Airtop3 cools 200W, a laptop can’t compete with that level of sophistication, but 30W is totally doable.
But, agreed, assuming you can easily control the fans without resorting to hacks, it’s better to have it, you may run it one day in case you need it. There is still a dust downside, but that’s OK.
That’s what I’m talking about when you disable turbo & go in powersave governor (as you can see in above screenshot with btop monitoring linux kernel compilation: 1.6GHz upper limit), I’ve seen absolute no lag in day-to-day tasks, most of bottleneck is not CPU or GPU these days, but rather network & SSD or Cache performance.
I’m still able to play 2k video without any issue, do multiple task at once… The only thing that may be affected is probably that the compilation time of the software will go high, so if you’re on Gentoo or source-only distro / doing ML on native hardware then only it’ll majorly affect you. Application opening time or bootup time is majorly affected by random reads from secondary disk, its the bottleneck, you can use ZFS or bcachefs as your rootfs to make it faster by a large extent, they use ARC (adaptive replacement cache) to keep things in RAM when possible.
Airtop is also doesn’t have to avoid burning the user which helps a lot with passive cooling.
I don’t think 30w in a laptop form-factor is doable (at least not without unusable surface temperatures) but I’d love to be proven wrong there.
Bear in mind, this test was with the 11th gen Intel i5. This is an example, but will not necessarily reflect the scores you would get with the AMD processor in the Framework 16 if you limited performance enough to get decent temps without the fans running. Until they get out in the field and people start testing them that way, we don’t really know how they would do in this scenario.
Actually, I believe it’s quite the opposite, in the past memory and storage were very slow so the CPU had to wait for them a lot. Now, thanks to improvements in memories and especially in storage, the CPU does not wait for them for long, and nowadays it’s the single-core performance that matters. Meanwhile, CPU tech did not improve so fast due to hitting the ceiling on single-core. In the past, manufacturers were just keep increasing the processor frequencies. At some point (around 5GHz) they realized they couldn’t keep increasing it, so processor gains diminished and focused on multi-core optimizations.
I have a laptop that scores 1700 on single-thread performance, with 20GB RAM and SSD, and it’s not pleasant for me to work on it.
Regardless of whether it is fast enough or not, it can’t compete with Macbook Air with this performance, not even at half the price.
It drops to 22 once heatsoaks but still pretty impressive even if the skin temperatures are pretty brutal.
I mean a fanless framework 16 could probably do it’s 45 until it’s heatsoaked too how long that will take is an entirely different question though, looking forward to someone trying it.
If you can get 20-30w out of this that should be more than plenty for most use cases. Definitely will give you more than 5276 passmark for whatever that meme benchmark is worth XD.
You won’t be beating a macbook in that ring anytime soon but it may be sufficient.
It’s not brutal, it gets 45 at peak.
Anyway, it’s possible, and doable, I guess we can agree on that. Framework does not need to beat the best, though I don’t see why it can’t, any manufacturer can beat Apple if wanted and is willing to spend resources on this, but offering a close alternative would be sufficient, like passively cooling a 20W system.
I love Framework, since I love repairability and customizability. I have another critical requirement, which is silence. In the future, I hope Framework checks that box too.
I guess that’s all from me.
That’s a lot, especially for a metal skinned laptop but right at the top of the allowed limit (weird that, allmost like it throttles based on that XD).
Maybe the 16 with the fan off already does that, who knows but I am sure thanks to this thread someone is going to try it once it’s out.
That’s not how those numbers work…
30W is the measured max power draw Notebookcheck measured for the MBA, though they noted it’s actually a constraint of the power supply Apple provides in box. When using a 100W PS, they measured up to 50W max power draw.
This still isn’t the whole picture however, since max power draw doesn’t mean anything if you can only pull that for say… a few seconds.
Passive cooling a performance chip is impossible even for Apple’s silicon right now. If anything, the previous poster’s results showing 22W on the FM while heatsoaked is impressive.
For additional context, the M2 Chip is running 108* in their temperature tests.
I think you are mistaken. ~30W is sustained not peak. Peak draw is 50W.
9W is sustained CPU draw, 30W is for the entire system.
Actually, to be precise, average power draw on load is 28.5W according to review. This is passively cooled without skin temperature exceeding 45 C.
30W load maximum is not sustained on the M2 chip for longer than a few seconds. This is the only load the cooling system manages. The screen, battery, and other power drawing components do not get cooled by the cooling system.
That the surface temp is 45 while the cpu is at 108 only shows that the MBAs cooling system is doing a poor job of transfering heat, rather than being a good point as you seem to think.
The MBA performs well for its cooling system, but it does not have a good cooling system. There’s a reason the MBPs use fans.
Yes, that’s what I’m telling.
I don’t really understand what your point is then. You’re pointing at the MBA as an example of a 30W silent machine, when in reality it’s benching as a 9W machine, that also runs it’s chip at 108* when doing so.
Others on this forum have already shown the existing FM (and possibly many other machines) can run at ~20W sustained load which is higher than the MBA’s results. At this point, the FM portion of the design (heatsink, chassis, power limit) is already proving to be capable of running silent, the constraint is the chipsets available.
Apple is not going to sell anyone else their M series chips, and they wouldn’t be able to run Windows anyway (they’re definitely not allowing FM to use MacOS). Unless Microsoft makes ARM windows a real thing finally, and Qualcomm CPU boards become common, I doubt you’ll find much demand for non x84 boards in the near future.
I think more likely is you eventually see someone mod a FM cooling system to use one of those AirJet coolers, giving it enough cooling for most tasks, while remaining silent compared to a fan.
My point is: I never said MBA cools 30W CPU passively, I said that MBA cools 30W system passively, and actually I was just rounding numbers; according to the review the actual figure it 28.5W.
I don’t see the point of isolating the CPU either. You should always think of it as a system, at least I find it more useful.
I agree with a previous comment,:
I have disabled turbo boost and the fan almost never kick in with intel 12th gen. I have NO noise during my day, even in hot summer. Only when I do a video render eventually, or gaming.
I think with AMD 5nm process it will be even better (its basically 4X more power efficient). That s the node Apple is using on their fanless laptops.
You might want to disable 2 big cores aswell , to mimic the 15W intel CPUs (2+8).
Interesting I thought there was something sketchy going on there.
Don’t particularly care about the 108 (who cares about silicon degradation if the soldered storage dies and turns the whole thing into a brick after a couple years), but the 45C skin temperature for 9w is not great.
What’s the obsession with disabling cores here, if they help using more cores at a lower frequency is more perf/w and if they don’t they sleep anyway.
Only thing it does is limit the max performance which you could also do with a power limit (and still get the better perf/w).
This is a bit tone death, making a fanless laptop and any hardware in the first place is extremely hard, I also doubt Framework has the finances to pay for ARM licensing, if they went with RISC it would be the RISC-V I imagine.
Tone deaf*
And yes, making computers is hard. Ya got me. My point is that if you can make a laptop, and Framework seems to be able to, then it’s not that hard to make it run cool if you’re willing to compromise performance.
The second part about ARM licensing…you’re sort of implying ARM is the only way to build a fanless laptop which is just not true, but then continuing on to assume what, they would need to build their own custom ARM chips? Why would they do that? What can’t they afford? How do you know this? I’m sorry, but there are just too many assumptions and logical missteps in that one short post.
You could probably setup a script/automation to reset at every reboot
Alternatively you could also manually wire the fan to the 5V rail or 7V rail (negative on 5V, positive on 12V), I think it’s the best of both worlds, its virtually inaudible but it still moves some air to remove some heat
