Wow, the Nintendo Switch has a fan? It is amazing how thermals are such a limiting factor in today's devices. I remember that a browser dev increased the Nexus 5's benchmark score drastically by placing it on a bag of ice.
> I remember that a browser dev increased the Nexus 5's benchmark score drastically by placing it on a bag of ice.
If the browser was stressing the system to the limits of the thermal envelope, then by being able to dissapate heat faster, you can schedule more work to be done delaying any kind of frequency governing.
e.g., if I start an h264 encode, first my CPU boosts, reaching 3.3 GHz (it's a 2.7 GHz i7), but after a minute, it's dropped to 2.4 GHz due to the thermals. Wouldn't surprise me if I stuck it in a freezer it would stay at a higher frequency.
When we switched to laptops from desktops at work, a full build including tests took quite a bit longer and a lot more variable in time; thermal limiting appeared to be the reason for the variance.
If the browser was stressing the system to the limits of the thermal envelope, then by being able to dissapate heat faster, you can schedule more work to be done delaying any kind of frequency governing.