Wednesday, November 29, 2023

AirJet

Roman Loyola (via Hacker News):

Since the MacBook Air doesn’t have a fan for the SoC, its performance will throttle down during processor-intensive work to maintain a proper operating temperature. The M2 13-inch MacBook Pro, on the other hand, has a fan that expels excessive heat so the chip can keep chugging along.

The AirJet is what Frore calls a “solid-state active cooling chip” that measures 27.5 by 41.5 by 2.8 mm, a lot smaller and thinner than a typical computer fan. It’s so thin that Frore was able to take an M2 15-inch MacBook Air and fit a set of AirJet chips inside the laptop. AirJet can keep the MacBook Air temperature at a proper level so the chip doesn’t have to throttle down. Using the Cinebench R23 benchmark, an off-the-shelf M2 MacBook Air was 7 percent slower than the M2 MacBook Pro. But the modified M2 MacBook Air with an AirJet setup matched the Cinebench score of the MacBook Pro.

It’s a proof of concept, not a product.

4 Comments RSS · Twitter · Mastodon

Sébastien LeBlanc

I mean the thinness of the MacBook Air doesn't prevent it from having a fan. It's just a conscious choice from Apple, so I don't see what these AirJet solve, they are basically the same size, if not bigger than a classic fan

@Sébastien The article says it’s a lot smaller.

The cynic in me says that if they had a technology Apple would want to buy, they wouldn’t be hacking open a MacBook and putting it on YouTube. They would be being privately contracted / acquired

@Julian, yes that's my first thought too. But the CoverFlow story shows that not everything reaches the Glorious Leaders' attention. Making things public sometimes works. Unfortunately for them, the new Glorious Leader (Tim Cook) is not the old Glorious Leader (Steve Jobs) which may cause results to differ.

Leave a Comment