> I mean, hardware wise they are not much faster, but cooling is a different story.

The highest spec macbook comes with a 9980HK and starts at 2800 $. A 3900X has approximately twice the performance in multi-threaded workloads and you can easily build an entire quiet workstation with it for less than 1000 $. Half the performance, thrice the price. Great deal.

Yes, there are also "laptops" with a 3900X in them. But even those still have lower performance than a desktop with a 3900X because of thermals.

The way I work is I have two desktops, one at work, one at home. I used to also have a laptop but when it died I bought a large tablet.

There are obviously many ways to do this comparison, but going off Wikipedia's pricing for most recent Intel processors. Their highest end mobile processor is currently the i7-1185G7 which apparently retails for $426. Let's compare it with the closest desktop processor to that price, the i9-10900 ($438). Cores (Threads): 4(8) vs. 10(20). Base Freq: 3.0ghz (At 28w TDP) vs. 2.8ghz. Max All Core Turbo: 4.3ghz vs. 4.8ghz

Specs can never tell the true story, but it's clear that the mobile processor is going to be much slower for anything remotely processor intensive, and probably much more than twice as slow for anything making good use of multithreading.

Having had to go back and forth between a laptop and a desktop for a processor intensive application (AutoCAD) the difference was painful.

Passmark and Geekbench are decent CPU benchmarks for general performance and indeed both show about a 2X multi-threaded difference:

* https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/Intel-i7-1185G7-vs-Inte...

* https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/compare/4354735?baselin...

These are short tests too, so would be a best case. In real life, laptop performance is probably significantly worse due to thermal throttling.

You also have to watch out for the powersupply of the laptop. Some companies give you a 70-90 W even though your computer needs 120 W at high load, counting on the battery giving the extra juice for the short bursts. If you do long processor intensive work, the computer just might shut down on you or if you are lucky, start throttling.

Yeah, this seems to be an unfortunate recent trend in some gaming laptops, presumably in a bid to save some weight and/or cost, but luckily, it still seems rare enough that any time it happens, the manufacturers still get called out on it in reviews. Usually, the power drain is when CPU+GPU are maxed out, not one or the other. I suppose if you did manage to get into a situation where this was an issue, you could find a bigger power supply. Up to about 180W these tend to be common and reasonably priced, then size and weight start going up dramatically.

While we're mentioning other minor gotchas, another one is memory latency and bandwidth. While desktop systems commonly have XMP and 1.35V support, very few laptops do (typically running at JEDEC timings at 1.2V). While there's diminishing returns, the difference between JEDEC 2933 CL21 or 3200 CL22 and say 3800 CL16 can actually be noticeable in certain workloads and is often effectively "free" (one-click in the BIOS) extra performance on the desktops.

A MacBook Pro can have an i9 and 8 cores, isn't that better than the i7-1185G7?

MacBooks have terrible thermals. They will thermal throttle before most laptops, much less even compared to a desktop.

Also, laptops generally have CPUs that pull 15 watts. Whereas desktops have CPUs that can pull 95 watts or higher (sometimes up to 150). The difference is astounding.

The 15/16" MBPs have a 45W CPU TDP; they can run CPU continuously at at least 45W as long as your ambient temperature is normal-ish and the airflow isn't obstructed, and can do 60W+ if thermals are cooperative.

See: https://evanmccann.net/blog/2020/5/13-inch-macbook-pro-revie...

I guess you haven't tried connecting to external monitor during that.

40, 100, 29 in pmset -g thermlog instantly.

Ooh, you're right, I retract. A few minutes for me, though, not "instantly".

Not necessarily. Intel is still putting out i3's with better performance than their i5 or i9 models. It's all about the specs, not the model number.

Depends on what the workload is.

CAD, for example, barring new geometry work in progress now, is single threaded.

People working on high surface count models want these things:

Big, fat, fast cache

Sustained sequential compute performance

Sustained I/O

GPU that focuses on geometry and precision. This is not generally an issue today, but can be on laptops.

Desktop machines with active cooling are where it is at.

i3/i5/i7/i9 aren’t actually different processors, they make a handful of desktop/laptop/server... variants for each generation of Core architecture CPU and differentiate down the line by binning and restrictions added at time of production. So mobile i5 might have nothing to do with desktop i5, or i7 and Xeon can be taken from the same batch.

I have a >3 year old GPU that's still faster than any mobile GPU. I have been having 64 GB RAM in my desktop for ... 5 years now. Even in the summer my PC is completely quiet, even under heavy load. (Both the GPU and the CPU are water cooled with stock all-in-one coolers.)

Desktops are great.

Not to mention if you have a catastrophic hardware failure, all you have to do is replace the single part that failed and keep going.

To be fair many parts can be replaced on laptops as well. I have replaced ram, wireless cards, hard drives in laptops.

My water cooler is noisy at the fan end. How do you evade that?

If your fans are noisy buy better fans. We had some corsair fans that came with the AIO at work, replaced them with noctuas and the computer went from mildly annoying to dead silent.

Though with water cooling you might also have a lot of pump noise, especially if the radiator is mounted incorrectly.

If your fans are noisy, buy BIGGER fans.

The larger the diameter of a fan, the lower the RPM it can spin at to move the same amount of air (same cooling capacity) as a small fan. Provided you can put the air where it's needed (e.g. a 1 foot fan can't "focus" air onto a 6 inch radiator) a larger fan will just about always be quieter and more efficient.

Oh, and having a water cooled PC with the radiator and fan inside the PC itself is silly. If you run the pipes outside or into your basement, your PC is almost completely silent, plus the cooling capacity will usually be much, much higher, because not having to cram fans and a radiator into a small enclosure lets you make them bigger and more efficient.

Your parent commenter is talking about AIOs, which are premade water cooling systems. Fixed radiator, hard connected to a pump. Nothing you can route out of your PC.

And historically, bigger case fans have been problematic, those 200mm fans they tried to introduce some years ago. Bad static pressure if I recall correctly?

Also, I wouldn't call having a radiator and fan inside the PC silly. The case eats a lot of the noise already, it's the easy and the common setup, and good AIOs are quiet and cool well. But maybe you just wanted to share a cool big water cooling setup with everything noisy routed into the basement ;)

>Nothing you can route out of your PC.

The hoses aren't welded steel, you know.

Best way I found to reduce pump noise is to insulate it.

In my case I have a DDC style pump, and its very quiet after I got a car wash sponge and cut a square hole in it and put the pump inside. It looks ghetto but its inside a case so who cares.

At first I was worried about heat, but its lasted 10 years so far.

You can minimize noise with oversized radiator area and low fan rpm along with good flow/noise ratio fans like noctuas notoriously good 120mm design. You can compensate in one area for another, i.e. by having such a gigantic radiator that fans are hardly needed. Quiet setups cost extra, for sure.

I heard a story about a DIY PC that did nothing but circulate water through the cpu cooler from a fish tank; the tank was big enough to dissipate heat through evaporation and other means, only occasionally needing a top off.

I actually mounted an automotive transmission cooler to the outside of my PC and made it part of the watercooling loop, because it was inexpensive and large. There are no fans on it, but it still reduces the work the standard pc cooling radiator with the fans on it needs to do.

This will be true for a long time - the design constraints are so totally different it would be foolish to use the same design in desktop and laptop systems.

The most limiting thing is TDP, which in the highest performance laptop processors is still capped at 45W, whereas a maxed out desktop processor can draw 100W or more.

See these tables for i9, for example, compare Coffee-Lake-S (Desktop) with Coffee-Lake-H (Laptop) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_Core_i9_processo...

> The most limiting thing is TDP, which in the highest performance laptop processors is still capped at 45W, whereas a maxed out desktop processor can draw 100W or more.

Maybe a small desktop. My desktop processor is 180W TDP (Threadripper 1950x), while some others are 250W TDP. You can also get a dual-socket workstation, for 2x CPUs (both pulling 200W each).

Thermals and power are significantly higher on desktops, it ain't even funny. Laptops win in power-efficiency, but absolute performance is always going to be a Desktop.

My desktop very rarely gets loud since I have made sure to choose a good airflow case and top of the line air cooler.

My Macbook laptop, on the other hand, sounds like a jet everytime I run yarn install.

So yes, desktops have higher thermals. But it handles it so much better than a laptop that it almost becomes irrelevant.

My workstation has a 3990x in it. It may not be the fastest single threaded machine out there but there isn't a laptop available right now with 64 cores (128 with hyperthreading if that supports your workload). As a c++ developer, compilation speed is p0 to me and there isn't a laptop that comes even close.

The trend in laptops has been for longer battery life and less heat. Since there haven't been any major breakthroughs in battery technology or mobile processor power (at least from Intel), this means lower power for processors and generally lower performance in general. Almost all laptops are using ultra low voltage Intel chips. And even the ones that don't, except for high end gaming laptops, thermally throttle ALL the time.

As a result, your 10 year old desktop is probably 50-100% faster than the most expensive Macbook Pro or Thinkpad. It can be quite astonishing swapping to even an old desktop after using a laptop for a long time.

Eventually laptops will be so optimized for battery life, and display ads will be so aggressive, that you'll have to run chromium in the cloud and your thin client will be shut down the moment anyone accuses you of being a fascist. https://blog.cloudflare.com/browser-beta/

Don't go giving them any ideas.

This is hilarious!

I know you put the Intel disclaimer in there, but I just bought a laptop with an AMD Ryzen 9 4900HS and am loving it. It has me pretty hyped to get an AMD processor for the first time for my desktop when the 5900 launches in November. But the laptop chip has far exceeded my expectations.

I have to agree that the latest AMD Renoir processors are beasts - I have 4800H in a laptop that can sustain 54W TDP OOTB and CPU benchmarks are within spitting distance of my 3700X workstation. Amazing for a 1.5kg portable package.

I'm planning to drop in a 5950X upgrade in the workstation in a couple weeks as well. Looking forward to both the huge multi-threaded and IPC gains.

Which laptop is that?

Also, many laptops have non-replaceable batteries, and a significant percentage fail in 24-30 months.

FYI Lenovo and probably others have an option to limit max charge which will greatly extend battery life.

I have mine set to 80% and only set it to 100% if I know I'm going to be away from AC for a while.

Most laptops have replaceable batteries from my experience. Its just you have to grab a screwdriver and open them up first.

What example configuration machine from a decade ago can match (or beat) a current-gen maxed-out Thinkpad or Macbook Pro in raw performance? Those laptops are quite speedy compared to something from 2010

Slight exaggeration on my part. I was thinking of my old desktop which is about 6 years old - taking about half the time to compile a project compared to my brand new MBP.

Maxed out MacPro4,1 or equivalent HP workstation class PC

I mean it mostly depends on what you do no? But all I need is for my job is a terminal session open. A macbook from 2010 can (and does) do that fine for me. I don't need the 85% of the specs I never use and I suspect the same applies to the author.

not only is it still true, there's never been evidence it's not been true or that it's going away.

Time after time, as someone who's been working on his 10 year old desktop (with a replacement ssd + graphics card when the old one died), I meet devs and analysts using laptops who reason more or less: "well it says i7 and it says x GHz and it says ddr3/4 and it's got a gpu with the same marketing number, so laptops perform the same as desktops cause they have the same hardware in them don't they".

Clearly, what they really mean is "I've never worked with and compared with a desktop". I suppose one of the problems is that SOME of them that have 'used desktops' were actually using neutered VMs in a shared corporate environment that run really poorly and are pretty underspec'd in a shared environment.

But every time, it's actually been the case that not only is the desktop faster and cheaper, but things usually remained faster on an X year old desktop hardware vs more modern laptops for any serious workload.

Edit: and in case it needs to be said, I have both desktops and multiple portable devices in my household because the downside of desktops is clearly portability.

Use a $3,000 gaming laptop. I guarantee it'll stutter and throttle and perfom less well than a same-gen $1,000 PC.

More expensive, less performant, and less serviceable with a suite of proprietary bloatware on top.

I usually build a desktop for $4-500, because I reuse parts from the older one, and don't need a gamer graphics card. I blow the money on the mobo, CPU, and lots of ram.

As a gamer I've fallen into upgrading my CPU/mobo/ram and GPU in an alternating fashion every 2ish years.

I might break the pattern this year though, I got a 3900x last year around launch and moved my 4670k to a home server. I've been pretty impressed with the 3900x while the 4670k has been maxing out all cores in the server for some tasks so was considering buying a second 3900X(T) to replace the 4670k again. But with the rumours about the 5900X, I might end up putting the 5900X in my desktop at the same time as a 3000 series GPU and moving the 3900x to my home server.

Same, I saved my ssd/hdd, gpu and case and built a ryzen 3700x with 16gb of ram for less than 400 dollars altogether. My 1k USD laptop has half of that computing power, easily.

My Aero 15 would never throttle, with a 7700HQ + 1060. There was a 700mhz penalty in that generation (3.5ghz vs 4.2ghz for the 7700k), but I kept it pegged for hours and it was rock solid.

Most laptop cooling is awful, but you can certainly find laptops that are well built if you look for it.

Not sure you should weigh bloatware, either. You can trivially install a fresh Windows or Linux and you have to on a custom built PC anyway. If you buy a premade PC, it probably comes with the same crap.

For what it's worth, I switched to a desktop once the core race heated up - now I've got a 12 core 3900X.

I can't believe how much faster it is when it's using all the cores. Night and day. Highly recommended. And 12 cores is barely scratching the surface of the crazy workstations you can build these days.

For tasks 4 threads and less, it would be a bit faster than a current gen Intel laptop chip, but I don't think it would have been worth the portability penalty to me personally if that's all I did with it.

Yes. The same class desktop counter part (GPU/CPU) are generally faster than their laptop counter parts while remaining cheaper and more versatile

You answered your own question: CPUs are throttled down when there is too much heat. That happens all the time in a laptop. A desktop with enough air flow never has that problem (unless overclocked).

It depends on your definition of throttled. A CPU that was totally unthrottled would just sit at its boost clock under sustained load, but even desktop CPUs can't manage that, dropping to their base if too much heat is generated. Of course, there are laptops that can't even sustain the base clocks, but some have enough cooling to match that.

The base clock rate is typically defined as the sustainable speed. Intel literally calls Turbo Boost "algorithmic overclocking".

The problem is this base clock speed is given by the CPU manufacturer not the laptop maker. And Intel wouldn't know what kind of laptop it's getting crammed into. So careful definitions don't really help. Desktops are already big clunky things that have to be kept plugged in, I can trust them a lot more to deliver the CPU's promised performance. Whereas laptops are notoriously making compromises because customers tend to be very unrealistic about noise, battery life, etc.

Desktop CPUs will do that with a big heatsink - mine is noctua nh-14, and it weighs more than most laptops, at 1.5kg

The amount of raw power you can drive will "always" be contingent upon your ability to dissipate heat. And the second law of thermodynamics being what it is, that ability is relative to the space you have (assuming you're using similar cooling technologies in both cases).

Laptops being power-conscious, they're usually much closer to the point of maximum efficiency on the power curve. In that sense you get better performance per watt. But that's negated by the increased front cost.

20/30% more is much faster (just check desktop/notebook results at https://www.cpubenchmark.net/ to name one)

AFAIK mobile CPUs max out at 8 physical cores, whereas you can get 16 at the higher end of mainstream in desktops, and up to 64 in the enthusiast segment. Core count isn't the whole story, obviously, but an important consideration for many applications.

One thing where multicore pays off for me is when running the D test suite.

Yes, they are. It was surprising to me how much faster a desktop was.

Yes. You only need to look at the power draw of mid to high end desktop CPUs to realize that’s not feasible to power or cool on a laptop.

Now heat and power consumption is the bottleneck of laptop performance. Performance laptops uses same CPU silicon to desktop (even different SKU, especially Intel) but their performance is limited.

I didn't see any specific numbers in reply to your comment, so I just want to point out that base clock Ghz for Intel and AMD is much higher for desktop CPUs than laptops. For your average click-read cycle, this feels better.

At full load, it depends on the heat dissipation; Dell's Precision 7XX0 dissipates heat well enough to keep the CPUs from throttling, but the 5XX0 does not.

Which form factor of the Dell's 7XX0 are you talking about?

The 7550 is a 15” laptop.