Two Fridays ago, I drove to a squat, single-story office building in Silicon Valley to check out a MacBook Air. There was no security guard, no identification required, not even a PR person in my demo room. That’s because he wasn’t visiting Apple headquarters for an unannounced laptop. Instead, I went to San José to see a existing MacBook: One surgically modified to demonstrate how far an exotic cooling technology has come.
Frore Systems is a startup with $116 million in funding, and I’ve shown you their first product before: the AirJet Mini is a piezoelectric cooling chip that weighs just nine grams and is thinner than two US quarters stacked together. Each nominally consumes one watt and can remove an additional 4.25 watts of heat. Here’s the question: what if Frore used those AirJets to cool a laptop that normally doesn’t have any fans?
What the company discovered (and I saw firsthand) is that Apple’s M2 chip can run faster and longer with Frore’s technology on board. Without it, a 15-inch M2 MacBook Air was like a runner who can’t run indefinitely without getting out of breath. But with three AirJet Minis, the same laptop received a permanent second wind.
Here’s the bottom line: The longer I ran an intensive test on Frore’s pair of modified and unmodded 15-inch MacBook Airs, the bigger the difference I saw.
Even during the first of a several-minute benchmark like Cinebench R23 or The shadow of the Tomb Raider, the AirJet version was slightly ahead, although perhaps within the margin of error, say, 29 frames per second with AirJet vs. 28 frames per second without AirJet. He Xcode benchmark He finished in 172.7 seconds with the AirJet versus 178.2 seconds without the first time.
But after half an hour straight The shadow of the Tomb Raider On gaming benches, scores had dropped to an unplayable 22fps on the standard Mac versus 27fps on the AirJet version. I started seeing massive stuttering on the stock Mac at the 40 minute mark, while the Frore AirJets were still running.
With Cinebench R23, a video editing benchmark, multi-core scores dropped seriously after a few repeat tests: from 8775 with AirJet to 8380 without. According to an overlay provided by Frore that I watched like a hawk, the original Mac simply couldn’t maintain the same CPU clocks. Both clock speed and power dipped at times, presumably because a fanless computer has no other good way to cool itself.
What’s happening here is pretty well understood: current processors are just as fast since they can cool down, with many “turbo” advertising modes that thinner computers can only sustain for a short time. For example: Apple’s Air can run the M2 chip at 3.2 GHz, but drops to 2.8 GHz after 30 minutes of Cinebench R23, says Frore.
But as cool as it was to see the AirJets give Apple’s M2 a second wind, I was also a little disappointed. tomb Raider Stuttering aside, we’re mostly talking about an already capable computer that simply takes a little longer to perform the most intensive tasks, with less demanding benchmarks (like single-core Cinebench, where I saw identical scores) that don’t. They stress the chip enough to make a real difference.
More importantly, we already Learn what Apple’s M2 chip can do when you add airflow to it – it’s called the 13-inch MacBook Pro!
As I reported a few years ago (back when I could ethically cover Apple products), the biggest difference between the 13-inch MacBook Pro and the 13-inch MacBook Air is literally a fan. Since then, we’ve clearly seen on our own M2 MacBook Air and MacBook Pro benchmarks that performance tends to deteriorate over 30 minutes without that fan on board.
Frore knows this and brought me a 13-inch M2 MacBook Pro to test alongside the Air, but it’s not really an apples-to-apples test when comparing them to a 15 inches MacBook Air with a wider chassis and more thermal headroom. Still, Frore’s modified 15-inch Air was practically neck-and-neck with the 13-inch Pro, rather than regularly outperforming it. (The Pro took four seconds longer to complete an Xcode run.)
But there’s a good reason Frore chose the 15-inch MacBook Air: At 0.45 inches (11.5 mm) thick, it’s one of the thinnest laptops ever made. It is not clear Apple could Place your 13-inch MacBook Pro’s fan there, or any fan, for that matter. Even Frore had to painstakingly carve 0.3mm out of the laptop’s lid to give the AirJets a large enough air gap to do their job, and the company ended up removing the speakers, Wi-Fi antenna, and even the Mac’s internal keyboard connector along the form.
But Frore did it, and engineering chief Prabhu Sathyamurthy tells me that laptops can get even thinner if they’re designed with AirJet in mind: They could reach 9.5mm thick simply by substituting a thinner keyboard and a thin OLED display. , says the company.
However, there is one thing that I did not see included in Frore’s proposal and that I was not able to test satisfactorily in the Frore offices: the all-important battery.
While Frore says each of its AirJet Mini chips requires one watt of power, I saw three of them draw more than five watts from the MacBook’s USB-C port, and the AirJet-equipped MacBook Air (obviously) drained much more faster than that of accelerated power. one without a fan did during my testing.
Mind you, Frore has made it clear from the start that its chips must be integrated into a device for them to work optimally, and the MacBook demo is anything but when it comes to power. Sathyamurthy says you can expect the AirJet part of a complete system to consume as little as 0.1W or 0.2W when idle, with the AirJet Minis staying off until they need to explode. He believes the average user will see them activate 10 to 15 percent of the time and never for “emails and web browsing.” We’re talking about a Zoom call or worse.
And when they do ring, they make it much quieter than a fan, I can confirm that. I had to crouch down next to the laptop to hear them. The modified laptop also appears a bit cooler than Apple’s fanless MacBook Air: a thermal camera showed me a wider, cooler region rather than a hotspot near the chip.
I can’t say that this demonstration has convinced me that Frore can make the fan obsolete. I mainly saw it with the performance of a fan, with less noise in a smaller space. But that could mean a lot to the right company trying to go further in portability or… please! — use those space savings for additional batteries.
I wonder if any laptop manufacturers will try this. So far, Frore’s only confirmed design win is this Zotac mini PC that will always be plugged into a wall, but has prototypes of 4K webcams, doorbell cameras, LED light bulbs, and more. Sabrent, Phison and OWC tried it Experimental AirJet-cooled SSDs. head on seems to think AirJets could fit on a Steam Deckalso.
I would love to try a battery powered system where we can completely See the AirJet way is better. And I’ll let you know as soon as I do. Frore says the AirJet Mini is now in mass production, with larger and smaller versions in development.
