but you're now generating more heat than the system is designed to dissipate
I believe that's more accurately rephrased as "now you have more performance than they wanted you to have", because that's how it's being used in practice.
FYI, it is painfully obvious that you're toeing some sort of company line here.
"An unthrottled CPU without any OS-level policy will generate enough heat that the case temperature may rise to levels that violate safety regulations" can certainly be interpreted as "now you have more performance than they wanted you to have", yes.
> FYI, it is painfully obvious that you're toeing some sort of company line here.
I work for a company that develops trucks. While thermal dissipation is something that we do need to worry about, I can promise that it is absolutely not at the scale involved here. I've also been pretty consistent in criticising Intel for refusing to document DPTF. Whose company line do you think I'm toeing here?
Despite literally zero evidence of that actually being a problem in practice?
I've also been pretty consistent in criticising Intel for refusing to document DPTF. Whose company line do you think I'm toeing here?
Not Intel, but there's plenty of evidence that DPTF just cripples performance; and why else would you jump in to an article about unlocking manufacturer-crippled products with FUD like "not the correct approach"? It's like posting "may cause processor damage" and advocating for stock speeds on every article about overclocking.
For the record, I've been overclocking (not at extreme or competitive levels) since the early 90s and haven't killed any hardware because of it. The system I'm posting this from has been on a 50% overclock for over a decade and it's still rock-solid stable.
Seems like there are quite a few other reasons why someone would "jump in", including being a relative expert. Maybe you could think of a few others yourself?
Sustained contact with metal at a temperature as low as 45C is sufficient to cause discomfort, and it's a surprisingly small rise above that before you can actually cause burns (https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/document?repid=rep1&type=pdf&d...). Skin temperature is a standard input to DPTF policies, and during my testing I was certainly able to get the skin temperature of my test laptop well above that level - DPTF would trigger throttling instead.
> why else would you jump in to an article about unlocking manufacturer-crippled products with FUD like "not the correct approach"?
DPTF defaults to a "safe" configuration, where "safe" is a euphemism for "almost unusably slow". If what you care about is your laptop not being almost unusably slow, it's reasonable to choose an approach that obtains that without introducing any additional thermal concerns. If what you care about is obtaining the absolute maximum performance possible from your hardware with no regard to any safety or longevity concerns, then yes, implementing the DPTF policy is probably not what you want to do. But recommending the latter without providing any information about the tradeoffs is irresponsible.
That's not evidence, that's just theory. I'm asking for ACTUAL EVIDENCE of people who got burned by their laptops after disabling DPTF or using ThrottleStop, because I haven't found any. And assuming that humans won't have a natural "this is hot, better not touch it" response is absurd.
But recommending the latter without providing any information about the tradeoffs is irresponsible.
Clearly, common sense is not something you and the rest of the authoritarians in Big Tech want, because you'd rather be paternalistic control-freaks. Pulling out the tired "safety" argument only shows your commitment to that.
If you're fully aware of the possible consequences of ignoring those policies then go wild. I think it's the wrong choice for most people, and as I said I think it's irresponsible to suggest people change the thermal policy in that way without ensuring they're aware of the possible consequences. If saying "You should only do this if you're ok with your laptop potentially becoming hot enough to burn human skin" is authoritarian then I guess I'm authoritarian?
Also, why is Intel so reluctant on fixing this themselves? It looks so simple to me too fix this by releasing the docs and fixing thermald, and still, here we are having to use throttled for those wanting a little bit more punch.
And finally, how is it that nobody it's creating a custom, patched thermald that takes all this into account? Is it that the process for reverse engineering is too complicated and that we don't have the full picture yet? It shouldn't be too difficult to read the values Windows takes and reverse engineer it, although it may be tougher than it seems at first.
FWIW, the incidence of people burning themselves on hot pads / body warmers would strongly suggest otherwise:
https://www.hmpgloballearningnetwork.com/site/wounds/reviews...
You choosing to not even look for evidence so you could make an argument in ignorance does not automatically mean it doesn't exist. This is literally the first google result for "laptop case temperature causing burns": https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4292129/
Also look at this fun condition: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erythema_ab_igne
> Temperatures between 43 and 47 °C can cause this skin condition; modern laptops can generate temperatures in this range. Indeed, laptops with powerful processors can reach temperatures of 50 °C and be associated with burns.
Some more results:
https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4n04r793
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/23164210_Thigh_Burn...
They added thermal throttling because most users only max out their CPU a tiny fraction of the time so the thermal inertia can compensate for inadequate cooling. It’s infrequent enough that most users could even disable it without noticing a difference. The problem is under the wrong conditions Aka inadequate cooling plus high ambient temperatures plus extreme workload = dead CPU.
And no this isn’t theoretical, one summer working without AC I cooked a CPU before they added thermal protection. It actually happened to several people in the same heatwave.
Only fairly recently with Turbo Boost did Intel combine both ideas. It’s actually a fairly clever optimization as single threaded workloads benefit quite a bit from the extra thermal overhead.
Silicon aging is worse at higher temperatures, people are going to kill their 7/10nm chips far quicker if they keep overclocking as they've previously done. But that'll be Big Silicon's fault too, no doubt.
Mostly I mention it to say that there's not _no_ reason for thermal limits in modern setups...
There's zero reason for all this extra "thermal management" crap beyond corporate greed.
What people want is a box that does computing within spec and without melting, sterilizing their laps/hands, or otherwise introducing malbehaviors they have to work around.
People want stuff that doesn't or is very difficult to break. When it does break, they want it to be a straightforward repair.
Thermal limits like this are really about managing the manufacturers liabilities, and protecting the expected lifetine of the product.
Like I said, Intel warrants their CPUs to be operational at TjMax continuously, and that's the temperature they'll reach and stay at automatically if not given enough cooling. There's plenty of stories of people with computers whose heatsink has somehow detached or become so severely clogged as to be at that limit all the time, and the CPUs survive just fine.
This article isn't about that; it's about manufacturers artifically limiting performance beyond that to hit a marketing target like battery life or power consumption.
So, instead, you see the latter. This means that, yes, even if using official Intel DPTF drivers, systems will still occasionally thermally throttle. They may do so even if the CPU itself is not at a dangerous temperature, because the rest of the system may still be too hot and the CPU is the easiest tunable knob in terms of heat generation.
So, yeah, you can still obtain better performance by disabling DPTF and overriding power limits. And in the process you'll end up with a system that will become hotter than permitted by international standards, and you'll risk various types of failure ranging from inconvenient (the adhesive sticking things like rubber feet to the bottom of the machine tending to melt) to expensive (the unexpected levels of thermal expansion cycles causing components to fail earlier). It's fine that you're not worried about these things, but it's just straight up wrong to recommend that people override those limits without being clear about potential outcomes.
[1] https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CEL...
(Edit: replaced IEC 60950-1 with 62368-1, which is the up to date version, and linked to EU incorporation of that spec)
Since that isn't the case, however, many people get a laptop that isn't capable of performing the tasks it's advertised for. The excuse of "well, we didn't think you'd really need that much power" doesn't really cut it, when said power was strongly advertised on the box.
I don't think the average laptop user should need to concern themselves with acquiring the necessary knowledge to discern good laptop benchmarks.
They don't. The average laptop user doesn't have sustained workloads that keep the system running at 100% capacity for over an hour, so they don't need and shouldn't want benchmarks reflecting such a use case. They're genuinely better served by benchmarks reflecting workloads that come in shorter bursts.
The whole point is to ignore them because they're horrible and hold back what these CPUs can really do. Fuck the manufacturers playing these stupid marketing games.
Intel warrants their CPUs at TjMax 24/7, they'll automatically throttle when they hit that limit, and disabling all this other throttling crap makes them run that way for full performance.