Nope. The M1 isn't magical, it can build up heat and have trouble dissipating it too if the load is higher than the ability to dissipate.
This I don’t necessarily disagree with. It’s clear the MBA’s passive heatsink will saturate given enough time under load and cause problems. But the evidence so far doesn’t demonstrate that the load is higher than the fan’s ability to dissipate it in the 13” MBP and Mini.
What happens to your M1 Mini when it's sitting in 80F air and you're trying to run a WOA VM and an Ubuntu VM? It throttles, big surprise there. It's only got one fan, and it's not very high speed.
The fan isn’t running at high speeds because it doesn’t need to run at high speed. It’s the same cooling solution as in the 2018 Mini. The difference here is that the M1’s total wall consumption is much lower than the 2018. Max 40W at the wall, versus 122W. Max 133BTU/h vs 417BTU/h. The i5/i7 Minis will stabilize at around 65W for the CPU alone (although I’ve seen an i5 go higher), giving us a rule of thumb for what the cooling can actually dissipate. And the M1 won’t even draw that much from the wall at max clock speeds, so there’s headroom to keep the M1 from thermal throttling.
I was running some encodes (not using VideoToolbox, so it was all on the CPU cores, not the accelerators) during the recent heat wave here in the PNW. M1 Mini was sat in an ambient temperature of around 105F (~40C). SoC sensors reported peaks of ~70C. A couple core sensors did get into the 80s, with others in the high 70s, but clock speeds remained maxed out without spinning up the fan. Spinning up the fan manually would have brought the temps down noticeably, but since it wasn’t thermally throttling in a heat wave, I didn’t bother. My i7 though… that is another story.
Now, when Apple shrinks the Mini again, and puts a higher end SoC in there, you’d probably have a point about that one. Apple’s going to consume that headroom to make things smaller. They certainly ate up the headroom to make the MBA passively cooled. But if anything the M1 Mini as it is today is “over engineered” for the power it consumes.
I haven't tested with an M1 Mini specifically, but I have used loads like that with MANY different kinds of computers and OS's.
Then at least look at the data to date on the thing you are commenting on, because all the reviews have been pointing out the low power consumption under load of the M1 compared to the i5/i7 it replaced in the Mini. Apple posted power consumption numbers for both models (which tend to be surprisingly conservative compared to real world measurements of those two models). Folks have done tests around clock speed and thermals. And none of it lines up with your claim above.
Well, here we again have the two definitions of "throttling". We mean "throttling" as in a deliberate mechanism employed mechanism to manage the power and performance. You seem to talk about "throttling" as in "not reaching the expected performance due to thermal limitations". The M1 performs as expected in almost every scenario I've seen so far, so the second definition of "throttling" does not apply. But Apple definitively employs throttling (in wider sense) to manage the chip.
Unfortunately, the common usage is the second definition for a forum like this one, while the first is mostly in certain engineering circles (not common even on my dev team for example). Based on bobcomer’s usage of the term, the second definition
is being leaned into in passages like what I quote above. So it’s fair to continue the conversation in that context IMO.
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Getting somewhat back on topic though. One thing that I am surprised hasn’t been brought up is how systems like the PS4 use tricks to gain performance that aren’t (yet) common in PC gaming, and are dealing with lower resolutions like 1080p compared to a Mac. Although that will change, and these tricks would help Mac gamers especially due to the high resolution displays Apple embeds in their laptops.
Internal scaling and dynamic resolution were pretty common on both PS4 and Xbox One IIRC. I remember discussion around the dynamic resolution tech for Halo 5 a while back for sure. Being able to render at something as low as 720p and upscale to 1080p or 4K for output is certainly going to be less stressful on a GPU than trying to set game settings to match the 2560-by-1600 of a 13” MBP or Air.
