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Happy with my late 2011 2.5Ghz Macbook pro with hi res non glossy screen.

I think the new design is beautiful, if thinness is your thing but not practical for me. I travel around a fair bit and use the optical drive often, and I like the bigger screen real estate of the high res screen, despite the lower resolution.

I'm not keen on the soldered on parts and the price.....I think this design Macbook Pro will go through a few nominal iterations which will undo things like glued in batteries etc. Also hopefully the price will come down and the resolution will improve to allow for more screen real estate.
 
Does anyone know what configurations the Apple store is stocking of the new Macbook Airs?
 
(4*2.3 GHz)/(2*2.0 GHz)=2.3

(4*2.6 GHz)/(2*2.0 GHz)=2.6

Not sure what you are trying to say. But intel was saying ivy bridge was 20% to 30% fater than sandy bridge.

Like others here doing benchmarks confirm the new CPU's are 20% faster than last year CPU's .

In the Apple keynotes not the CPU but the video part of it Apple say the video card is 60% faster than last year video card.Not sure if people have done benchmarks to confirm this.


It is myth every 18 month CPU double in speed. It every 18 month CPU transistors double thus getting smaller.

It more like CPU double every 3 years than the 18 month myth.
 
I'm not sure why this is hard to understand. Both the new Air and the new Pro have Ivy Bridge (so your first statement below makes no sense). Given the clock rate of the processors in the Pro, together with the fact that they are quad core, the computer should be 2.3-2.6 times faster than the Air in applications that use all the cores (see trivial math above). However in reality the Pros are a measly 1.5 times faster. So I'm simply asking why the quad cores scale so extremely poorly, making the Pro only slightly faster than the much lighter and slimmer Air.

Not sure what you are trying to say. But intel was saying ivy bridge was 20% to 30% fater than sandy bridge.

Like others here doing benchmarks confirm the new CPU's are 20% faster than last year CPU's .

In the Apple keynotes not the CPU but the video part of it Apple say the video card is 60% faster than last year video card.Not sure if people have done benchmarks to confirm this.


It is myth every 18 month CPU double in speed. It every 18 month CPU transistors double thus getting smaller.

It more like CPU double every 3 years than the 18 month myth.
 
Always the base models with no CTOs.

Actually, they usually have a couple CTO configs in stock. I picked up a 13" 2.0/512/8gb last night. Thought I wanted a retina book, but after fondl ing it a bit, it is still too big and heavy. I have done the 15&17 fastest mbp thing in the past, but after having used the 13" air for the past months, I could never go back to a 15". I got the new air for the extra ram, storage, and USB3. I can do the really heavy stuff on my 3.4 iMac. The Air is "fast enough" on the road.

Oh, Moore's law started to fall apart a few years ago. Processor improvements have move to incremental updates rather than revolutionary changes. Biggest development goals are reducing power draw these days.
 
The static benchmarks look great, but will a 1~2 FPS improvement matter? Or 4 seconds off a render? Real-life benchmarks will always mean more; static benchmarks are usually better for marketing purposes... not wrongly so...

I wouldn't use static benchmark results as the main selling point (think 'Retina' as being the awesome deal-maker here) as I've still yet to find temperature benchmarks and if the computer throttles over time due to temperature concerns or due to voltage being insufficient (notebookcheck.com found the 2011 models throttled under either condition, but to be fair Ivy Bridge is made with a smaller process and likely requires less electricity to run at, while producing less heat...)
 
The computer still takes that long to think, except today, it has analyzed, classified and created paths for every possible outcome until the end of the game, written it out to a relational database, indexed all the data and created lookup table queries to always select the best path where the outcome is a better chance for it to win.

The DOS computer in that same time had figured out about 2 moves ahead for 3 key pieces.

Moore's law, ain't it grand ? :D

One of my Comp Sci teachers actually went over Moore's law this year, I've never actually thought of how it would work for chess though :)

On a side note, it's nice to be able to come to a forum where everyone has so much knowledge to share. I have yet to be let down by the amount of cool topics people bring up!
 
Sloppy graphic

Has anybody noticed how inconsistent the scale is in the bar graph? The 2.0GHz Air and 1.8GHz Air appear to have very different performance based on the bar in the graph but in fact the difference is less than 100 pts.

I don't know about you all, but this kind of mistake makes me seriously question the integrity of these benchmarks. Is the bar wrong or is the number wrong? I would assume the bar is wrong but then why does the 2.0 processor perform within the margin of error of the chip that costs 90 dollars less!?!
 
Why more cycles doesn't mean faster performance.

macbook123, you are completely right to ask this question. Check out the benchmark of the CPU (as opposed to the system benchmark) here: http://www.cpubenchmark.net/high_end_cpus.html

Based on CPUBenchmark, you might expect as much as a 4x difference in performance. Alas, the gains are only marginal for most common computing jobs. This is because most jobs require synchronous execution. This means that a super hefty job can't just be divided up into smaller jobs and allocated to different cores/threads. They have to be executed in order.

Note: it is extremely hard to write good code to take advantage of all the cores/threads on a CPU.

But let me just anticipate your next question: why would one buy the super-powered MBPs? Let's say you are encoding video or running a compiler. These jobs can be effectively divided into asynchronous jobs and take advantage of the multiprocessing environment (as many as 8 concurrent jobs!!!).

Hope this helps. I'm personally struggling with whether I can justify the MBP over Air and I'm a graphics designer/hacker!

I'm not sure why this is hard to understand. Both the new Air and the new Pro have Ivy Bridge (so your first statement below makes no sense). Given the clock rate of the processors in the Pro, together with the fact that they are quad core, the computer should be 2.3-2.6 times faster than the Air in applications that use all the cores (see trivial math above). However in reality the Pros are a measly 1.5 times faster. So I'm simply asking why the quad cores scale so extremely poorly, making the Pro only slightly faster than the much lighter and slimmer Air.
 
My geek bench 32 bit score is around 6000 consistently when it should be around 10000 to 12000 per the geekbench benchmarks overall. I have a 2.6/8/512. I've run Apple Hardware Test, ClamXAV, and BlackMagic, and all of those tests come out normal: no malware or hardware problems. BlackMagic shows my SSD speed to be around 400 to 450 which seems to be what most retina users are getting. I've turned off graphic switching.

Any ideas?
 

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Try turning down the resolution and see if that affects it. I read a report that UI rendering with the MBP Retina on complex pages can throttle performance.

Report back!

My geek bench 32 bit score is around 6000 consistently when it should be around 10000 to 12000 per the geekbench benchmarks overall. I have a 2.6/8/512. I've run Apple Hardware Test, ClamXAV, and BlackMagic, and all of those tests come out normal: no malware or hardware problems. BlackMagic shows my SSD speed to be around 400 to 450 which seems to be what most retina users are getting. I've turned off graphic switching.

Any ideas?
 
Try turning down the resolution and see if that affects it. I read a report that UI rendering with the MBP Retina on complex pages can throttle performance.

Report back!

Thanks for the info! Apparently, my initial download of the update didn't get installed because when I tried Software Updates again, there was the retina Macbook Pro update. I'm now getting around 11000 on my Geekbench score. :)

Thanks again for the suggestion!
 
Nice!

What did you update?

Thanks for the info! Apparently, my initial download of the update didn't get installed because when I tried Software Updates again, there was the retina Macbook Pro update. I'm now getting around 11000 on my Geekbench score. :)

Thanks again for the suggestion!
 
Nice!

What did you update?

There's an update specifically for the retina Macbook Pros that you get when you choose Software Update in the Apple Menu. I thought that I had installed it previously, but I either didn't, or I interrupted the installation. It's all good, now! :)
 
Upgrading from 1.8 (i5) to 2.0 (i7) costs $100, which is about 4.7% of the cost of the MBA 13" (i5) fully configured. For that you get a 1.3% increase in gb score.

I don't like that math.


Actually, it's a 13% speed increase. For a 6.7% price increment.

Like the math better now?
 
Virtualization

From a virtualization perspective, 16GB RAM and the 2.7GHz Quad-core Intel Core i7 with 8MB shared L3 cache is worth the extra $$$... to me. :)
 
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