Re: Unboxed structures (yes, again, only this time for real)

> On 19 Jan 2026, at 18:17, David McClain <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
> Yuri, would you please repeat your suggested solution?

I am afraid it would not work, sir, that solution was specific to M1 macbook Air laptops. They have a little gap between the radiator and the metal shroud that can perfectly fit a thermal pad which would transfer the heat from the SoC to the aluminium case, making it essentially a much bigger radiator.

> I have an Intel i7 iMac (desktop) computer. And it has the very annoying characteristic of throttling all the way back to 1 GHz clock whenever some majority of cores is active. And this isn’t directly related to heat, as monitored by the Intel Power Gadget. There seems to be some other aspect of runtime behavior that triggers the throttling. But it certainly becomes quite annoying.

Not sure what the throttling problem could be here, if it is not the heat. With that said, Intel macs were indeed somewhat hot, but I would imagine your iMac would have an active cooling anyway, so it should not suffer from that excessively. 

Typically though, if one see thermal throttling kicking in on a machine with active cooling, it could mean dust accumulation in the fins of the radiator (which can be cleaned out with a vacuum cleaner, or maybe a can of compressed air, although I never tried the latter). It could also mean thermal paste between the CPU and the radiator drying up, but preassembled machines are not very likely to suffer from that, I think.

Getting it serviced may be a good idea, but buying a new one could also be an option, Intel macs are a thing of the past, too hot and too underpowered (which if funny, because Apple switched to Intel in 2006 because Motorola ones were, you know, too hot and too underpowered).

_______________________________________________
Lisp Hug - the mailing list for LispWorks users
[email protected]
http://www.lispworks.com/support/lisp-hug.html