[ScottFree]

> A combination of good cooling + a tweaked power management profile to accommodate the better thermals should give a substantial performance increase.

Give it a try and report back.

edit: Wow, HN has changed. There was a time when experimentation was encouraged here.

[eqvinox]

I don't think that's terribly useful. Regardless of how much processing power you can extract from the CPU, there is the parallel question of CPU lifetime.

You can see in the video how hot the CPU runs. If I remember correctly, a 20°C temperature increase halves the lifetime of electronics. "Normal" laptops tend to stick around 60°C-70°C. Apple apparently decided that halving or even quartering the CPU lifetime compared to that is fine.

That said, most MBA CPUs probably spend their CPU lifetime closer to idle. It'd be interesting to get temperature numbers for that. Still, it's worse than it could - and IMHO should - be.

[ScottFree]

> I don't think that's terribly useful.

The entire overclocking community would disagree with you.

[eqvinox]

The entire overclocking community also decided lifetime is secondary to performance, yet I still feel rather displeased with Apple deciding to make lifetime secondary to saving a few cents on a better cooling solution :D

[ScottFree]

If the CPUs on your macbook pros are dying, you're doing something very wrong. If they're not, then you're creating an issue where none exists.

[Nextgrid]

> Give it a try and report back.

Modifying the thermal & power management profile is very difficult as it would require reverse-engineering the firmware.

I guess a temporary hack would be to mess with the current sensing circuitry to make the machine believe the CPU is drawing less current that it actually is and encourage it to give it more power.