@Thraktor @LiC If it's really on 4N and the node is 'good enough' to get the power consumption and heat in portable mode under control, then why would they need a fan in docked mode unless they're going to clock this thing all the way up?
I don't think fans really tell us much about what node it would be on, without knowing what clock speeds they'll use. The same cooling could be required for an 8nm chip at modest clocks, or a 4nm chip at high clocks.
The whole fan-in-the-dock thing is a little weird to me, though. I don't think there's any sense in adding a second fan in the dock to provide extra cooling while docked. There's two scenarios in which that could be intended to work. The first is just blowing air against the console's case, which would likely be very ineffective.
The second is pushing air through a channel into the console, over the heatsink. This would result in something called a push-pull configuration, where one fan pushes air onto the heatsink from one side, and the other fan pulls air out. This is common enough in PC cooling setups, and was used by Nintendo on the Gamecube, but in those cases standard PC-style fans are used, where the airflow is all in one direction. Here we're talking about blower fans, which use centrifugal force to push air out at a right angle to the direction it's come in. I've never seen a push-pull setup using blower fans, and I don't think it would provide any benefit over a single fan design, because of the way blower fans work.
One possibility is that there's no fan in the console at all. If the system was efficient enough in portable mode to run without active cooling, then you could design it with a heatsink, and a channel through the console which allows air to flow over the heatsink. When docked, a fan in the dock could be designed in such a way to push air through that channel and over the heatsink. This would provide some benefit, as removing the fan from the console would cut down on size and weight. However, it would require the console to run passively in portable mode, which I think is unlikely even for 4nm, and the fan in the dock would be less efficient than one in the console, because air would escape between the dock and console.
If there are two fans, one in the console and one in the dock, then I think the simplest explanation is that they're meant for cooling different things. The one in the console would cool the console's hardware, and the one in the dock would cool the dock's hardware. Of course, that leads to the question of what would require cooling in the dock, as nothing in the current dock requires active cooling. Maybe some of the hardware changes have pushed the dock just over the edge to require active cooling (eg perhaps the new DisplayPort to HDMI converter generates more heat than the old now that it will be pushing more pixels). Or, perhaps there's something else in the dock that we're not aware of.
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... perhaps on a later date.
