(Update: announcement imminent) A new generation of thermal throttle - new intel laptop chip found

[SpaceGhostC2C]

11 hours ago, Zando Bob said:

It's set that low to allow it to clock very low when idle/under light load. 

CPUs regularly drop below their base clocks for that reason - you are describing power-saving states, not the base clock. Base clocks are not how low it can go when it has nothing to do, but how high it can go for sustained full load.

 

I think @Mira Yurizaki's point was that you can always release a 28-core monolithic CPU with a tiny heatsink as a "500 MHz base clock, 5.0 GHz max boost" CPU rather than acknowledging the inadequacy of said heatsink - or, to come back to laptops, the difficulty/impossibility of fitting adequate cooling in limited space in order for the increased core count to have a meaningful impact on performance.

Hence, the question was whether these mobile CPUs are tuned to some kind of sweet spot, or just tuned down to make them laptop-viable while keeping core counts and single-core, short-lived boosts for marketing purposes.

[NumLock21]

I like how op immediately jumps into conclusion with the word “thermal throttle” in their topic title. Heh

[hishnash]

1 hour ago, SpaceGhostC2C said:

CPUs regularly drop below their base clocks for that reason - you are describing power-saving states, not the base clock. Base clocks are not how low it can go when it has nothing to do, but how high it can go for sustained full load.

 

I think @Mira Yurizaki's point was that you can always release a 28-core monolithic CPU with a tiny heatsink as a "500 MHz base clock, 5.0 GHz max boost" CPU rather than acknowledging the inadequacy of said heatsink - or, to come back to laptops, the difficulty/impossibility of fitting adequate cooling in limited space in order for the increased core count to have a meaningful impact on performance.

Hence, the question was whether these mobile CPUs are tuned to some kind of sweet spot, or just tuned down to make them laptop-viable while keeping core counts and single-core, short-lived boosts for marketing purposes.

In the laptop space the limitations commonly are not just cooling but also power delivery.

The throttling that was happening on the 2018 MBP turned out to be due to a bug in intel's power management layer. Under very heavy load the VRM would inform the cpu that it could not handle any more power and rather than reducing the clock speed a little the cpu dropped all the way to min clock, then ramped back up all the way to the VRM sending the warning and repeat.... The fix for this was for the OS to insert a hock (at boot time) into the cpu so it could intercept that signal and instead do the proper thing. This is why those laptops still have this issue in windows since this hock needs to be installed very early on in the boot stages something that only MS can do, some Dell machines that came out at this time also had this issue and are still unfixable.

[Kisai]

14 hours ago, williamcll said:

It is slightly faster than the previous generation.

Source translated from german:

Source:https://browser.geekbench.com/v4/cpu/15153782

https://www.computerbase.de/2020-01/intel-core-i9-10980hk-erste-benchmarks/

Thoughts: since this is probably an engineering sample I would assume the clock speed would be lower, however, it would be a tough fight against the upcoming ryzen 4800H which is only slightly lower in clocks, but considering how intel mobile cpus have rarely maintained their temperatures this is going to be an L for intel.

I was notified by someone in who is in the know that IT departments are snubbing upgrades from 6th generation and later systems. 

 

Which is fine, business laptops haven't been getting faster because their "thin and light" profile keeps them from having more than 32GB of ram. Yet many staff are complaining that even a i7-8850H is too weak to run their CAD programs, and 32GB RAM isn't enough.

 

Meanwhile people with the I7-8665U in the 14" laptops have effectively doubled their performance over the previously awful 14" models

[RejZoR]

• Thermal throttle - Automatic underclocking below base clock to prevent thermal damage
• Base clock - Minimal guaranteed clock under heaviest possible load where conditions for Turbo/Boost clocks are not possible
• Turbo/Boost - Using thermal/power headroom to boost clock beyond base clock. Dropping clocks down to base clock is NOT thermal throttling. It's just normal Turbo/Boost operation.

[cj09beira]

 

21 minutes ago, RejZoR said:

• Thermal throttle - Automatic underclocking below base clock to prevent thermal damage
• Base clock - Minimal guaranteed clock under heaviest possible load where conditions for Turbo/Boost clocks are not possible
• Turbo/Boost - Using thermal/power headroom to boost clock beyond base clock. Dropping clocks down to base clock is NOT thermal throttling. It's just normal Turbo/Boost operation.

if said boost isn't sustainable because of only cooling problems, it is thermal throttle

[RejZoR]

2 hours ago, cj09beira said:

 

if said boost isn't sustainable because of only cooling problems, it is thermal throttle

I'd consider something as "thermal throttling" only when clock goes below base clock due to thermal issues or when temperatures are hitting absolute CPU maximum temperature even if clock doesn't go below base clock at that point. The usual boost usually doesn't fall under either condition.

 

I've recently pushed my 5820K quite hard with silent cooling during test and it was hitting its maximum design temperature (I think it's 105°C) where it started dropping from 4.6GHz to 4.5 and 4.4. This is the case where it was thermal throttling while not going under base clock. Although operation isn't factory default because it's manually overclocked beyond it's normal boost anyway.

[Chen G]

15 hours ago, Bombastinator said:

Which is arguably a tad obnoxious in that what it does is base a chip’s listed stats on cooling ability.  If boost clock is variable by installation and that installation is pre done, as it is in a laptop, the rating of the device should reflect that. If a laptop has a cpu with a base of randomly 3.0 and a boost of randomly 4.0. It shouldn’t say boost of up to 4.0 if it’s only ever going to hit 3.5 because of the cooling in the machine.  It should say base 3.0 boost up to 3.5.

I don't pay much attention to Windows laptops because I don't like them.

But all the MacBooks hit their advertised boost frequency.

[Mira Yurizaki]

5 hours ago, cj09beira said:

if said boost isn't sustainable because of only cooling problems, it is thermal throttle

The problem I have is that the CPU is always throttled due to power, voltage, or utilization, which given the connotations of the word, means that the processor is never reaching its maximum performance potential. People have proven you can clock these processors to absurd speeds, therefore, everything Intel (and by extension everyone else) sells us is throttled, period. Which to me means they're selling us bum parts that can never be fully flexed, at least not without absurd ways of doing it.

[TempestCatto]

22 hours ago, Bombastinator said:

You turn green and your ears get huge.  That must hurt a lot.

 

13 hours ago, BiG StroOnZ said:

-snip-

 

 

Ironically, I dont care for these memes all that much. 

[NumLock21]

Just to be clear, when a cpu thermal throttles, it's based on the temperature of the cpu, not its clock speed. The cpu will reduce its clock speed, to help lower its temperature, and prevent itself from a thermal shutdown.

A cpu with a based clock of 3.5GHz and it's only running at 1GHz, but temps is only 30-40C. This isn't thermal throttling, it's just the cpu operating at a lower state. Intel calls it SpeedStep and AMD calls theirs Cool n Quiet.

A cpu with based clock of 3.5GHz and its temps is way over 90C, then yes it wills start to thermal throttle.

[Bombastinator]

20 minutes ago, Mira Yurizaki said:

The problem I have is that the CPU is always throttled due to power, voltage, or utilization, which given the connotations of the word, means that the processor is never reaching its maximum performance potential. People have proven you can clock these processors to absurd speeds, therefore, everything Intel (and by extension everyone else) sells us is throttled, period. Which to me means they're selling us bum parts that can never be fully flexed, at least not without absurd ways of doing it.

On a laptop?  Of course.  There are power and heat limitations.  There is a reason people use desktops after all.  This has never not been the case with laptops.  Laptops processors are desktop processors that have been tweaked to run better at lower voltages, and have more power saving functions.  They’re not all that fundamentally different though.  They’re still desktop processors though.  You put in enough voltage and absorb enough heat and it’s a desktop machine.  
Laptops used to be a lot larger than they generally are these days.  They could still be that big.  It is done occasionally.  With a laptop it’s what is the minimum size required to do a given job?  As CPUs got more powerful and efficient the jobs they needed to do got more complex at a slower rate so laptops got smaller.  To write this post in 2000 I would have needed a machine slightly smaller than a small pizza box.  Now I’m doing it on a cell phone which is much more powerful that that pizza box sized machine ever was.  For 2000 my phone is desktop class, or pretty close.

[williamcll]

Update: It seems like the 10th gen mobile processors will be announced on April 2nd.

Source:https://videocardz.com/newz/leaked-slide-confirms-intel-core-i9-10980hk-will-boost-up-to-5-3-ghz

 

[RejZoR]

On 1/20/2020 at 4:36 PM, Chen G said:

I hate how people on the internet talk about "throttle" without knowing what it actually means.

Technically, it is because laptops always run so hot it's hitting the throttle temperatures basically in matter of seconds. But if you set the base clock so low it doesn't really go that low, then you avoid being called "thermally throttled" and all is well. It's really just technicalities...

[jagdtigger]

On 1/20/2020 at 5:01 PM, Zando Bob said:

can slap 97C for extended periods and still keep over 2.5Ghz boost consistently

Thats pretty lackluster for the price....      

[RejZoR]

I wish CPU's could identify how many cores are fully utilized and pump those up to max while lowering the rest as low as possible. Coz currently it seems it's either 1 core maxed out as far as possible or all cores maxed out as much as possible. No one seems to be maxing out as many cores as needed while not the rest that don't really do any work. I don't think even Ryzen does that even though it's adjusting clocks across the board. It's just adjusting them on all cores about the same.

[Zando_]

4 hours ago, jagdtigger said:

Thats pretty lackluster for the price....      

For a quad core in that chassis, not at all. MBPs are currently thin and lights, even if they label them Pro. You’re paying for things other than raw performance, if I needed/wanted that I’d have a different laptop. 

[jagdtigger]

Mostly you pay for the name, nothing else.

[Rolling2405]

On 1/20/2020 at 7:36 AM, Chen G said:

I hate how people on the internet talk about "throttle" without knowing what it actually means.

 

On 1/20/2020 at 8:25 AM, Chen G said:

Because it doesn't matter if it was.

You knew what the base clock is, they tell you right on the product descriptions, that's what you're buying, and there's no reason to complain when it clearly does reach that base clock. And there is certainly no reason to say it's "throttling" when it clearly isn't.

 

On 1/20/2020 at 9:25 AM, MageTank said:

we can't call it throttling, then we need to come up with a general term that everyone understands in relation to what exactly is happening when your boost clocks are reduced.

Wait so throttling actually means when your boost clocks are reduced, not when the cpu or gpu falls below base clocks? This whole time I thought throttling meant that the cpu or gpu fell below base clocks. 

[Arika]

10 minutes ago, Thomas001 said:

Wait so throttling actually means when your boost clocks are reduced, not when the cpu or gpu falls below base clocks? This whole time I thought throttling meant that the cpu or gpu fell below base clocks. 

throttling is anytime the CPU is held back, be it power limits, temperature, utilization, hell even a GPU "bottlenecking" a CPU could be classed as throttling etc.

 

And it's not always a bad thing. if it doesn't need to run at full clocks, then it's just wasted power and heat.

 

It can mean so many things that it essentially means nothing anymore.

 

EDIT: thermal throttling is specfically related to heat, so if it drops clocks by any amount (even in boost state) due to heat, that's thermal throttling

[Bombastinator]

1 hour ago, Thomas001 said:

 

 

Wait so throttling actually means when your boost clocks are reduced, not when the cpu or gpu falls below base clocks? This whole time I thought throttling meant that the cpu or gpu fell below base clocks. 

It’s both I think.  The problem with the word is it’s vague.  There are types of throttling.

[Way2Broke]

Battery:

[williamcll]

Update: Looks like the i9-9880 will be updated into the i9-10880H: This Asus laptop for example

At the same time, OEM provider Mechrevo will have a new laptop will all the rumored parts installed, featuring a RTX Super mobile and 10th gen mobility processor:

Source: https://hexus.net/tech/news/laptop/140977-asus-laptop-spotted-intel-core-i9-10880h-5ghz-boost/

[mr moose]

Throttling means to restrict,  that is why the device on a motor (like a lawn mower or motor bike) that changes the revs is called a throttle, when you let it go it' restricts airflow into the engine which reduces the power it produces and thus the revs.  

 

Thermal throttle in computers literally only means that the device as been restricted because it has become too hot.  This has been a thing since CPU's have been able to dynamically adjust clock frequency.  

 

This confusion over thermal throttling explains why so many people don't understand TDP.   TDP is different for everything as it is defined by the manufacturer to best define the product*.  Intel guarantee their CPUs maximum clock frequency (speed) under full load by defining the size of thermal heat sink it requires.  This is the base clock,  if you use a heat sink smaller than the TDP rating the CPU will not reach base clock (it will thermal throttle below base clock) if you use a heat sink larger than the TDP rating then you will achieve boost clock ratings more often.  Variations in how much you can obtain after base clock are determined by multiple factors.   However the most important thing is that when your heat sink is inadequate the CPU will thermal throttle to prevent damage.  This is not a design flaw or failure by AMD/Intel (whoever made the chip), this is a problem with user expectation and understanding.

 

 

 

 

 

*and it is also a well defined and established metric of semiconductors,  this also confuses people.

[Bombastinator]

Yet another definition of terms issue.  These keep on coming up.