Indeed, that’s what I expect; this laptop is still pretty snappy under full load, it’s not badly throttling, it’s just that there’s only so many watts a thing this size can dissipate. I also understand that more cores running at lower speed and power each can be more efficient than fewer cores running faster, because as voltage and speed go up, power use goes up even faster (squared, kinda). Anyway I figured 6 cores running a bit faster compared to 8 cores running a bit slower, at roughly the same total TDP, is close enough.
Hmm, my laptop seems to have reasonable temperatures under normal usage (50C?), but under load it definitely seemed worse than that. This inspired me to do some slightly more rigorous testing. I’m running linux, using turbostat to monitor freq/power and stress -cN to load N cpu cores, and ectool to monitor temp and fan, and control the fan.
What drove my impression is the default fan control, it’s really slow to react - it keeps fan below 3000 rpm for like 15 seconds, while the temperature can make it up to 94C, then the fan starts slowly ramping up. It makes sense to not be instant, and spin up and down annoyingly, but it is really slow to adapt.
But I can force the fan to 80% (6500 rpm), and then it’s mostly like yours, around 85C at 33W all-core load at about 4 GHz. Nifty.