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)
The versatility of a laptop doesn’t mean that it should be expected to violate the laws of physics, or only use chips with maximum TDP such that it is always comfortable on your lap.
Having a chip which can max out thermal load while plugged in at your desk, with the expected thermal results, and then throttle down when you go mobile, again with the expected thermal results, is actually the best of both worlds.
And with one click the user can actually choose which power mode they want to operate in.
A laptop that throttles back to avoid getting hot when you need the CPU/GPU operating at peak performance would be much less useful, particularly for professional use.
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.
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.
Not just desktops. A few years ago we had thick laptops with good cooling, too.
Unlike newer thin laptops, they were, and still are, viable desktop replacements. Some of them even allowed upgrading the CPU. I once inserted i7-3612QM in 13” HP ProBook 4340s of a family member (it had an i3-3110M initially) also replacing fan assembly. It runs well under sustained loads, and the performance with the i7 is very close to much newer 15W mobile CPUs such as i7-8550U found in the current 13” macbook pros.
It’s a shame we no longer have these, not Apple, not Windows, nobody.
While this seems to be targeted for small low power web servers, I really want low powered, cool and low temperature laptops. Laptops with hot intel processors are cooking my body if I actually keep my laptop on my lap.
> Fully parallelized workloads in a consumer laptop are just exceedingly rare.
Eh? Probably THE most common workload for a laptop (opening a webpage) is multi-threaded. And even consumers multi-task. As soon as you have multiple processes, you can use multiple cores even without multi-threading support.
> Plus it's exceedingly pointless to do lengthy multi-threaded development on a laptop, it's going to overheat and under-clock.
The promise of these laptops is that they won't. As you say, their power consumption is a lot lower than competing chips, and it's that power that produces the heat.
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.
Sure, there's also a company called Eurocom which will happily stick a 165W nominal TDP Intel CPU into a laptop case - but there is no way it can run at maximum boost for a very long time.
I wonder how much these will be deliberately crippled by laptop manufacturers putting them in systems with barely adequate cooling and/or turning down the power limits far below what they can actually handle.
I have heard others with relatively recent laptops say they see the CPU go into power/thermal limiting if they barely exercise it with a few seconds of compilation. The power limit can be worked around with utilities, the thermal one not so much...
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