Howard Oakley:

Hot Macs have their own paradox: open Activity Monitor, select the CPU view, and at the top of the CPU % list will be kernel_task hogging the CPU cores with 100% or more, rather than its usual 4% or so. Kerb any temptation to kill it and hope it goes away, as it has taken control of your Mac to let it cool.

[…]

There are rare occasions when fans blow full on and kernel_task goes wild without any thermal problem. In Intel Macs, resetting the SMC is usually curative, but this could instead be the result of a fault in a thermal sensor, or in the SMC. Hardware diagnostics should tell you more. By far the most common cause of persistent problems is dust and debris in the air ducts, and in the case of some Intel Mac notebooks overheating of the left USB-C ports. For more details, see Apple’s note about kernel_task, which also confirms what I have written here.

[…]

If your Mac is showing early signs of thermal strain and still running, encourage heat loss by immediately[…]

Paul Haddad:

It boggles my mind that the biggest software company in the world, with total control of their hardware/software stack is totally incapable of shipping an OS that doesn’t include one or more daemons who just endlessly waste CPU cycles.

Bonus irony points because dasd’s purpose is supposedly to schedule low priority background processes.

Howard Oakley:

Continuing with the results from file compression, it’s straightforward to calculate the total energy required to compress the test file using the P and E cores:

• When compressing using the ten P cores, power used was 51 W for a total of about 8.4 seconds, thus 428 J, or 43 J per core.
• When compressing using the four E cores, power used was 255 mW for a total of about 150 seconds, thus 38 J, or 10 J per core.

[…]

In omitting GPU power from Energy Impact, many power- and energy-intensive tasks will appear far less demanding than they really are. This is becoming even more important now Apple silicon chips are being used increasingly to run AI computation locally.

Neither powermetrics nor Activity Monitor provide any estimates of power or energy used by other parts of a Mac, such as memory or the internal SSD, although those can also be important determinants of battery endurance and heat generation.

Previously:

• “If You Can’t Stand By a Feature, You Shouldn’t Launch It.”
• The LG UltraFine 5K, kernel_task, and Me
• Throttling Due to Thunderbolt Left Proximity Sensor

Activity Monitor Mac macOS Tahoe 26 Power Processors

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