On July 12, Apple (AAPL -2.41%) announced updated versions of its popular MacBook Pro line of notebook personal computers. The main improvements in these systems came from updated components, with faster processors stealing the show.
According to Apple, the new 13-inch MacBook Pro can deliver up to twice the CPU performance as the previous generation model. The 15-inch MacBook Pro can also be up to 70% faster than its predecessor in CPU tasks.
Image source: Apple.
These improvements, of course, sound phenomenal on paper. However, in practice, it seems that the chips aren't delivering on their performance potential in these systems due to thermal constraints.
More cores, but they're running hot
According to AppleInsider, which summarized testing performed by YouTube user Dave Lee, the Intel (INTC -3.67%) Core i9-8950HK inside of the 15-inch MacBook Pro runs at a relatively low frequency when confronted with a heavy workload. The frequency of a chip is an indicator of how fast it's running.
Although the chip is rated at a base frequency of 2.9 gigahertz (GHz) (with turbo speeds significantly exceeding that), "tests conducted put the average clock on load at around 2.2GHz," AppleInsider wrote.
To make matters even worse, Lee's testing reportedly showed that because of these thermal throttling issues, the new 15-inch MacBook Pro actually encoded a 5K video clip slower than last year's 15-inch MacBook Pro did. The older system apparently performed the rendering in 35 minutes, while the newer one took 39 minutes.
"Lee illustrated the apparent thermal handicap by running the same test with the 2018 MacBook Pro in a freezer, dropping the render time down to 27 minutes," AppleInsider said.
Although it might be tempting to say that this isn't representative of typical computer usage, the reality is that the MacBook Pro machines are explicitly advertised toward "pro" users. Such users often perform CPU-heavy tasks like video encoding, so a regression in the effective performance in these tasks from the prior generation isn't good.
A perception issue that needs to be fixed
It's too soon to tell what kind of impact this apparent thermal throttling issue will have on sales of Apple's new MacBook Pro machines (Apple may give us some insight into the initial sales velocity of the new MacBook Pros on its July 31 earnings conference call). Nevertheless, any negative publicity around this issue seems like bad publicity.
Since Apple's MacBook Pro product cycles are a year long, it's unlikely that the company will release updated versions of the current products with superior cooling capability.
Instead, what seems more likely to happen is that Apple will just ride out this product cycle and then, for the coming MacBook Pro lineup, it'll completely revamp the cooling solution for the next model.
Prepping for the future
I believe it likely that Intel's next H-series family of processors (the ones that Apple uses in its 15-inch MacBook Pro computers) will, yet again, deliver a processor core count jump from six to eight (this year's 15-inch MacBook Pro uses six-core processors, up from four-core chips in the prior models).
Those additional processor cores will surely generate more heat, particularly under load, so Apple's going to need a robust thermal solution to effectively deal with that.
Whether Apple will need to completely redesign the 15-inch MacBook Pro's chassis by, say, making it thicker to accommodate a better thermal solution, isn't quite clear. What is clear, though, is that Apple really oughtn't release notebooks with such heavy thermal throttling characteristics again, especially if it targets those machines to"pros."
