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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

>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.

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?

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

1 watt = ~3.4 btu

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

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.

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 :)

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.

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.