Ask HN: Why are there so few fanless laptops with Intel/AMD?

[pappeyrome]

One would assume after 10 Gen chipsets, and 10nm or shorter designs large heat sinks would suffice. But most of fanless devices are Celeron/Pentium-M chipsets in Chromebooks or Windows laptops with 4/8GB RAM and eMMC. Is it impossible to passively cool i5, i7 (integrated graphics)? Due to OS needs I cannot go for Apple M1.

[traceroute66]

I think most of it is the clue in the name .... laptop.

If we move for a minute beyond the direct "hard" technical constraints which have already been expressed here (i.e. small chassis, lots of chips etc.).

You have a second aspect, the old PBCAK (Problem Between Chair And Keyboard) one.

Users will use their laptops in less than optimal (from a thermal perspective) ways. They will use it on their laps. They will use it in bed, resting on duvets. They will use it on pool-side sun loungers with the mid-summer sun blasting down. Yes you can tell them in the manual that they shouldn't, but they still will.

So even if you can magically cool the chips passively, the possible use-cases of the product might ultimately constrain your ability to forgo a fan entirely.

I note that some people here are seeking to blame the "race to thin" for the requirement for fans. To them I would merely point them at the Panasonic Toughbook. Modern laptop but built like an old-shool 90's brick ... it still has a fan.[1]

Apple have done a stunning job with the M1 (and previously with the i5/i7). But even with the unibody chassis of a MacBook (i.e. the whole device is a massive heatsink) the necessity of forced cooling is still there (edit to add: with the exception of the MacBook Air M1 ... thanks for the correction guys !) . But with the non-Air M1s you really have to work super hard to make the fans ramp up at all, they've done a stunning job.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vgWZwP28trI

[microtonal]

the necessity of forced cooling is still there

The MacBook Air M1 is passively cooled. I used an M1 Air for a while (switched to M1 Pro) and it would only throttle slightly during very long builds. There have also been many tests where the MacBook Pro M1 (which does have a fan), the fan only spins up after minutes of loading all cores.

The MacBook Air M1 shows that it is possible to have a fast [1], passively cooled laptop.

[1] Beat my 3700X in most Rust/C/C++ project builds.

[t_mann]

Thanks for this dose of reality for the previous poster. It always amazes me to what lengths some engineers can go explaining with extreme confidence all the reasons why they think a specific feature isn't possible, all the while being proven completely wrong by the real world.

I remember my first question on Quora was whether there was a way to sidestep the (then) 30MB size limit for installing apps on the iPad while on cellular. A guy with several 'signal engineer' tags explained that that would completely overwhelm the mobile network. I responded that the SIM card I was using was actually marketed to be used as your main internet for your home and came with a Wifi router for that purpose (which I also used sometimes, transferring the SIM). His only response was that I obviously lacked the mental capacity to apprehend how physically impossible this was (something I was using regularly mind you, for much larger downloads and data-intensive apps), and he reported my profile.

[CiaranMcNulty]

I could count the number of times my M1 (13") MBP's fans have kicked in over the last year on two hands, and in most cases when I investigate there's some rogue process running thrashing some of the cores (looking at you, Fusion360)

[microtonal]

My experience with the Mac Mini M1 is the same. We bought a Mini for our daughter. I use it sometimes to benchmark stuff on the vanilla M1. I don't think the fan every spun up.

I can get the fans to spin up easily on my MacBook Pro 14" (M1 Pro), e.g. when building a large project like PyTorch. Luckily, the fans are not very loud. I can't hear it at the office (plenty of ambient noise), though I can hear it sometimes in our home office.

Passive cooling is one of the reasons I recommend people to get the M1 Air, unless they need 8 performance cores or > 16GB RAM. A completely quiet laptop is such a nice feature. I hope that they keep the Air passively cooled in the future.

Edit: >= corrected to >

[aaaaaaaaaaab]

>or >= 16GB RAM

My M1 Air has 16GB of RAM.

[microtonal]

Sorry for the typo, of course I meant > 16GB. My wife's Air also has 16GB RAM :).

[nerdawson]

I’ve owned an M1 Pro for a month or so and I have yet to hear the fans spin up once. A Google Meet call on my old Intel MBP would have the fans operating at max.

[hombre_fatal]

Same. Even when I realize some process has been using 100% CPU for a while the fans still don’t turn on.

This used to be how I found runaway processes on my previous Intel based MBP.

[culopatin]

I’ve maxed out my cpu for 1h recently and the fans are still very hard to hear. It’s a light purr if you put your ear against it.

[traceroute66]

> The MacBook Air M1 is passively cooled.

Thanks for the correction

My mind was still on the old pre-M1 Air which did have a fan IIRC.

Thanks to you my credit card is trying to tempt me to pull it out of my wallet. ;-)

[microtonal]

My mind was still on the old pre-M1 Air which did have a fan IIRC.

And the fan on the Intel Air was loud and the CPU performance not great :(. The Intel Air and the M1 Air are like night and day. Even though I have the 14" Pro now, IMO the MacBook Air M1 is the most revolutionary Mac of the past decade, if not more.

[pstadler]

Used an MBA M1 for a year before switching to a MBP 14" M1 Pro. The MBA is the best laptop I‘ve ever had. Fanless, light, insane battery life, always cool and blazingly fast. No noticeable difference between the M1 (8/7 16GB) vs. M1 Pro (10/14 32GB) in daily use, although I don’t usually depend on long running processes going full throttle.

I believe the entry-level MBA is the best laptop you can buy when it comes to price-performance ratio.

[microtonal]

Fanless, light, insane battery life, always cool and blazingly fast. No noticeable difference between the M1 (8/7 16GB) vs. M1 Pro (10/14 32GB) in daily use

Indeed. I only got the M1 Pro because I often do larger builds and two AMX (matrix multiplication) units is nice for some machine learning tasks. Other than that, I liked the Air more.

I hope that they carry over some features of the Pro to the next generation Air, in particular MagSafe, supporting more than one external 4k/5k display, and perhaps >16GB, and it would be so perfect.

[fmajid]

If anything the M1 MBA is too cool, it freezes my lap off. Intel’s done a heroic job of maximizing performance on x86 but you’ve got to pay the price for the inefficiency of its legacy CISC architecture and power efficiency and thermals is it.

[daviddever23box]

This - bought an Amber Lake-Y Core-i5 based MacBook Air (True Tone. 2019 - A1932) and returned it, as the fan noise was frequent and ridiculous. (I've heard that the Ice Lake-based sucessor was worse.)

[glandium]

You can do surprising lots with the M1 macbook air (including building Firefox faster than many intel-based laptops), and it doesn't even have openings for airflow.

[Gorgo]

The base of the laptop is the part of the machine being put on the lap/blanket/pillow/duvet while the lid sticks up in the air. A solution would be to put either the radiator (hard) or heat-producing hardware (easier) in the lid (with some insulation between the hot parts and the screen), making it a bit thicker and with that more stable. This also keeps the heat away from the battery which should make it last longer.

[replygirl]

oh no, it keeps falling over!

[Gorgo]

Aluminium and magnesium are quite light so that should not be a problem - especially not if the space previously taken up by those hot parts is filled by using a larger battery. The think may weigh 2kg instead of 1.5kg and it may be a few mm thicker. It also should have fewer problems in getting rid of heat (which translates to better performance) and the autonomy should be significantly increased due to that larger battery. I'd choose increased autonomy and performance over a lighter and thinner laptop any time.

[Redoubts]

Meh, the older 12” MacBook (not pro, not air) was also fanless. I miss that 2 lbs design quite a bit.

[Tagbert]

I had the 11” Air and it was a delightful little laptop at the time. Very similar to the 12” MacBook. The screen was small and the screen height was limited but it worked well with an external monitor when at my desk. I may go try to fire that up today.

I would not be surprised if Apple eventually brings out a new laptop that addresses the ultra-portable market. With new screens it might be a 13” screen in a tight & light case.

[fmajid]

And it had abysmal performance, unusable for any development task.

[Redoubts]

I developed on it just fine, and that’s certainly not the only task a laptop is useful for.

[fmajid]

This is *Hacker* News.

I had a Docker build that would take 4 hours on mine when it completed in under 15 minutes on my Mac Mini.

[musicale]

> Docker

Many people use/need Docker, but of course it requires a Linux kernel (often running in a hypervisor if you're running macOS.) VMs can easily eat up a lot of resources, especially memory. Alternately a VM without enough memory will also perform abysmally.

I've also heard complaints about poor performance (vs. native Linux or even WSL on x86 hardware) of x86 Docker images running in emulation on an M1 MacBook Air.

[c0l0]

Yeah, I am disappointed that fanless devices have been on the retreat these past several years. My wife's previous laptop was a Lenovo Yoga 710, with a fanless Intel Core m3-6Y30 (Skylake, 2 cores with HT). Performance was more than adequate for her work as a scientist. My current laptop is a Xiaomi Mi Air 12.5, with the same CPU installed. It's powerful enough for everything I do on the go. If I were to replace it, there's just no up to date fanless device available except for the Macbook Air - which will have to have decent GNU/Linux support before I can/will consider buying it.

But it's not just laptops that lose their fanlessness (which I appreciate both due to noise and reliability concerns), but also NUCs - almost every single NUC-like device that has entered the market and managed to come to my attention over the last months has had a fan installed. I wonder why that is - TDPs do not seem to have gone up, at least not when looking at data sheets... maybe it's just cheaper to make stuff that way.

[hddherman]

To go fully passive while keeping the same amount of performance you need to use much more material, so in this case copper and/or aluminium. Moving that air around with a relatively cheap fan works well enough and allows for a smaller build.

This is also why it's generally recommended to go with a classic air cooler that just has the fan speed set to the lowest level over passive air coolers in desktop PC-s. It's still quiet, but you get the cooling performance while using much fewer resources.

[toast0]

> TDPs do not seem to have gone up, at least not when looking at data sheets...

Data sheet TDPs seem to have less connection to reality with each generation.

But with all of the boost clocks and what not, the more heat you can disipate, the faster the chip will go, and the power usage/temperatures can ramp really quickly too. Fans are so effective in most situations, that it's hard to leave them off and accept the performance difference. Personally, I'm ok with most fans, although I had to replace the PSU fan in my most recent build cause the included one had a noise profile I couldn't stand. For things like NUCs and Desktops, running longer cables and hiding the noise source is probably a good option too.

[simne]

Yes, fan is cheaper.

- Copper is one of the most expensive materials, and it is hard enough, and have high melting temperature, so manufacturing also more expensive than from plastics.

When micro computers was inside 15W TDP this was not a problem, as heatsink was tiny, but for modern commodity designs, 25W+, need to use all surface of notebook as heatsink (at least one side of "shell"), this would be very expensive.

[waterlaw]

I bought a fanless quad core Apollo Lake Chromebook and installed Linux on it.

It's not perfect (headphone jack doesn't work), but been really happy so far. Probably the best $ per performance laptop I've ever purchased.

[c_o_n_v_e_x]

In addition to TDP, maximum ambient, case, or junction temperature is an extra dimension that needs to be considered.

Edit: Just did a search of junction temps for 10th, 11th, and 12th gen i5s... all 100C.

[jhugo]

x86 chips that can run without a fan have disappointing performance, and the segment has been pretty stagnant. If a manufacturer wants to release a new NUC-like device with better performance than the old NUC-like device, they have little choice but to install a fan.

[mjevans]

Weight and power density are the biggest issues. Some of the lower end APUs (think tablet mode) might work out, but to literally be usable on top of a lap they aren't allowed to get that hot.

Tablets mostly spend their energy budget (under normal operation) on illuminating the screen and most of the action content they see would either classify as webpages or video encoded with codecs they have hardware support for decoding efficiently.

A generic PC meanwhile runs a heavy OS and is often asked to do large volumes of local processing tasks. E.G. that bloody 16GB Outlook mail database that has to be stored locally because your power user that demanded a laptop has to be able to read all of their past email while they're in the field with no reliable net connection.

Oh, they also demand that it has to be light. Fans are cheaper and lighter than putting enough metal inside to do something passively; and also run cooler since even a pathetic volume of airflow is many times better than waiting for convection alone to move the heat.

You can blame the noise of the fan on the push for crazy flat laptops though. There's no reason a still light but thicker laptop couldn't use a larger slower moving fan. Well, other than the perception of thick as heavy and thus bad.

[formerly_proven]

> You can blame the noise of the fan on the push for crazy flat laptops though. There's no reason a still light but thicker laptop couldn't use a larger slower moving fan. Well, other than the perception of thick as heavy and thus bad.

FWIW I've taken apart many laptops over many generations and the general trend seems to be that OEMs always use a cooling solution that's just-so good enough, regardless of available space and laptop cost. When you give an OEM a 40 % reduction in power through a new CPU generation, you're giving them a choice: a) spend the same amount of money on a cooling solution that's as capable as before, so now you'll get a quiet and cool laptop or b) make the cooling solution 40 % smaller, making it cheaper, and keeping noise and heat roughly similar.

[microtonal]

When you give an OEM a 40 % reduction in power through a new CPU generation

It's the same with workstations. Although they have plenty of room, but OEMs often install barely-capable CPU coolers that are noisy (rather than something like a large Noctua cooler that can keep most CPUs cool with barely any noise). Or another big annoyance: many OEMs (even reputable brands like Dell) install a PSU that is just enough for the load. If you want to replace the GPU by something that requires a bit more power, you'll end up replacing the PSU as well (assuming that you can get one that is compatible with their custom mainboards).

[Beltalowda]

> many OEMs (even reputable brands like Dell) install a PSU that is just enough for the load.

I'm not sure what the current technology is like as I haven't built a PC in a long time, but it used to be the case that efficiency would drop off quite rapidly if you underpower it. e.g. your fancy 600W 95% efficiency PSU would only be 60% efficiency at 200W power draw.

> OEMs often install barely-capable CPU coolers that are noisy (rather than something like a large Noctua cooler that can keep most CPUs cool with barely any noise).

My old AMD Athlon mainboard came with a very rattly and noise cooler for the chipset; I ended up replacing it with an after-market heat-sink that I got for €10. Pretty bad design IMO, but it saved ~€3 on the mainboard price.

A lot of the old Atom CPUs (Atom 330 etc.) had fanless CPUs, but because they were almost always paired with an old inefficient chipset they all came with a little cooler on the chipset. Ended up replacing a few of those, too.

[vladvasiliu]

> (assuming that you can get one that is compatible with their custom mainboards).

This. I have got an old HP EliteDesk from work. It uses a standard SFF (not sure if it's the right term) PSU, but the motherboard connector is custom. Of course the fan makes a terrible noise. And even if I'm able to find a replacement PSU that would fit in the case (even fanless! - I'm happy with the integrated graphics), I also have to look for an MB connector adaptor.

[gushogg-blake]

Someone should make a laptop that's way heavier/thicker than current models but is also silent, cool, high-performing, and the battery lasts a week.

[NathanielK]

Just duct tape a USB-C power bank to any modern ultra low power laptop. Especially ones with optional GPUs that don't have one installed. There's even software to treat them like the secondary batteries laptops used to have as an option.[0]

[0] https://github.com/n4ru/FakeSlice

[kcartlidge]

> Someone should make a laptop that's way heavier/thicker than current models but is also silent, cool, high-performing, and the battery lasts a week.

With a deep-travel backlit keyboard, FreeDOS, WordPerfect 5.1, DataEase 4.53, SuperCalc 5, and JPI TopSpeed Modula-2. (Oh, and Elite+, Prince of Persia, and the Infocom back catalogue for down-time).

Seriously. My dream machine.

[wildrhythms]

Has Apple cracked the code with the M1 Air? It's light. It runs a 'heavy OS'. Three's no fans, and no noise.

[simne]

Apple have very special business model, more "all inhouse" than other major producers.

So we don't know, how much this costs for them, and even, is M1 project profitable.

[mnw21cam]

Fanless implies low power. The problem with low power is that it doesn't market itself well, because it implies a weak CPU. The biggest marketing claim that laptops tend to have is how fast their CPU is, and that's what most people look at when buying. Making it fanless means that you have to get rid of the heat by making the case heat-conductive, which means making it out of metal instead of plastic, which is more expensive. So, most laptop makers have gone down the route of including as fast a CPU as the price of the laptop will allow, which means including a fan and using a cheaper case material.

I bought my Asus UX305C about five years ago now. It's fanless, and the CPU is definitely a little slow, because it's an Intel atom. However, I wasn't buying it for the CPU - I was buying it for the fact that it was fanless, had a decent keyboard, hidpi screen, enough RAM, and sturdy metal case. I don't need a fast CPU, because everything I do is run on a chunky server somewhere else. It feels like an expensive laptop because of the metal case and nice screen.

I was so pleased with it that I recommended an Asus laptop to someone else, but unfortunately that one does have a fan, and the case is made of plastic, and it feels really cheap. The touchpad stops working properly when you hold the laptop case in a particular way, which bends the plastic and stops it being able to detect fingers.

[cagey]

1 month ago I bought a new Chromebook[1] with N4500 Celeron CPU that turns out to apparently be fanless (fanlessness is literally an unadvertised feature of this device). I'm typing this reply using it, with many dozens of browser tabs open, and it runs with nary a hiccup, and its battery life is insane (currently 13% battery w/estimated 2h35m operating time remaining, and based on my past experience that estimate is very credible).

[1] https://www.bestbuy.com/site/asus-17-3-chromebook-intel-cele...

[ataru]

I think it is market forces. Fanless laptops can be made, but the bulk of the market seeks reasonable performance at the best price.

I think it doesn't matter much, as you can take a standard laptop and restrict the clock speed, and the fan will never turn on.

[xbar]

You are precisely right.

And laptop marketing focuses primarily on CPU speed, which is an error. It drives running CPUs at speeds that create non-linear heat/power graphs without much consideration to total system performance.

[bornfreddy]

Does that really work? I would expect the fan to kick in based on temperature, not cpu frequency?

Or do you mean restricting clock speed based on temperature?

[replygirl]

the fan turns on because the cpu gets hot, the cpu gets hot because it’s doing more work, slow the cpu down and it does less work. downclocking to keep the fans from kicking on is the same thing as thermal throttling, just earlier

[guilamu]

My answer: the mind-blowingly cheap, good and passive Acer Swift 1 with a quad-core last gen pentium n6000.

I've been buying dozens of those for people at work since 5 years now (first ones with n5000) and I still have to hear a single complaint about it.

The only point of failure of that thing is the charging port, proprietary, not usb c.

[bytehowl]

What is your use case for those?

[guilamu]

Web browsing, office apps, media consumption on the excellent (for the price) IPS panel.

Also to be noted : one of the lightest 14 inches on the market with an excellent battery life.

[bytehowl]

Yeah, for those kinds of tasks they should be fine. I think OP was asking about laptops useful for more involved workloads, though.

[pappeyrome]

I do in fact have that acer swift N6000 bought for €200 - it is perfect for all my tasks (usually CI/CD, ssh) except may be Zoom. It does not allow changing background owing to paltry CPU/GPU. My boss therefore gave me €1000 to get a better device and I cannot find anything silent.

[bytehowl]

Well, either you can remove the noise, or you can remove your ability to hear it. Have you considered just using headphones? Computer fans are usually quiet enough that you won't even need noise-cancelling ones.

[daviddever23box]

Unless you need something today, I'd wait for the rumored AMD Phoenix-based laptops that are purported to be shipping late this year (2022) or early next year (2023); the integrated graphics are said to be pretty knockout in terms of performance, which bodes well for fanless or infrequently-running fanned designs (NVIDIA discrete graphics being a contraindication for quiet operation).

I don't have any first-hand experience with this (yet), mind you, and am unable to comment on other features :)

[jhugo]

The Intel & AMD chips with decent performance just consume too much power when delivering that decent performance to be able to be passively cooled. This is the biggest achievement of the M1 and it's likely Apple will have the lead here for a while.

[skrebbel]

Intel used to have a CPU line called the "Core m" which allowed fanless use. I had Lenovo laptop with one and i loved it. But they were hard to find then already, and i think they discontinued the line. My theory is that reviewers and benchmarkers don't care enough about "fanless" and gave them bad reviews ("slow for the price") while not highlighting the major advantage that being fanless is.

[Tagbert]

Those Core M chips were slow. That is part of why Apple eventually dropped that 12” MacBook.

Now Apple’s M-series chips combine power with low power usage and they are able to build fast and fanless devices like the M1 MacBook Air.

Intel and AMD have been focused on building for power and have been, mostly, ignoring efficiency for too long. Hopefully, Apple’s newfound success in this area has waken them to the need to address power consumption.

[theropost]

I have a Chromebook with a m3-8100y, and it is pretty good for general surfing and video. Not the fastest chip, but does the trick. I find it a big slower in RDP, but otherwise no complaints.

[replygirl]

iirc they discontinued those because most of the sales were to apple for the 12” macbook, but they still essentially make that product tier as lower power i-series

[Rastonbury]

If a user manages to get the temps high enough to throttle its going to be a very bad user experience if they aren't savvy, the device is going to be hot and slow.

My work laptop is one of those macbook air style super light Windows ones, I thought it was fanless until I watched a teardown, the fan hardly turns on and I have to put my ear to hit to hear when it does.

[diffeomorphism]

For the same reason the macbook pro, mac mini, ... have a fan.

> Is it impossible to passively cool i5, i7 (integrated graphics)?

Obviously not, but same as with the M1 in the air and in the pro: fan=more power and heat available. Add the fact that in many devices you have to try really, really hard to be even able to hear the fans adding them is a no brainer.

[microtonal]

but same as with the M1 in the air and in the pro: fan=more power and heat available

The MacBook Air M1 does not have a fan, it's passively cooled. The fan in the MacBook Pro M1 (non-Pro/Max) and Mac Mini M1 spins up very rarely.

Add the fact that in many devices you have to try really, really hard to be even able to hear

Then you have a lot of ambient noise. Everything from Intel MacBook Airs, Intel MacBook Pro 16" to Lenovo laptops make quite a bit of noise when under load (where 'load' can also mean something simple like a video call). Once you are used to a quiet machine (like an M1 Mac), it can be very annoying.

[diffeomorphism]

> The MacBook Air M1 does not have a fan, it's passively cooled. The MacBook Pro [does have one]

Yeah, that is what I said. Not sure why you are repeating that.

> Once you are used to a quiet machine (like an M1 Mac),

One with a fan or without?

> it can be very annoying

Yup, but you can simply turn that off by adjusting the fan and power. Allowing less fan usage on the M1 Pro just pushes performance down to the M1 air and makes the fan inaudible or even just off. However, you cannot go the other way: the Air is not going to magically grow a fan.

So most companies do exactly what apple does with the pro: include a fan.

[Tagbert]

“ with the M1 in the air and in the pro: fan=more power and heat available”

That statement can be interpreted to say that the Air and Pro do have fans. It’s ambiguous.

[tjoff]

It is possible, but most often not desirable.

I think most surface pro lineups had the i5 being fanless and the i7 with a fan. And that was a problem, because although the performance difference between the i5 and the i7 wasn't that great (most would not pay for the difference) the cooling differences made it night and day. And as someone who loves passive cooling I was forced to recommend the i7 just because it had a fan. (note: in latest lineup of the surface pro the i5 also has a fan, making the i5 version much more attractive for most (though now it cost as much as the i7 used to do ...))

There is a huge difference in cooling between passive and a very very slight breeze, intel/amd CPUs are a bit too hungry for it to make much sense in the medium-to-high performance CPUs. Though I feel not enough attention is being put into cooling of laptops (passive nor active), isn't a strong selling point I guess (though it should!).

[kyrra]

i5, versus i3, versus i7 matters less for fan or fanless compared to the product suffix. That's that letter at the end of the name. U, Y, K, H, etc... Which are decoded on this page: https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/processors/processor...

The letter indicate the target application, which then impacts the TDP Intel is targeting (slightly dependent on i3/i5/i7, but maybe not at all). U and Y are the big ones to look at for mobile fan vs fanless. Their definition is:

   Y: Mobile extremely low power
   U: Mobile power efficient
   H: High performance optimized for mobile

Here's the ARK link for 4 10th gen i7 with the above 3 letter (plus one desktop CPU): https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/compare.html?pro...

TDP (max power draw) based on letter:

   Y: 7 W
   U: 15 W
   H: 45 W
   KF: 125 W (unlocked, Requires discrete graphics)

[ksec]

>Is it impossible to passively cool i5, i7 (integrated graphics)?

No it is not.

Why do they not sell one? Because passively cooled x86 CPU doesn't run every fast enough (yet) which leads to poor sales number.

May be a few more years. When both IPC and node improvement catch up.

[0des]

Pixelbook was an i7 passively cooled. Worked fine for compiling and virtualization etc. Can't remember it ever throttling. Also very thin. Made of plastic and I think either magnesium or aluminum but mostly plastic.

[sys_64738]

The problem is that Intel is really sluggish without the Turbo Boost feature. You see this with Intel Mac laptops if you disable TB or you have low battery power and the system disables it. It becomes real sluggish. When Intel needs a little horse power to do anything then it heats up dramatically and this is its Achilles heel in that the ARM based Macs don't heat up at all during that initial burst of speed which probably doesn't last very long. But even on sustained throughput the heat generated by the ARM chip is very low due to using such little power.

[Daegalus]

I was in need of this a while ago. the best I found was the Surface Pro 7 with the i5. it's fanless. runs super well, I installed Linux on it.

other than that, everything else I find has weak Celerons in it.

[sseagull]

I just bought a Surface Pro 7+ with an i5 and 8gb of memory, and am really liking it. I was looking more for a tablet (with a real OS on it), but it doubles as a laptop in a pinch.

I have a more powerful desktop for heavier tasks, and this fills my portable needs very well.

(Haven’t put linux on it yet, but maybe soon. WSL is filling that void for now).

[Daegalus]

Ya I just use mine for some light nighttime coding in bed or just some browsing. Fills that void super easy.

[jhpaul]

I've run the Surface Pro 7 i5 since 2019, which replaced a SP4 i5 (though that had a fan, which I'd tuned to almost never come on). For most things it's more than enough and always silent. I sometimes point a fan at it if I'm doing something heavier or driving external displays.

For, I think, $799 with pen and keyboard its a great mobile machine and remote terminal. If I could go back in time I'd maybe spring for the 16/256gb upgrade, though that was more than double the price.

[Daegalus]

Thats what I use mine for. Being able to quietly code in bed while wife and baby is sleeping. Or just surf the web.

[jotm]

I don't think people care enough about fanless laptops, of which there are a few. And companies seem to really love penny pinching when it comes to the heatsink, which would have to be way bigger and/or better designed - that's almost out of the realm of known physics when it comes to HP, Dell and Lenovo :D

You could go "fanless" on many laptops, though. You'll have to check beforehand, but all you need is TDP adjustment (and ideally, undervolting) support and the ability to turn off the fan or adjust the speed table with something like NotebookFanControl.

For TDP/TPL/voltage adjustments, use Throttlestop on Windows; Linux also has some tools or you can write to MSRs directly after a long night of figuring them out. AMD mobile chips can not be undervolted as of right now, btw, a real shame. But neither can Intel with Plundervolt mitigations, so that's a double real shame.

A Core i7 can go up to ~20W without turning the fan on, and higher with the fan at minimum (I doubt you'll hear it). The critical temperature (=fan at full speed, overriding settings) is usually over 80 degrees Celsius, which is high enough that it may never get there.

Using better thermal paste would be highly desirable, too.

The major disadvantage is obviously performance - you'd get half of whatever the chip offers, at best.

[rektide]

Personally I think the idea of a fanless laptop is in most cases stupid: having the option to get a lot more performance from you laptop almost universally justifies having a fan (at a low price lightweight & only moderately bulky cost).

More laptops should have fanless modes, where the processor is power limited & only passive cooling is used. I believe this would be possible on many laptops. Perhaps especially gaming laptops could potentially do very well only on their passive mode while not gaming, since they have such a large focus on cooling, but given the extreme flexibility in specifying power limits for chips that's possible these days, I feel like quite a wide range could have a pretty ok passive cooling performance.

It's be wonderful if there was a good standard review process to better explore laptop noise. That seemingly is the objection to fans, yes? Rather than totalize the ask, allowing different routes to success would imo be preferred.

[thrdbndndn]

In addition to what everyone else have already said: having a fan is hardly a disadvantage for most of customers. So the demand isn't high.

[fauigerzigerk]

"Hot and noisy" is the most frequent complaint I hear about laptops (also previously about Intel MacBooks). I think OEMs are either misreading the market or they are forced to emphasise other strengths because they can no longer compete with Apple in terms of performance/watt.

[thrdbndndn]

> they can no longer compete with Apple

I think that's it, x86 isn't even close at the moment.

You said "Hot and noisy", and making it fanless would only be even hotter or, have significant performance penalty (to a point that even light users won't tolerate.)

My (Windows) ultrabook bought a few years ago could be hot and noisy (and slow) when I'm merely using browsers nowadays, can't imagine what a fanless one would do.

[AnthonBerg]

I would put it like this: Few customers have an intuition for the disadvantages of having a fan. Or the advantages of a fan-free laptop.

A fan is a big and fragile physical component with a lot of associated cost – physical size, constraints on heatsink dimensions, noise, and power.

And indeed, customers' response to Apple's fanless laptops has shown a reasonably strong economic preference for them, or it seems that way right?

[Tade0]

I don't know about Intel chips, but I have a "gaming" laptop with a Ryzen 4800HS (made with TSMC 7nm) on board that has appropriately oversized heat sinks and with the help of an alternative fan control software I was able to make it run mostly fanless after the fans developed rattle apparently connected with thermal expansion(only start to get noisy when run at low speeds after a gaming session).

With the fan off it sits at 65°C vs 55°C fan on when browsing the web and programming. It only approaches 80°C (threshold at which the fans engage) when viewing Google Maps or gaming.

I suppose I could make it run even colder if I repasted it.

In any case now that Apple isn't using TSMC's entire 5nm capacity anymore we should expect nice, fanless laptops to become more common. Lenovo recently released the X13s, which has the Snapdragon 8cx and glorious 20h+ battery life. The M1 Air is still faster, but some of us refuse to use their hardware and this device fills this niche.

[wccrawford]

I just bought a little HP laptop that has no fans. It was super cheap, too.

So what I'm hearing is that you don't want the devices that are already on the market, probably because you think they're underpowered.

If nobody is buying the existing devices, why would they make more varieties?

[davidgerard]

One of those recent Windows netbooks? How are you finding it?

(I got one and Linuxed it. The wifi was so crappy I had to compile a driver from source, for an authentic early-2000s Linux experience. Need to test 22.04. https://reddragdiva.dreamwidth.org/608064.html Love it for writing on, not so great as an actual netbook.)

[wccrawford]

I haven't used it much yet. I plan to use it to control my CNC Router and CNC laser. I had another laptop doing that, but it died, so I replaced it as cheaply as possible. But as I'm in the middle of rebuilding those things, I haven't actually had a reason to finish setting it up.

[davidgerard]

With mine I was most surprised to find that LibreOffice had somehow become comparatively lightweight and fast in the last 20 years, lol.

If you're not running a web browser with serious intent, it should be a perfectly capable little box.

[heelix]

Consider water cooling, if it is a desktop system. I've got a radiator/pump I intend to use for the next gen threadripper when it shows up. A 5950x, at stock speeds, runs without any fans needed. The heat dissipation with the large radiator is enough where the fans won't need to switch on. Combined this with a power supply video card that throttles the fan when not needed, it is absolutely silent. This was a real shocker to me how quiet my office got when my workstations were cut over to open loop systems.

My i9 mac just makes me angry, every time docker spins up. Stuck with it for a few more years as we start going into the office.

[sys_64738]

Cooling systems inevitably leaks which is why there are leak sensors in the Enterprise devices. Not sure about consumer though.

[n7pdx]

Because Intel is too incompetent to design a CPU that can perform at 1 watt, which is what it takes to run 4 cores in a fanless chassis.

[Beltalowda]

My ThinkPad x270 (i7-7600U) operates without using the fan for most things; only when compiling things for more than ~15 seconds do the fan turn on (and when opening Slack). Can probably tweak it a bit more by adjusting the limits and/or adjusting the upper CPU frequency limit, but I haven't bothered.

I do run Linux, and have a fairly light-weight environment (dwm etc.) I don't know how much that matters.

[gehsty]

The chips run too hot under normal workloads to not have a fan. Not having a fan would reduce performance and make it not worth the additional cost for the ‘faster’ chip.

My opinion is intel/amd are not incentivised to make silent / fanless designs as they are hard to market as they are not going to be the fastest. Apple are incentivised as a silent cool running computer is something people will buy.

[yzan]

For a laptop with >15 Watt peak consumption, a fan based design is easier to get working on the first attempt: maybe the fan will rotate faster than strictly necessary, but it will work.

On the other end, it generally takes a couple of iterations to get a fan-less design right, because you can't simply slap an oversized heatsink into a mobile device.

[fredgrott]

Hmm, did anyone check the assumption in his statement?

See: https://www.ofzenandcomputing.com/best-fanless-laptops/

part of the date is rechecking assumptions as sometimes we do not re-check them ourselves before posting.

[threeseed]

Some of the computers on that list do have fans though e.g. Dell XPS 9310.

Looks pretty untrustworthy in general.

[nottorp]

It's because most people are trained to prefer larger numbers (which aren't always useful) to peace and quiet.

People preferring fanless/quiet devices are a minority and devices made for them won't sell enough to justify the design costs.

Also, latest Intel CPUs can eat up to 300W for some reason.

[nwatson]

(As for your OS needs, using UTM you can run Windows 11 ARM Edition on Apple M1 MacBook Pro.)

[capableweb]

I'm not sure running a unsupported OS on a device made by a company that famously don't support any software not made by them is a great idea for a device you mainly want to be productive with. You're better off just voting with your wallet for devices that support multiple OSes.

[hulitu]

Because of crappy CPU design and marketing. I have a work laptop (HP) with a 4 cores i5. When i do some work the fan is always at maximum speed and only one core is running because of thermal throtling. And the laptop is barely usable.

[arketyp]

The Huawei Matebook X looks good to me.

I was really disappointed with the fan behavior of my Thinkpad X1 Nano -- constantly spinning, and loudly. I use third-party software to control it now. Having the fan spin for writing an email is just ridiculous.

[capableweb]

> Having the fan spin for writing an email is just ridiculous

What program are you using for writing said emails? That matters more than what user action you're performing.

As a reference, using gmail in firefox makes my X1 very loud too, but I've moved to Thunderbird as of late and it's much more careful about resource usage.

[arketyp]

I figure, basically, that I should be able to do whatever things I do on my phone without the fan spinning.

[capableweb]

Sorry, I think maybe I misunderstood or something similar. I thought we were talking about laptops that use active cooling, not smartphones with passive cooling.

[stavros]

I think the GP meant "my laptop should be able to do the same things as my phone without the laptop fan spinning".

This ignores how much more wasteful with resources developers are on the desktop, though.

[moonbug]

ah "you are using it wrong", that famously helpful reply.

[capableweb]

What? No, that's a very misleading framing of my comment...

Of course it matters what you do on a laptop when it comes to how the fans are reacting. Are you really expecting the fan to stay silent and the computer to stay cooled when compiling the Linux kernel for example?

Different workloads have impact of the thermals, it's as simple as that. Using heavy applications will make the laptop behave differently than if you use vim.

[simne]

:))))))))))

Because, to cool passively, they need huge heatsinks.

Real passive machines are in 15W limit, but commodity x86 are 25W and more.

Military notebooks are passive, but they used all their case as huge heatsink.

[bytehowl]

Does anyone know what happened with the dual piezoelectric jet coolers, which were being hyped as the Next Big Thing in electronics cooling back in ~2012?

[Koiwai]

Fans are cheaper and lighter than bulky passive cooler, it's that simple. And (almost) nobody cares.

Why are you still wondering is the real question here.

[langsoul-com]

M1 is arm, whilst Intel and amd aren't. Perhaps there'll be general laptops with arm chips that won't have fans.

[threeseed]

There is nothing inherently special about ARM that makes it use less power.

Apple simply invested a huge amount of resources and had the benefit of optimising the SOC specifically for the OS.

[fmajid]

Which is why Intel is an also-ran in mobile computing and IoT despite all the ressources it poured into it, I suppose?

The sheer amount of legacy in x86 is why those CPUs are so inefficient and require so much cooling. ARM would not have emerged if not for its superior efficiency.

[usrn]

I like fans. If you have decent fans things are cool and quiet. I wish my phone had active cooling.

[Tagbert]

Fans also kill battery life. If you have a phone with a fan, you would need frequent recharges.

[lloydatkinson]

Those underpowered Windows notebooks with 4GB of ram and 32GB MMC should be illegal. What a terrible combination due to penny pinching. Literally double both figures and it’s immediately more acceptable and usable.

[postalrat]

Because heatsinks with fans work really well.

[34679]

1 watt = ~3.4 btu

The more power any electronic device uses, the more heat it produces.

[temptemptemp111]

There are hobbyists that have been able to run Ryzens at very low power without much performance impact. If you raise this with any manufacturers, then they ignore it. Most people are on autopilot