[karpodiem]

"You have to take into consideration what kind of workloads lead to throttling."

I'm driving four displays at work with Windows 10 (two 21.5' 1080p monitors, my laptop flipped open, and an iPad Pro 12.9 connected via USB C running Duet Display) and my idle desktop CPU utilization hovers around 15-20%. Having Outlook and Chrome open gets it into the mid 30s. This is a four core i7 Dell Latitude 7490 with 16GB memory and an NVMe drive that I was given in May 2019.

Yes, all the OS/applications I'm using are resource hogs but I'm not even doing software development - this is all business analyst work. Seeing that the general trend of applications/OS will continue to be resource hogs, let's hope that six core thermal chassis design for 14' ultrabooks is figured out in the next two or three years.

[wtallis]

Throttling is what happens when your CPU stays at 100% for a long time. Perhaps you could describe the part of your workload that exhibits that behavior, rather than describe a workload that is obviously not causing thermal throttling?

[read_if_gay_]

Throttling is what happens if your CPU overheats which does not imply it's running at 100% for a long time

[wtallis]

We're talking about the current state of the real market here, not abstract hypotheticals. Laptops overheating at 30% CPU usage is not a widespread issue in the real world; to a first approximation, the only way to get an ultrabook's CPU to thermally throttle is to keep at least one of its cores completely busy so that the processor stays in its boost state long enough to pump out serious thermal energy. Bursty workloads give the CPU too many opportunities to cool off.