[sdfsadfjaslj]

Absolutely this. I have a 16'' mbp and it constantly throttles, even when I manually set the fans to full blast and use a cooling pad. There's no way to sustain the 45 watt tdp for more than a few seconds.

Anecdotally, my outdated i5 quad core is much snappier than the mbp i7 8 core because it can go all out at 69 watts/max boost for hours and not throttle for a second.

[vaughan]

Disable turbo boost. Throttling is not directly linked to any temperature sensor, and turbo boost almost instantly causes throttling, which then takes some time to return to normal because of a back-off algorithm.

[hesdeadjim]

I’ve used the software that lets you modify all the CPU flags and nothing helps. Killing turbo boost sucks, having a frequency in the 3.0Ghz+ instead of 4.4Ghz+ is brutal when you are single thread bound.

[hesdeadjim]

This is exactly it, the thermal ceiling leaves almost no room to use the full 45 watt TDP. The fact that this problem isn’t a huge PR nightmare shows just how “pro” the typical buyer’s workload is.