The reason is that where before we had several different pieces, now we have only one, which causes when a component raises the temperature more than normal it ends up affecting the rest idem. So in the end, the temperature regulation mechanisms of the chip have to lower the clock speed of the neighboring parts, thus cutting the performance that each of them can achieve.
However, this trend is common in the industry and if there is something that we have to highlight it is the famous quote from Lincoln. That is, you can fool a few all the time, but not all of the time. From our knowledge we knew that the problem was the industrial designs of Apple computers. If an Intel Core 12 is placed in the same design of a MacBook Pro M2, the H models with 45 W of TDP would already be ruled out and we should opt for the 28 W P models with significant cuts in clock speed.
The fact that a professional notebook is unable to constantly keep a 30 W processor cool is worrying to say the least. That yes, the computer is very nice and all that. Is it really worth a laptop of more than 1500 euros that does not work at full capacity all the time we use it?
