2013 MacBook Air Benchmarks Show Slightly Slower CPUs, Faster SSD

[Brandon263]

Anand Shimpi got his hands on one of the new MacBook Airs and ran some preliminary benchmarks:

- Battery capacity has not changed

- The chip Apple is using in the new MacBook Airs is the Core i5-4250U

- The 3D rendering performance of the new CPUs is similar to the performance of the 2012 model, but the 2012 model runs slightly faster on multi threaded tasks

Base 2013 13 inch Cinebench Single Threaded Benchmark = 1.11
Base 2012 13 inch Cinebench Single Threaded Benchmark = 1.11

Base 2013 13 inch Cinebench Multi Threaded Benchmark = 2.46
Base 2012 13 inch Cinebench Multi Threaded Benchmark = 2.65

- The SSDs are substantially faster than the SSDs on the previous model

2013 MacBook Air SSD (Samsung) Peak Sequential Read Performance = 793.831 MB/s
2012 MacBook Air SSD (Samsung) Peak Sequential Read Performance = 407.5 MB/s

2013 MacBook Air SSD (Samsung) Peak Sequential Write Performance = 767.488 MB/s
2012 MacBook Air SSD (Samsung) Peak Sequential Write Performance = 372.6 MB/s

http://www.anandtech.com/show/7058/2013-macbook-air-pcie-ssd-and-haswell-ult-inside

http://www.anandtech.com/show/6063/macbook-air-13inch-mid-2012-review

 

[theSeb]

The SSD speed increase is mainly due to this:

On the storage front, Apple officially leads the charge with the move to PCIe based SSDs. The upcoming Mac Pro, as well as the new MacBook Airs both use PCIe based SSDs instead of SATA drives. A quick look at OS X's system profiler reveals a PCIe 2.0 x2 interface, capable of 1GB/s in each direction.

Good news, but I am disappointed that the screen was not updated, so I won't be updating mine.

 

[RightMACatU]

45% increase in SSD performance... the freaking machine will have booted before I even hit the power button

 

[DisplacedMic]

45% increase in SSD performance... the freaking machine will have booted before I even hit the power button

haha, yeah

 

[cirus]

45% increase in SSD performance... the freaking machine will have booted before I even hit the power button

Probably won't notice any difference.

Really hard to tell the difference between sata 2 and sata 3 drives.

Probably limited by CPU on bootup anyway.

 

[NutsNGum]

Probably won't notice any difference.

Really hard to tell the difference between sata 2 and sata 3 drives.

Probably limited by CPU on bootup anyway.

No. No. And indeed. No.

 

[JVlasy]

Battery life and SSD performance update

It is clear that apple has chosen "weaker" processors that are on par with 2012 models so the performance stays pretty much the same but the battery life gets much better and because SSDs are getting better all the time they updated them as well. Similar to late 2010 model with Nvidia and 2011 with HD3000 the GPU performance didn't get any better for many was even worts but battery life got better.


-My €0.02

 

[Chub]

Probably won't notice any difference.

Really hard to tell the difference between sata 2 and sata 3 drives.

Probably limited by CPU on bootup anyway.

I think the SSD in question uses a PCIe interface simply because 800mb/s is not achievable with sata 3, however I read somewhere that this has been confirmed. Anyhow it is true that real world performance won't be greatly affected and yet I doubt many of us will be use the full speed of that SSD most of the time anyway.

Again the CPU does often affect boot time and although a lot of you believe the CPUs in here to be fast they are pretty slow coming from a 3930K

 

[The-Pro]

Again the CPU does often affect boot time and although a lot of you believe the CPUs in here to be fast they are pretty slow coming from a 3930K

Of course in comparison to that they are slow. But for 90% of the people the i-series cpus are too fast. Most people never use more then 2 cores as most people just browse the web, work on word documents and watch videos.
A C2D is plenty for nearly everybody.

 

[whtrbt7]

Perceived speed of the new 2013 units will be faster by probably 10-15%. PCIe flash storage doesn't have SATA bottlenecks and the new graphics processing is better even though it's ULV. We're almost up to streamlined main board/SoC design which a lot of Windows based machines have been trying for years. I wouldn't say the Haswell SoCs are "weaker", they are just really different in terms of what they do. They are trying to balance better performance overall with better battery life which is necessary for SoC designs going into "ultra book" or ultra mobile notebooks.

 

[lixuelai]

I highly doubt you will notice the SSD gain. Going from SATA2 to SATA3 SSD was already a wash.

 

[cirus]

No. No. And indeed. No.

Um really yes.

Can't really see the difference between sata 2 and sata 3 in real world tasks.

Basically no difference between sata 2 and sata 3 ssd. You are not going to see an observable difference with 800 MB/sec sequential vs 500 MB/sec. (Random will be the same because that's not sata limited).

 

[raftr]

I highly doubt you will notice the SSD gain. Going from SATA2 to SATA3 SSD was already a wash.

The speed difference seems fairly negligible so far. It's the battery life where I hope to see an improvement. I don't think my 2012 i7 2.0 ever went past 5 hours on one charge.

 

[mattferg]

It is clear that apple has chosen "weaker" processors that are on par with 2012 models so the performance stays pretty much the same but the battery life gets much better and because SSDs are getting better all the time they updated them as well. Similar to late 2010 model with Nvidia and 2011 with HD3000 the GPU performance didn't get any better for many was even worts but battery life got better.


-My €0.02

No, they chose a better GPU/CPU combo. The processors are the same range but are underclocked so the 5000 graphics doesn't destroy power consumption.