Everybody always talks about the massive computing power of smartphones (movies love the moon mission comparison) but still my phone rarely gets hot. (Only when I use it while charging sometimes)
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The first way chipsets can get rid of heat is simply getting hot, which heats the chassis, which dissipates the heat. The performance of phones is generally tuned to not generate more heat than the chassis can dissipate. They could crank up the performance, but then your phone would need a fan.
The new MacBook Air vs. MacBook Pro vs. Mac Mini are good examples. At certain price points they all have the same chipset, same GPUs and CPUs. The Air doesn’t have a fan, which makes it thinner and quieter. But this limits how fast the chipset can run and for how long. Really hit an Air hard with say video crunching, and it’ll soon throttle the performance of the chipset to keep the heat down because the chassis alone can’t dissipate heat fast enough.
The Pro can run that heavy load longer since it does have a fan, but it may eventually have to throttle too.
The Mini can do even better since it has a bigger fan, no throttling that I’ve heard of. But there’s a version of the Mini that can run Apple’s highest-performance chip, called the Studio. This looks like the Mini but it’s over twice as tall just to accommodate bigger heat sinks and two much bigger fans.
It’s all about balancing desired performance with the ability of the hardware to move the heat out. You just don’t need a fan at lower performance levels.
Many years ago CPUs were rather power hungry for the performance they provided. Remember, a CPU is basically a space heater that does work, so they put out a lot of heat. I remember my very old computer without a fan. It ran at about 2 MHz, but it would get warm after a while. We’ve done a lot to make CPUs much more power efficient, so we can get more and more work done while producing less heat.
For example, the first Apple-designed phone chip was the A4 13 years ago, and it put out 5W of heat. The newer A16 puts out 8W. That is more, but the phones are bigger so there’s a lot more phone chassis space available to dissipate that heat. And that’s at maximum running the two high-power high-performance cores. The A16 has four low-power cores, each of which puts out a small fraction of that heat, and each of which is much more powerful than the single core in the A4.
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