Yea it's especially common when running external monitors. The conspiracy-minded...

awill · on Oct 18, 2021

Using any external monitor requires turning on the discrete GPU. I'm sure that's a large part of the problem.

muro · on Oct 18, 2021

Why would that be required? The embedded GPU should be good enough for many things.

cassianoleal · on Oct 18, 2021

Poor drivers. The same reason why the discrete GPU pulls around 20W just for being on with an external screen, even if the screen is black. Apparently not an issue:

    * in clamshell mode;
    * on Windows via BootCamp.

According to some reports in the MacRumours forum [0] this is fixed in Monterey.

[0] https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/16-is-hot-noisy-with-an...

Edit: Not quite a fix. Apparently they introduced a Low Power Mode that helps bring wattage and temps down by essentially preemptively throttling CPU and GPU or something like that.

Aeolun · on Oct 19, 2021

> by essentially preemptively throttling CPU and GPU

Not really a fix then. That may prevent hurting your machine but it’s still not running at optimal performance.

cassianoleal · on Oct 19, 2021

Indeed. I disable turbo boost on my 16". It hurts peak performance but runs (slightly) cooler and quieter, and sustains for longer. This reads all kinds of wrong.