[dijit]

Apple always shipped their chips with "configurable power down" when it was available, which isn't available on higher specced chips like the i7/i9 - though they didn't disable boost clocks as far as I know.

The major pains for Apple was when the thermal situation was so bad that CPUs were performing below base clock. -- at that point i7's were outperforming i9's because they were underclocking themselves due to thermal exhaustion; which feels too weird to be true.

[senttoschool]

That's not Apple. That's Intel. Intel's 14nm chips were so hot and bad that they had to be underclocked. Every laptop maker had to underclock Intel laptop chips - even today. The chips can only maintain peak performance for seconds.

[MichaelZuo]

Can you elaborate?

My 2019 macbook pro 15 with the i9-9880H can maintain the stock 2.3GHz clock on all cores indefinitely, even with the iGPU active.