From the evidence I've seen, I believe firmly that people are vastly overhyping the effects of the throttling in the M2 MacBook Air.
The YouTube review I've seen so far with the most thorough benchmarks is Dave2D's, and he went so far as to say that "if you're someone that wants a very powerful system and you're hoping that something super thin and super light could handle it, unfortunately, I would say that it can't." He also spends a good deal of time throughout the rest of the video highlighting the effects of the throttling as he saw them.
That's a rather extreme conclusion to make, from what I'm seeing. I will use his own graphs to demonstrate.
This is Dave's graph of the effects of throttling on the Cinebench score, comparing the M2 MBA to the M2 MBP (which has a fan). There are some important things to note here.
I calculated that a single run on the M2 would last anywhere from 1.5 to 2 minutes, based on its overall score. So 10 consecutive runs would take about 15-20 minutes. Remember, throttling is related to temperature over time, and the effects of it go up as your time under sustained load increases.
Cinebench pegs the CPU at 99-100% utilization on all cores for the duration of the test. So we're talking 15-20 minutes of that. If you've spent any time doing "Pro" workflows, and monitored your system usage, you would know that this amount of load, for that duration, is extremely rare. Even in a video editor, you rarely have a render that would peg the CPU to that degree, for that amount of time. You do also have the GPU cores to consider in that instance, but many renders for many users also would not take 15-20 minutes to complete. At the highest end, sure, with very complex timelines with hefty codecs. But the majority of users who do video work who would buy this machine? No.
On top of that, I think Dave is over-estimating the impact of the throttling. I calculated that on his x axis, each interval represents 562.5 points. So if you look carefully, you see that after 10 consecutive runs, the M2 MBA has dropped about 1125 points.
A drop of 1125 points puts it at about the same performance as M1's maximum performance, and this occurs after 15-20 minutes straight of 100% CPU load. 8783 to 7658.
So if you somehow have a workload that is pegging the CPU at 100%, or a combination of GPU + CPU that equals the same thermal output, for 15-20 minutes STRAIGHT, your performance STILL only drops to about the equivalent of M1's maximum performance. 8783 vs. 7743.
For the vast majority of users, their workloads will stay well within the zone where they are reaping the benefits of M2's performance increase. Even many sustained loads do not load up as much as Cinebench does. And for users who manage to push to the throttling point, their performance only goes down to about the performance of M1. Pushing past that point will be even rarer still.
So, as is always the case with throttling, the debate is not "Does the machine throttle or not?", it's "How much of an impact does throttling have?"
So far, I am not seeing any evidence that suggests that M2 MacBook Air users will have a poor experience. I think the effects of this throttling are far less than how it's being described. I also believe Apple would have weighed all of this themselves when testing this machine and determining how it would perform for its expected user base. For most users, it will still exceed their expectations, even while editing video and doing other "pro" workflows.
The YouTube review I've seen so far with the most thorough benchmarks is Dave2D's, and he went so far as to say that "if you're someone that wants a very powerful system and you're hoping that something super thin and super light could handle it, unfortunately, I would say that it can't." He also spends a good deal of time throughout the rest of the video highlighting the effects of the throttling as he saw them.
That's a rather extreme conclusion to make, from what I'm seeing. I will use his own graphs to demonstrate.
This is Dave's graph of the effects of throttling on the Cinebench score, comparing the M2 MBA to the M2 MBP (which has a fan). There are some important things to note here.
I calculated that a single run on the M2 would last anywhere from 1.5 to 2 minutes, based on its overall score. So 10 consecutive runs would take about 15-20 minutes. Remember, throttling is related to temperature over time, and the effects of it go up as your time under sustained load increases.
Cinebench pegs the CPU at 99-100% utilization on all cores for the duration of the test. So we're talking 15-20 minutes of that. If you've spent any time doing "Pro" workflows, and monitored your system usage, you would know that this amount of load, for that duration, is extremely rare. Even in a video editor, you rarely have a render that would peg the CPU to that degree, for that amount of time. You do also have the GPU cores to consider in that instance, but many renders for many users also would not take 15-20 minutes to complete. At the highest end, sure, with very complex timelines with hefty codecs. But the majority of users who do video work who would buy this machine? No.
On top of that, I think Dave is over-estimating the impact of the throttling. I calculated that on his x axis, each interval represents 562.5 points. So if you look carefully, you see that after 10 consecutive runs, the M2 MBA has dropped about 1125 points.
A drop of 1125 points puts it at about the same performance as M1's maximum performance, and this occurs after 15-20 minutes straight of 100% CPU load. 8783 to 7658.
So if you somehow have a workload that is pegging the CPU at 100%, or a combination of GPU + CPU that equals the same thermal output, for 15-20 minutes STRAIGHT, your performance STILL only drops to about the equivalent of M1's maximum performance. 8783 vs. 7743.
For the vast majority of users, their workloads will stay well within the zone where they are reaping the benefits of M2's performance increase. Even many sustained loads do not load up as much as Cinebench does. And for users who manage to push to the throttling point, their performance only goes down to about the performance of M1. Pushing past that point will be even rarer still.
So, as is always the case with throttling, the debate is not "Does the machine throttle or not?", it's "How much of an impact does throttling have?"
So far, I am not seeing any evidence that suggests that M2 MacBook Air users will have a poor experience. I think the effects of this throttling are far less than how it's being described. I also believe Apple would have weighed all of this themselves when testing this machine and determining how it would perform for its expected user base. For most users, it will still exceed their expectations, even while editing video and doing other "pro" workflows.
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