MacBook Air M3 CPU Temp

[mikem204]

Hello all,

I just recently downloaded iStatistica to monitor some things on my new M3 air and I found that the CPU temps on all the cores stay low in temp except for core 6. On core 6 there is often times spikes up to 70 deg c while the others remain around 40 deg c. This can be while I am simply just scrolling through Reddit on Safari with nothing else in the background. Please see attached photos for examples.

Does anyone know if this is normal or what the cause is for this? Is core 6 of this CPU the heavy lifter?

Thank you

 

[chabig]

Core 6 is probably the one doing the work.

 

[mikem204]

Core 6 is probably the one doing the work.

That does not seem fair to the other cores. One carrying the team while they just sit idle.

 

[geta]

That does not seem fair to the other cores. One carrying the team while they just sit idle.

Someone has to do the dirty work while others chilling.

 

[August West]

That does not seem fair to the other cores. One carrying the team while they just sit idle.

Apple used the highway road repair crew model when designing the AS chips.

 

[mikem204]

Apple used the highway road repair crew model when designing the AS chips.

Is this normal for these chips to be working like this? I do understand these highway road repair crews work most effectively like this, but does an apple chip work effectively like this too?

 

[raythompsontn]

Is this normal for these chips to be working like this? I do understand these highway road repair crews work most effectively like this, but does an apple chip work effectively like this too?

If there is only 1 active app, if the active app is largely single threaded, what else is there for the other CPUs to accomplish. Lightroom can multi-task and doing a couple of exports will put load on additional CPUs. Who know? Maybe the OS or firmware, will use one CPU one day, another CPU on another day, sort of rotating the active CPU among all the CPUs depending on the day.

 

[Salty Pirate]

Efficiency core(s)?

 

[mikem204]

So I think there may be an issue with that specific program and measuring/reading the temperature sensors on the M3 Chip. I looked into another program called TG Pro which explicitly states support for M3 chips and after downloading it, it is showing consistent temperatures among the cores.

 

[NT1440]

So I think there may be an issue with that specific program and measuring/reading the temperature sensors on the M3 Chip. I looked into another program called TG Pro which explicitly states support for M3 chips and after downloading it, it is showing consistent temperatures among the cores.

Unless you're troubleshooting a problem, or just really really really want to go down the rabbit hole of how macOS schedules cores between the performance and efficiency cores, there's no really any value to what you're trying to do here.

What started your quest to look at this?

 

[mikem204]

There is no problem, the air is about a week old and things have been performing great. This is my first Mac however and I have never had a computer without any fans so I am curious to how it performs.

So far so good and really enjoying the experience.

 

[NT1440]

There is no problem, the air is about a week old and things have been performing great. This is my first Mac however and I have never had a computer without any fans so I am curious to how it performs.

So far so good and really enjoying the experience.

Nice, just don’t drive yourself crazy by constantly monitoring stats. Enjoy the machine!

 

[arcite]

IMHO, 70C is kinda toasty for a machine with no fan.

 

[geta]

IMHO, 70C is kinda toasty for a machine with no fan.

But it’s great on cold winter days.

 

[colodane]

Relax

 

[NT1440]

IMHO, 70C is kinda toasty for a machine with no fan.

Based on? 70C cannot hurt components.

 

[jdb8167]

So I think there may be an issue with that specific program and measuring/reading the temperature sensors on the M3 Chip. I looked into another program called TG Pro which explicitly states support for M3 chips and after downloading it, it is showing consistent temperatures among the cores.

All of the sensor apps are just guessing about what the various sensors mean. There is no official documentation on them and they change frequently with different Macs and SoCs.

Over time the guesses get better so I suspect that TG Pro just has better insight on the actual sensor functions.

(I know all this because I attempted to write a sensor app for my Apple silicon MacBook Air and found the whole thing very frustrating.)

 

[mikem204]

All of the sensor apps are just guessing about what the various sensors mean. There is no official documentation on them and they change frequently with different Macs and SoCs.

Over time the guesses get better so I suspect that TG Pro just has better insight on the actual sensor functions.

(I know all this because I attempted to write a sensor app for my Apple silicon MacBook Air and found the whole thing very frustrating.)

This is the correct response. When I was using iStatistica it was not reporting all of the cores and it was showing that core 6 was sky high.

With TG Pro, they have a blog on their page about the testing they did to dial in the sensors on these Apple silicon chips. After installing TG Pro, all the cores are reporting temp as should be on an M3 air with all the temperatures in a reasonable range with respect to each other. I attached a snippet of the TG Pro sensors listed and their temps. The max temperature is now showing 57 degrees celsius with all of them in a reasonable range.

 

[jb310]

I wonder if it's due to an app that's programmed to run single-threaded? 🤔

Most apps today are built to support multi-threading, but it's always possible that there's one that's making a single core do all the work.