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Uh, it turbos in the 4+Ghz range. That is by itself probably going to blow the 45W thermal rating the entire chip has. My gut instinct says that macbook probably can't even dissipate that over a long period of time. The linked test seems to indicate the truth of that, and its not unusual for a mac product, the last one that could probably continuously dissipate the combined cpu+gpu heat was that crazy ugly mac pro.

Intel didn't invent some new physics to get "high" performance cores crammed into a laptop, they are just pulling the same stuff the phone market has been doing for the past few years. Put enough thermal capacitance against the chip itself to absorb a few multiples of the chips dissipation, allow it to get really hot, and then throttle it hard. Hope, people keep their benchmark runs short.

There is a difference between socket 2011/2270 based i7/i9s and their insufficiently cooled, memory and IO bandwidth starved cousins found in laptops. Even a fairly low end desktop is going to stomp the most expensive laptop you can find simply due to physics. Being able to dissipate more heat means higher performance. Its possible to move the curve up/down depending on fab processes, or micro-arch, but these days there aren't any miracle cures. More power equals more performance.



Isn't the 4 GHz meant as a boost frequency as thermals allow? The more CPUs are active the rarer this happens. It becomes problematic when the CPU can't maintain its base clock speed anymore.




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