edemerzel

Mike Wuerthele said:

tht said:

From a simple, binary, "yes or no" perspective, the Mac mini clearly throttles based on the thermal condition.

Please don’t use the word throttle. It is working as Intel has designed it, and Apple is implementing it as Intel wants it.

Intel says it turbos. If an OEM chooses to provide 1.5x more power to the CPU and puts in a cooling solution to transfer 1.5x more heat out of the box, it will allow them to run the chip at a higher turbo states, whatever that may be.

Intel can’t guarantee consistent turbo behavior without throwing away more chips, or really can’t segment their chips much more so as to better market chip behavior, so, they guarantee base clocks at x TDP and guarantee a turbo clock rate for one core (or more depending). OEMs and box builders can provide more power to enable longer running turbo states, but users will find that they are subject to a silicon lottery where some chips will see more cores turbo longer than other chips’ cores will. The behavior can’t be guaranteed. It’s not throttling.

Heck, the TDP values aren’t even for the whole chip. It excludes combinations, like the GPU and CPU can be going at full power, or in the cases of Xeons, the AVX512 unit is excluded from the TDP guarantee, and AVX512 dominant code end up having lower performance then people would think based on the advertising of the chips performance.

The rest of the paragraph you didn't quote immediately following the period in this sentence covers just about everything you're saying here.