All existing air cooled laptops and desktops would benefit because they can keep the same performance and operate much quieter. A colleague's laptop was nicknamed the hoverbook, because it always felt and sounded like it was going to take off whenever he typed 'make'. And heat isn't comfortable on laptops. Plenty of models you need to be careful to not burn yourself if you actually try to use it on your lap.
Oh, and gaming of course. Which has driven most consumer level performance improvements. Laptops haven't gotten 4k gaming sorted yet and already people talking about 8k.... and have you seen the size of the newest NVidia cards? Literally the size of a brick and often in need of scaffolding due to the weight.
Cooling laptops just isn't going to happen. I've never had one with a thermal management system that didn't suck. My current laptop has 3 noisy ridiculously loud fans and it can't cool the processor enough to maintain a sustained load at maximum speed. All I have to do to watch it nearly melt itself down at 93 °C is run make all in some project's directory.
For a lot of us, a desktop is just too big and too much work. A laptop is easy, it's everything right in front of you, it's fast enough, it's cheap enough, and it's portable. Aside from serious business use (trading, rendering, etc), gamers, programmers and data hoarders, there's not really a great reason for the average person to have a desktop anymore.
Laptops that were built with thermals in mind actually do quite well at full load. I used to play a decent amount of games on my Lenovo Y500 when it was new and it could do full load for hours and hours without getting hot. It was still less noisy than my Macbook. The secret is to build a high diameter fan and a wide fan vent. Unfortunately Apple seems to think that being thin is more important. It's certainly easier to market.
If we are to redesign the laptop why can't we admit that it's current design and use cases are at odds? People are running zoom and docker and slack and a dozen other things at once. We waste more resources than ever doing the same chat/etc. stuff we've been doing for 25 years. Things aren't moving faster, fans are going full tilt and CPUs throttle down.
What the people need more than anything is for manufacturers to take a step away from making a 2.5lb aluminum blade and instead offer a sufficient cooling solution.
Nearly all of the tech you have in your laptop was developed, tested, and refined on desktops. PCI based SSD were in desktops before NVMe was a thing. Vapor cooled processors were on budget gaming PCs 10 years ago. Even the MacBook trackpad was based on a desktop keyboard produced by a company called fingerworks. High DPI monitors came first to desktop. High refresh rate came first to desktop. Fingerprint reader? Had one on my secure computer 15 years ago. Face unlock a couple years after that.
Desktop is still the primary place for innovation. Laptops use technology that was introduced and pioneered on desktop, then refined until it could fit in Mobile/Laptop. Don't get me wrong, there's probably more work in getting the tech into Mobile than developing it in the first place... But the genesis of the ideas happen on desktop.
Desktop has the opposite mix of freedom and constraints as mobile. Standard internals, but freedom of space. There are dozens of heat-sink manufacturers for PC... Dozens of small teams focused on one problem. There's some variation between chipsets, but nothing that requires major design changes. These teams can afford to innovate... And customers can afford to try new solutions. If the heat-sink doesn't perform, you're out 5% of the total cost. But there's no similar way to try things out for laptops.
For example... Should a laptop combine all of its thermal dissipation into one single connected system or have isolated heat management? It completely depends on usage and thermal sensitivities of the components... It was desktop water-cooling that gave engineers the ability to test cooling GPU and CPU with the same thermal system to determine where to draw the line.
Dissipating lots of heat from a laptop isn't that hard, it's just that the tradeoffs take the form of gaming laptops because the laws of thermodynamics are not shaped by consumer preferences.
We'd finally have laptops that don't overheat (well, not heat at all) and are not constrained by thermal limits! Imagine putting a desktop CPU into your laptop! (Battery lifetime issues aside)
> You can blame the noise of the fan on the push for crazy flat laptops though. There's no reason a still light but thicker laptop couldn't use a larger slower moving fan. Well, other than the perception of thick as heavy and thus bad.
FWIW I've taken apart many laptops over many generations and the general trend seems to be that OEMs always use a cooling solution that's just-so good enough, regardless of available space and laptop cost. When you give an OEM a 40 % reduction in power through a new CPU generation, you're giving them a choice: a) spend the same amount of money on a cooling solution that's as capable as before, so now you'll get a quiet and cool laptop or b) make the cooling solution 40 % smaller, making it cheaper, and keeping noise and heat roughly similar.
I think capable cooling should be possible on a modular laptop, especially for models without a dGPU, but it’d require a thicker chassis than most people find acceptable on laptops these days.
I'm not sure what the point here is, if you want an actively cooled laptop, just buy that. Just because you personally need something different it doesn't mean that feature isn't important to other people.
I just hope the do extensive testing on cooling these machines.
As a former user of laptop workstations, there is nothing worse than having to always lug around a bulky UPC as well as worry about overheating.
The other reason I could see them doing this is maybe related to wanting to push people to use more graphic related applications (3D rendering), but even that is slowly going to cloud.
I expect the GPU generates heat as well. Which is why all the interest in external enclosures.
This entire thread is baffling to me. Everyone rushing to justify buying a new high performance laptop which they don’t mind throttling because they never needed the performance in the first place??
Performance per watt is something no one cares about. Laptops are a tiny market compared to servers. I'm pretty sure desktops are even a larger market. I'd rather have a beefy desktop PC than a laptop that's fundamentally handicapped by cooling problems.
Why trying to 'accept' the thermal challenge if you can just buy an HP/Dell/whatever 1U box that already has the engineering effort done for you. Or even better, why buy a box at al, just use cloud.
In the old days, I used to tinker with my machines, improve airflow, better CPU cooler, liquid cooling etc. Now I just want stuff to work, so I buy a laptop.
Oh, and gaming of course. Which has driven most consumer level performance improvements. Laptops haven't gotten 4k gaming sorted yet and already people talking about 8k.... and have you seen the size of the newest NVidia cards? Literally the size of a brick and often in need of scaffolding due to the weight.
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