6 ms·

The age old problem of mobile chips have brilliant performance for about 15 seconds until they thermal throttle. If you are just using apps, 15 seconds is more

The age old problem of mobile chips have brilliant performance for about 15 seconds until they thermal throttle. If you are just using apps, 15 seconds is more than enough to launch and setup an app, for anything more it will be down graded a little. Still dang impressive but the form factor becomes the limiting factor.

cma 23d ago
The browser can sometimes idle a lot until there is a touch/scroll event so it can be good for responsiveness during that kind of bursty stuff too.
- kakacik 23d ago
  aka how >95% of the users actually use phones (me including), this is enough for most
- swaranga 23d ago
  Some Linux?
KPGv2 23d ago
You said it. It was over 100 F here where I live, and I was on my phone outside trying to get work done while watching my kid, and I couldn't even type because of the thermal throttling triggered just by it being so damn hot outside.
- vachina 23d ago
  Solar radiation. Try working in the shade. The max brightness isn’t helping either.
- danudey 22d ago
  A few years ago I decided I was going to get some fresh air by going and working on the (south-facing) deck. Put my phone and drink outside, went back to get my laptop, brought it outside. Outside was too bright for me to see my laptop screen even at full brightness, but by the time I had it outside and had discovered that my phone had overheated so much it refused to turn on until it cooled down. At least my drink was still cold.
pclmulqdq 23d ago
I am pretty sure that's a feature, not a problem. The idea of these chips is to rush to idle on webpage-like workloads, and then otherwise use as little idle power as possible. Games and heavy work are generally not the intended workload.
sudo_cowsay 23d ago
Imagine they make a MacBook Neo Xiaomi version. That would solve the form factor problem.
- brookst 23d ago
  What OS though?
  - enos_feedler 23d ago
    Aluminium
picture 23d ago
While the other comments are correct to point out that majority of mobile workloads are rush to completion, many users (especially in China) still do a lot of heavy gaming on their phones. This is exactly why the newer SoCs are so interesting- that they can deliver more performance for the same power consumption. (Directly increasing run time and decreasing heating)
- f6v 23d ago
  > many users (especially in China) still do a lot of heavy gaming on their phones I think most children prefer to play on phones these days. Mobile gaming is huge. To the point where game loops on high-end games are optimized around thermal throttling.
locknitpicker 23d ago
> The age old problem of mobile chips have brilliant performance for about 15 seconds until they thermal throttle. I think this is a trait of all chips. As a general rule of thumb, both desktop chips and graphics cards come with a huge and noisy fan. Demand for aftermarket solutions is so great that it spawned quite a few specialized companies. How many high-end laptops ship with at least one fan?
- CyberDildonics 23d ago
  Any chip that isn't cooled is going to heat up and throttle or just shut off in seconds. The point is that mobile devices have a peak performance that you don't really get because you can't cool them enough. Desktops can have plenty of cooling so you actually get the real speed of whatever you are using.
rock_artist 23d ago
There’s still one mystery for me. I’m now at the iPhone 16. The performance of those chips with 8GB in non throttled environment (Neo..) can run as a fully performant macOS. Yet, as a phone I don’t feel upgraded performance since my SE 1st gen days. Sometimes I get stuttering, basic browsing can get the device pretty warm, sometime camera lags to launch. My usage profile didn’t change much over the years. So I can only assume codebases became more bloated, websites became more heavy on resources. Because, if my device now throttles to what I was happy with years ago assuming the software would behave the same, I’ve expected my usage to give me at least cooler non stuttering performance. But that was never the case.
- re-thc 23d ago
  > So I can only assume codebases became more bloated, websites became more heavy on resources. If we assume this is true, it at least meant if you didn't upgrade you'd get even worse performance.
  - UnfitFootprint 23d ago
    decreasing perf makes stomaching OS upgrades hard… I can’t remember a time I didn’t resent having to do a major version bump of my OS.
- egeozcan 23d ago
  That summarizes my whole computer use. I used to believe it was my tolerance, but then I took out a good old YP-G70CB (Samsung Galaxy S WiFi 5.0) from a drawer and everything felt much snappier than my S25. The only computer that's the exception is my macbook m4. This thing was and still is ridiculously snappy.
  - tristor 23d ago
    It's a few different things. I've gone down a hardcore rabbit hole on this because I also find this exceptionally annoying. I now sometimes experience lag when typing into a terminal, where I am typing faster than characters appear, which is something that didn't even happen in the early 1990s on significantly less capable hardware. A very big portion of this is just Wirth's Law in motion. Software is getting worse rapidly, and AI is accelerating the decline in software quality, where performance is an aspect of quality. But the other part of this is the latency vs throughput tradeoff. More and more of our systems are optimized for throughput, or worse are optimized for throughput in ways which causes significant experience degradation if you are unable to meet the throughput demands. There is a natural tension between throughput and latency, and we are seeing this play out across every aspect of both hardware and software system design. As a simple example, nothing you do to USB4 will ever match the latency of PS/2 connection for an input device, but a PS/2 port delivers around 7-12 kiloBITS/second of throughput vs USB4 delivering up to 120Gbps and a /minimum/ of 20 gigabits/second of throughput. PS/2 uses blocking direct hardware interrupts for input devices, vs asynchronous polling on USB. This architectural difference will never allow for USB to match PS/2 latency, regardless how "fast" USB gets. This tradeoff is leaning more and more towards throughput everywhere you look. Just today, the new M5 Ultra is announced w/ 1.2TBs/ of memory bandwidth. The M5 Max had 14ns of memory latency while high-performance DDR4/DDR5 typically achieves 8-9ns of latency. That's 36% more latency (conservatively), but nearly 10x the throughput. When you stack up small changes like this at every layer of the system, including in our overreliance on micro services and networked data I/O vs local data in applications, and it adds up. There are so many places in modern software where there is some network connection required for something that could have been achieved without that connection, and waiting on that connection consumes a huge amount of wait time relative to the total time for the operation, and we all feel it.

cma 23d ago

The browser can sometimes idle a lot until there is a touch/scroll event so it can be good for responsiveness during that kind of bursty stuff too.

kakacik 23d ago
aka how >95% of the users actually use phones (me including), this is enough for most
swaranga 23d ago
Some Linux?

KPGv2 23d ago

You said it. It was over 100 F here where I live, and I was on my phone outside trying to get work done while watching my kid, and I couldn't even type because of the thermal throttling triggered just by it being so damn hot outside.

vachina 23d ago
Solar radiation. Try working in the shade. The max brightness isn’t helping either.
danudey 22d ago
A few years ago I decided I was going to get some fresh air by going and working on the (south-facing) deck. Put my phone and drink outside, went back to get my laptop, brought it outside. Outside was too bright for me to see my laptop screen even at full brightness, but by the time I had it outside and had discovered that my phone had overheated so much it refused to turn on until it cooled down. At least my drink was still cold.

pclmulqdq 23d ago

I am pretty sure that's a feature, not a problem. The idea of these chips is to rush to idle on webpage-like workloads, and then otherwise use as little idle power as possible. Games and heavy work are generally not the intended workload.

sudo_cowsay 23d ago

Imagine they make a MacBook Neo Xiaomi version. That would solve the form factor problem.

brookst 23d ago
What OS though?
- enos_feedler 23d ago
  Aluminium

picture 23d ago

While the other comments are correct to point out that majority of mobile workloads are rush to completion, many users (especially in China) still do a lot of heavy gaming on their phones. This is exactly why the newer SoCs are so interesting- that they can deliver more performance for the same power consumption. (Directly increasing run time and decreasing heating)

f6v 23d ago
> many users (especially in China) still do a lot of heavy gaming on their phones I think most children prefer to play on phones these days. Mobile gaming is huge. To the point where game loops on high-end games are optimized around thermal throttling.

locknitpicker 23d ago

> The age old problem of mobile chips have brilliant performance for about 15 seconds until they thermal throttle. I think this is a trait of all chips. As a general rule of thumb, both desktop chips and graphics cards come with a huge and noisy fan. Demand for aftermarket solutions is so great that it spawned quite a few specialized companies. How many high-end laptops ship with at least one fan?

CyberDildonics 23d ago
Any chip that isn't cooled is going to heat up and throttle or just shut off in seconds. The point is that mobile devices have a peak performance that you don't really get because you can't cool them enough. Desktops can have plenty of cooling so you actually get the real speed of whatever you are using.

rock_artist 23d ago

There’s still one mystery for me. I’m now at the iPhone 16. The performance of those chips with 8GB in non throttled environment (Neo..) can run as a fully performant macOS. Yet, as a phone I don’t feel upgraded performance since my SE 1st gen days. Sometimes I get stuttering, basic browsing can get the device pretty warm, sometime camera lags to launch. My usage profile didn’t change much over the years. So I can only assume codebases became more bloated, websites became more heavy on resources. Because, if my device now throttles to what I was happy with years ago assuming the software would behave the same, I’ve expected my usage to give me at least cooler non stuttering performance. But that was never the case.

re-thc 23d ago
> So I can only assume codebases became more bloated, websites became more heavy on resources. If we assume this is true, it at least meant if you didn't upgrade you'd get even worse performance.
- UnfitFootprint 23d ago
  decreasing perf makes stomaching OS upgrades hard… I can’t remember a time I didn’t resent having to do a major version bump of my OS.
egeozcan 23d ago
That summarizes my whole computer use. I used to believe it was my tolerance, but then I took out a good old YP-G70CB (Samsung Galaxy S WiFi 5.0) from a drawer and everything felt much snappier than my S25. The only computer that's the exception is my macbook m4. This thing was and still is ridiculously snappy.
- tristor 23d ago
  It's a few different things. I've gone down a hardcore rabbit hole on this because I also find this exceptionally annoying. I now sometimes experience lag when typing into a terminal, where I am typing faster than characters appear, which is something that didn't even happen in the early 1990s on significantly less capable hardware. A very big portion of this is just Wirth's Law in motion. Software is getting worse rapidly, and AI is accelerating the decline in software quality, where performance is an aspect of quality. But the other part of this is the latency vs throughput tradeoff. More and more of our systems are optimized for throughput, or worse are optimized for throughput in ways which causes significant experience degradation if you are unable to meet the throughput demands. There is a natural tension between throughput and latency, and we are seeing this play out across every aspect of both hardware and software system design. As a simple example, nothing you do to USB4 will ever match the latency of PS/2 connection for an input device, but a PS/2 port delivers around 7-12 kiloBITS/second of throughput vs USB4 delivering up to 120Gbps and a /minimum/ of 20 gigabits/second of throughput. PS/2 uses blocking direct hardware interrupts for input devices, vs asynchronous polling on USB. This architectural difference will never allow for USB to match PS/2 latency, regardless how "fast" USB gets. This tradeoff is leaning more and more towards throughput everywhere you look. Just today, the new M5 Ultra is announced w/ 1.2TBs/ of memory bandwidth. The M5 Max had 14ns of memory latency while high-performance DDR4/DDR5 typically achieves 8-9ns of latency. That's 36% more latency (conservatively), but nearly 10x the throughput. When you stack up small changes like this at every layer of the system, including in our overreliance on micro services and networked data I/O vs local data in applications, and it adds up. There are so many places in modern software where there is some network connection required for something that could have been achieved without that connection, and waiting on that connection consumes a huge amount of wait time relative to the total time for the operation, and we all feel it.