Surfacegate: Microsoft execs 'misled Nadella', claims report Veteran Microsoft-watcher Paul Thurrott has made the sensational allegation that Microsoft's senior management "misled" their CEO about the cause of serious launch issues with its flagship Surface Pro 4 PC. Microsoft defended the reliability of the Surface range after Consumer Reports withdrew its Buy recommendation last week …
...to hear about "thermal issues" on the Surface Pro 4
The right hand side of my i5 Surface Pro 3 used to get too hot to hold when doing anything other than web browsing (when the processor was clocked down to 700MHz or something like that).
I very much doubt this was an Intel fail
I very much doubt this was an Intel fail
I doubt it also, look at the Apple MacBooks, years, upon years, upon years of service ... I do remember the last generation of G4 Powerbooks getting pretty hot, but that was IBM's fault, back then ...
Seriously, I understand fanboyism, to a certain extent, however, we are talking Microsoft, here ... I mean, how on earth can you possibly be a Microsoft fanboy ? Must have come from another planet ...
If MacBooks are over-priced, what is this crap ? Remember, Apple has been shipping Powerbooks/MacBook[Pro]s for nearly two decades that have been thinner than any competing laptop, thinner for the first decade that was, yet Apple never experienced anything like this ... these MS toys are heavily overpriced !!!!!
DON'T BUY laptops with soldered RAM/SSD, just don't be silly (funnily enough, both Apple and MS are doin' it) ... Maybe it is as simple as: "Anybody stupid enough to pay 10 times more for the kit will be more than happy to renew the purchase after two years!" Worse, with Apple, you at least get a decent UNIX system .... just saying ...
"I mean, how on earth can you possibly be a Microsoft fanboy ? Must have come from another planet ..."
Maybe if Microsoft are paying for all your kids to go through Private Education, you might be.
"DON'T BUY laptops with soldered RAM/SSD"
Any Pro User needs to really ram this one home, that any laptop with soldered SSD is a f'nightmare if you drop your laptop out of the overhead locker on a plane. (Yes, being there). What should be a day without a laptop, ends up 10 days minimum, be warned, (and you're lucky if you get the data back intact).
It's fairly obvious by doing this , these companies are no longer looking out for their users, but ony their bottom line. SSDs should NEVER be soldered, and should always be a standard interface.
Well yes but in reality the movement is in the opposite direction, it's just a matter of time until SSDs are no longer a separate item but are an integral part of the motherboard, at least for lappies and tabbies where space is a premium.
Not endorsing this, much the opposite but I am making a firm prediction.
This would be true if you're looking at the overall price of the component and the price of the SSD.
As SSDs become cheaper, you'll start to see this because it will reduce the cost of the component.
If you have a tablet, do you really need 128GB or more of flash storage?
Not for today's use cases, but in 5 years time, who knows. The point is that if the cost of the flash chips drops, and the price of the component drops to a reasonable point where its cheaper to replace than to fix... you'll see it.
I mean if you drop and crack your screen on your iPhone and the cost to repair it is 25% of the cost of the phone or the cost of the upgrade to a later model... you have to consider which is a better choice. (Once a phone is broken, even repaired, its never the same. Of course, YMMV.
But you get the idea.
If they include an m.2 slot. Then it can come with a small but reasonable size to cover basic uses, and allow those who want more storage to install as many terabytes as they can afford and those who want more reliability can add a second one for mirroring.
m.2 slots take up very little space, there's very little argument that the room for it can't be spared.
This would even be a possible upsell for Intel - sell CPUs with say 256GB of NAND stacked on the package. The performance of that could be pretty impressive since it wouldn't be limited by interfaces like SATA or PCIe.
"As SSDs become cheaper, you'll start to see this because it will reduce the cost of the component."
Looking at the SSD as a component might be the wrong way of looking at it. Consider a personal computer as a data store with some access components wrapped round it.
kind of. It doesn't have systemd at the very least. Other than that there were better, lighter and thinner notebooks from Sony.
- "Apple has been shipping Powerbooks/MacBook[Pro]s for nearly two decades that have been thinner than any competing laptop, thinner for the first decade that was"
- "You know nothing, Jon Snow"
:)
Maybe, just maybe ... with a large team of people working on it some people lower down genuinely believed the overheating issue was an Intel chip problem? Maybe the senior management had been told that and then told Nadella?
Maybe the issue is that when the truth was finally uncovered no one then had the balls to let Nadella know that it was their cockup and so it wasn't actually a lie it's just the truth was withheld?
Purely because someone somewhere in any other company in the world that uses skylake would be calling foul on their laptops? Or did no other make use them? Where are the lenovo help forums crying foul or the Dell ones etc?
And MS are so open and trust worthy now who could possibly suggest... Actually I can't finish that sentence.
Could it just be that Intel's documentation was wrong? MS assume a certain amount of heat needs to be lost, design for that, but then get overheating when the chips run hotter than claimed. Wouldn't affect larger designs.
Just a though, no evidence or opinion either way.
@AMBxx:"Could it just be that Intel's documentation was wrong?"
I don't think any other manufacturer was having the same problem, so probably not.
If Thurrott is correct in that Microsoft wrongly pointed the finger of blame at Intel, their lawyers might have a defamation case to contend with if Intel can show a loss as a result of the statement.
Could it just be that Intel's documentation was wrong?
Highly unlikely: for years (since the Pentium 4, I think) Intel has had hardware thermal cutouts built into its chips because, as a hardware manufacturer, Intel understands the costs of product recall, both of having to provide replacement equipment and in regaining trust. Intel also regularly provides well-documented reference boards.
I was overclocking (overcooking) an old Xeon cpu I'd patched for a 775 motherboard. The performance actually went *down* as I took the speed past 3.4 GHz. At first it was significantly faster but as the temperature approached 100C it must have been thermal throttling, it never went higher than 98C.
I could not kill this chip, it protected itself. Nore did the computer crash at these settings.
Decent cooling would allow me to keep performance at high loads and even quite high temperatures.
Could it just be that Intel's documentation was wrong? MS assume a certain amount of heat needs to be lost, design for that, but then get overheating when the chips run hotter than claimed. Wouldn't affect larger designs.
Let me work this one out ....
So, SP4 design team shit something together that follows Intel's guidelines nicely, they then order 10 000 units from China and start selling them directly .... ala who needs prototypes, alpha and beta testers if the Windows 10 users are more than happy to do the dirty work ?
I hesitated between Trump and Joke icon ... this post is sad, let's go with Donald.
"...Could it just be that Intel's documentation was wrong? ..."
Nah. The chipset has been in use fairly widely with no issues on the radar. MS has always been a crew that "know better." It has bitten them before. It will again. I am still at loss about the point of using a "fondle slab." I like my desktop.
it's a fair bet that the hardware design includes things like board layout, heat sinking, and some means of getting that heat out of the CPU [and other components] and into something else [like the surrounding air] that doesn't cause blisters on the user's various body parts.
So yeah, I'd kinda blame THAT. And I bet that was Microsoft's own in house design, too.
Maybe they need to subcontract to Lenovo or Acer or Dell to get it right...
May I point out that MS had the same inability to read a thermal spec issue with the Xbox 360 and the RRoD? Which is why they had to go to IBM's more expensive SOI process to move the processor temperature down. (Not that it was totally MS's fault, but they should have done a better transition to lead-less solder like most other companies did.)
I would suggest there may be a lack of attention to thermal engineering in the MS hardware department and too-slavish deference to design engineering. A failure in one flagship product is understandable, but not learning from it speaks volumes about the culture in MS's hardware division.
The cause isn't the thermals, but the weird stuff MS did with custom drivers and the like (and to be fair, some of the hardware like the Surface Book's removable GPU probably need non-standard drivers and firmware). This means that when OEM drivers and firmware were updated, it took MS longer to get patches out than it took Lenovo et al.
Apple has always being very clever in the way it 'reports' the current Battery State/Charge. Apple work on the basis that after 1000 full cycles of the battery you should still get 80% of it's charge, compared to new.
I'm pretty sure Apple's Li-ion batteries themselves degrades much faster, but clever software programming by Apple gives this appearance, i.e. initially there is more capacity available than stated, and after 1000 cycles, this "reserve" is gradually added to the reported 'mix', to make it appear the battery is more resilient that it actually is.
It's a tweak Apple worked out over time, with thorough testing of the device.
Now take Microsoft, the Surface Pro 3 / Surface Pro 4 are very different to the iPad, in that these are normal high wattage Intel Processors, they have a much higher current drain / recharge rate compared to an iPad. I think Microsoft firstly didn't allow any software "reserve" and secondly, underestimated the shear damage 1000 cycles of high drain / quick charge rate would have on the battery itself, due to this high current drain.
The so called software firmware fix was never going to genuinely fix the dying batteries in the Surface Pro 3/4. It was the physical stress on the batteries doing the damage. Surface Pros have a 3-4 (more like 2-3) shelf life at most, because of this and people need to thoroughly understand that before purchasing.
Second, when Intel came up with Skylake they added new Sleep / Power efficency states. This relates to similar problems Linux has in interpreting this information from the processor / 'southbridge' io chipset/system bios. It takes a bit of jiggery to get it right. It relates to the low level commands of the ACPI (Advanced Power and Configuration Interface) co-developed by Hewlett-Packard, Intel, Microsoft, Phoenix, and Toshiba.
The ACPI Interface/code is inherently buggy, but over the years Manufacturer like HP, Lenovo has learnt the workarounds in order to prevent the battery charging problems, while Microsoft obviously have some skill in implementing the next layer (drivers) between the OS and the hardware, I think they were inexperienced in the ACPI layer between the hardware and the Processor, and how this is presented then to the OS.
I genuinely think most of Microsoft woes were related to Microsoft and not Intel, Intel added new sleep/Power States with Skylake and Microsoft rushed out the device based on older interpretations of those sleep/Power states for their implementation of the ACPI/Hardware.
I'd blame Microsoft, no Intel. That's my take.
Intel may have failed to document those Power States properly, but that would be unlike Intel. I think the info was there, Microsoft failed to read it, implement/test those new Power States, it's implementation of the ACPI for the Surface Range thoroughly.
I think Panos Panay may be the fall-guy for this, if they can afford to lose him. He seems very much the man that would try and cover up an issue than ever declare he made an honest mistake.
"I'm pretty sure Apple's Li-ion batteries themselves degrades much faster, but clever software programming by Apple gives this appearance, i.e. initially there is more capacity available than stated, and after 1000 cycles, this "reserve" is gradually added to the reported 'mix', to make it appear the battery is more resilient that it actually is."
Possibly true. Doesn't really matter how they do it though, all Joe Q User cares about is that their Macbook runs for 10 hours (or whatever) when new, and is still delivering 8+ hours 2 years on. 'True' battery capacity is irrelevant as long as the user can rely on a certain quantified benefit.
Possibly true. Doesn't really matter how they do it though, all Joe Q User cares about is that their Macbook runs for 10 hours (or whatever) when new, and is still delivering 8+ hours 2 years on. 'True' battery capacity is irrelevant as long as the user can rely on a certain quantified benefit.
That was my point. Apple give you a battery that you perceive to be operating much better than would be expected over it's lifetime. The user experience is better overall by using clever 'deceptve techniques'.
Ever heard of thermal runaway throttle w Apple? CPU goes up to 350% "usage" or so. This is because the machine is perceiving overheating (among other spots - in your battery) and doesn't want to catch fire. So, at avery low level the CPU pretends to be hyper busy so that whatever program is causing the real heavy use that's causing heat buildup can't get CPU cycles.
With me so far?
Now, physically take out or disconnect an MBPs battery and the system doesn't see its heat sensor anymore. So it happily _assumes_ overheating from that _absent_ sensor in your equally _absent_ battery.
CPU throttle to the rescue of your overheating battery and you can't use your machine just plugged in until you get a new battery. Been there.
So... let's not go overboard in Apple praise on this particular subject, even to rag on MS, shall we?
Flame, cuz.
"Ever heard of thermal runaway throttle w Apple? CPU goes up to 350% "usage" or so..."
Google sez this was a couple of people back in 2008 wondering if their MBA was throttling because they were having trouble running Minecraft or something.
Not the world's most dramatic smoking gun, if I'm honest.
This post has been deleted by its author
>Google sez this was a couple of people back in 2008 wondering if their MBA
Nope, April 2017 with trip to Genius bar where this exact thing was shown to happen on my, 2011, machine. The tech there and I talked it out and this was exactly what was happening. From the sounds of it, this is largely something that is decided in the low level OS/firmware, not just the hardware - the mac was aware it had no battery and still did just that.
But don't let get that get in the way of being a good fanboi ;-)
I rather like Apple hardware, and even more so the OS. Yes, it's pricey and is not perfect by any means, just better than a lot of alternatives (unless you have the mojo to tweak Linux on exotic hardware, which I don't). And it's impressive that a 6 year old machine still mostly runs smoothly and effectively. But I effin hate being lumped in with the fanboi brigade in the reality distortion field.
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/how-to-solve-kernel_task-high-cpu-usage.1706948/
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
