Building an ARM64 laptop

Fanless or not, most modern SoCs support peak performance that cannot be sustained over long periods of time and has to be throttled down eventually for thermal reasons. Simply because not all but many many jobs are short, so why not complete them faster and sooner.

> But none of them should burn the user unless the device is incompetently designed.

I think "burn" was meant metaphorically :-) The only thing I meant is: when there's no fan (no convection) then the only way the heat can be dissipated is through the case (conduction). The main article seems to have it backwards; maybe because it was trying to make a... "different" point about performance per watt.

You're being a bit harsh with "incompetently": it takes a lot of complex engineering to extract the most power from a SoC, especially a fanless one, while staying right at the limit before users feel uncomfortable and complain. Example:
https://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/2-in-1-tablet-m...