This is my belief also. I think the driver for this refresh was the age of the 750m and probably a lack of supply of it too, given its age. They probably left it as long as they dared, waiting for intel, but it would then come down to either dropping the dGPU option or stick with Haswell.
I find the mobile GPUs a little harder to pin down, performance-wise, but, from sites like notebookcheck, the Nividia 750M and the AMD R9 M265X seem similar in both performance, and, power consumption around 35-40W. Some have mentioned GPUs like the 980M, but, that is listed at 122W, way beyond what Apples notebooks typically have supported.
Personally, I find Apple's decision to go for AMD GPU very strange. As a person who owns a late-2011 MBP which turned into a brick more than a year ago as the result of Radeongate, I'm very happy that I bought an MBP with an nVidia chip, even though the chip has become kinda outdated by now.
If I had to face a choice between the one with AMD dGPU or the one without dGPU whatsoever, I'd choose the one with internal graphics.
Never in my life will I buy anything AMD again.
I had two experiences with the Nvidia problem late 2007-mid 2008, so, I could say the same about Nvidia, but, Apple repaired both systems under AppleCare. It has happened to both companies.
I thought they would put the 980M in the retina one too - it's clearly the superior card, but they've stuck with AMD for some reason, presumably because of some engineering quirk required to deal with the 5k display that makes it non-trivial to swap GPUs right now (especially since that means redoing the whole logic board for the iMac).
It has spelled the end of the line for me on future upgrades. My current late 2012 will last a good while yet, but at the moment there's no clear upgrade path if it needs replacement before then.
I don't follow you. Apple has used both Nvidia and ATI/AMD cards, and, Intel integrated GPUs, time and again. Clearly, batter/power/heat has always been the constraint, and, Apple has never been willing to put in 100W+ GPUs and cool them, along with drastically lowering battery life.
Actually, I'm guessing you don't actually have CUDA installed or your Adobe apps would probably be freaking out.
https://forums.creativecow.net/thread/3/961633
For a long time I thought CUDA came installed, but it doesn't, it's a separate installer. So it turns out I wasn't using my CUDA cores in Premiere anyway. But I guess it turns out that was a good thing.
There's a great chance that the Adobe suite runs way better on these AMD cards with their better OpenCL performance. As a huge Adobe user, I'm thinking this could be a really good thing. Hopefully, at least.
Interesting point. Do you know of comparisons of Adobe performance using CUDA vs OpenCL on Nvidia GPUs, and, of similar vintage Radeon HD vs Nvidia cards. This would have to be in, say, a 2009-ish Mac Pro with either AMD Radeon or Nvidia, since those boxes support both. I have no reference as to whether CUDA is more efficient than OpenCL, at least on Nvidia cards.