Re:Huawei caught cheating performance test for new phones
by barrkel on Friday September 07, 2018 @12:19AM
(#17931850)
20 years ago, PCs had much smaller fans than they do today, and the cases usually had no separate fans of their own - the only fans you'd find would be in the power supply and on top of the CPU. And passive cooling for the CPU wasn't difficult to achieve with a big heatsink.
The industry didn't focus much on quietness, that's true.
(I used to assemble and sell custom-built PCs around 1996 to 2000.)
Re:Huawei caught cheating performance test for new phones
by anyfoo on Friday September 07, 2018 @12:27AM
(#17931873)
1.4GHz Athlons were a thing around 2000, almost 20 years ago, and had anything but "small fans" to be cooled. I used to build PCs too, and once I pretty much instantly burned up the die of one of those Athlons because I forgot to apply the heat paste.
Even with computers that could be run all passively at that time, there is just no comparison to today's smartphones, which sit in our pockets and are orders of magnitude more capable along almost every axis.
Power management and thermal budgets are a very real thing. The times where all device’s components would run at full speed are (thankfully) over for quite some time.
20 years ago PCs had multiple incredibly loud constantly running fans, that I think hardly anyone would put up with anymore (and would obviously not work for phones anyway). Today’s phones are extremely more powerful than those PCs in many ways, and yet consume a fraction of energy per time unit. Does not work without complex power management.