Over the past 15 years I have bought cheap (Dell Inspiron) and expensive (Lenovo Business) laptops and no matter what: (a) the battery life always sucked, and (b) I never knew until a few years ago that CPU performance is always throttled no matter how powerful the CPU is that you purchased. The latter point made me not only mad, but upset because I wasted so much money on my last high-spec Lenovo laptop.
So my question is will these Meteor Lake chips really stop the performance throttling, stop the fan being on constantly, and of course, will the battery life really improve? I’m so sceptical based on my experience with x86 laptops. (FYI - I purchased an M1 MacBook Pro after it launched, and it has been the laptop I always needed. At home, I have an AMD-Ryzen 3600 tower PC that I built myself, which I’m happy with).
You must log in or register to comment.
Of course no
Unless you get a desktop replacement laptop with a entry level CPU, then it’s still going to be thermally limited.
Even then, it will still power throttle based on the OEM settings.
OP probably doesn’t know the difference.
No.
Most use cases are characterized by small bursts of performance with alot of idle time while the user reads or constant load until completion. Neither of those benefit from what you are asking for.
In a thermally limited application like a laptop OEM’s will ALWAYS boost as high as they can based on thermal and power headroom until they cannot. The alternative is 10% the performance you get now. Even the Apple chips do the same but with a wildly different thermal headroom to thermal load equation than we are used to.
Wait till OP learns smart phone CPUs spend most of their time at low clock speeds.
Ah yes. 3ghz processor of nova 11i running at <2ghz
Does that mean we could save money by buying a cheaper i5 that runs closer to it’s capacity than a throttled i7?
There are absolutely laptop configurations where a lower tier cpu with lower cores for example like an i7 can outperform a higher tier one like an i9 because of thermal and power headroom that allow the lower core counts to run unthrottled longer.
Does that mean we could save money by buying a cheaper i5 that runs closer to it’s capacity than a throttled i7?
Not without better cooling systems. Intel and AMD CPUs for higher performance can crank out performance until they hit the thermal limits.
You can do things such as Eluktronics where they have water cooling to dump the heat out faster then heat can be generated.
Batteries are going to be an inverse relationship with performance. The better the CPU the worst the battery life is going to be.
If you are running just generic stuff then a Mac will meet your needs. If you need to run games / Windows only applications then Windows laptops and desktops will meet your needs.
The limitations for laptop CPUs will always be thermals, look at the size of the heatsink on a laptop compared to a desktop cooler. There is nothing they can do to the chip that will overcome that.
You can either limit performance or let it rip until it throttles.
OP I’m not sure why everyone is missing the point of your question, I thought it was pretty obvious. Windows/Intel laptops have had pretty embarrassing performance for a long time. I have a 4 core 1135g7 in a thin and light laptop, and the fans still run up and blast when doing anything more than Internet browsing. Meanwhile an M1 MacBook air has higher performance in just about every way and it can sustain that performance fanless and have better battery life.
Obviously any laptop CPU is going to be more constrained than a desktop CPU, both in available power and cooling. But you’re hoping that meteor lake will be a fast enough architecture that even at a low power draw will be snappy enough to confidently use for a long time on battery, unlike current Intel laptop chips.
Anyone who says apple M series laptops are in the same predicament as Intel ones is being disingenuous. There is an obvious capability gap between Intel and apple laptops in battery life, absolute performance, sustained performance, and silence.
That’s not really a question but a complaint. Your reformulation of it as a question boils down to “will next gen perform better than the previous gen” to which the answer is yes, it will.
Only laptops that don’t deal with loud fans are the Macbook Air. The Macbook Pros are extremely quiet, a lot of times the fans don’t even turn on. But they throttle as well.
All laptops throttle.
People are not answering your question, so i will. Meteor lake will make much of the fan issue go away. Lunar lake is anothe impressive jump that will deal with fan and battery issues.
PRO TIP: always turn your laptop on to best power efficiency is you want that quality silence and cooling. Yes you lose some performance, but laptops are not hard workers unless you get a workstation style laptop anyway. meteor lake and lunar lake it will be worth it.
No. They’re going to keep playing games with the cooling/TDP/clocks to match a pre-defined form factor. For a lot of users, the thermal limits are rarely touched. (Sadly, I think enterprise users with a lot of endpoint software/monitoring get to suffer). I would also point out that if you know what you’re buying, enterprise or not, if you’re doing a lot of crunching you don’t buy thin and lights because that gives you space for a bigger cooler and battery. No comment about the apple chips… I think if you are allowed to own one and can suffer it’s limitations, just get it.
No. They’re going to keep playing games with the cooling/TDP/clocks to match a pre-defined form factor. For a lot of users, the thermal limits are rarely touched. (Sadly, I think enterprise users with a lot of endpoint software/monitoring get to suffer). I would also point out that if you know what you’re buying, enterprise or not, if you’re doing a lot of crunching you don’t buy thin and lights because that gives you space for a bigger cooler and battery. No comment about the apple chips… I think if you are allowed to own one and can suffer it’s limitations, just get it.
When they allow different voltages per core. Or have they already done that?
That would require on chip integrated voltage regulators per core so no, they only do that on servers. There will be voltage regulators per tile and bus at least though.
No.
CPU performance is always limited by some reason. In laptops it will almost always be heat, which is the same as power consumption. There is no reason not to drive the CPU as hard as it can on a given cooling and battery solution. You bought a high spec lenovo laptop which is probably configured to run as fast as possible. Did you even try to setup it otherwise?
Typical idle use (like typing reddit) power for my old lenovo intel laptop is about 5W which results in about 8 hour battery life with this small old battery. I don’t think I ever hear the fans of the laptop unless I am running a compiler or something. I could setup it so that I would not hear the fans even then but that would cost some performance.
No, it’s a feature of the laptops according to the OEM. Boost high as you can until you hit the thermal limit then back off
Heat can be dealt with better, but it will come at the tradeoffs of thickness and weight. No one wants to carry around a 10 lb laptop plus a big ass power brick. There would probably be more fans spinning at higher speeds, further decreasing battery life.
Not with it, IMO.
Repasting the heat sinks with better thermal grease and the use of external platform fans would probably help more at a lower price without adding bulk to the laptop.