Help Me Compare to a New MacBook Pro i7

[Josh Kahane]

Hi

I currently have a PC custom built, very fast. It has an i7 930 processor and I was wondering, is the i7 in the Macbook Pro essentially the same? Or is it very different?

So basically will I see a big performance difference between my PC and an i7 macbook pro (same RAM in each)?

Thanks.

 

[Josh Kahane]

Thinking about it, this is a better way of asking:

What i7 chip is in the Macbook Pro? How does that chip compare to the i7 930 performance wise?

 

[mrv9292]

The i7 in the macbook pro is not a quad core processor like your desktop computer. It is a dual core with hyper threading I think. I'm not sure of the model number, but if you want a laptop that has osx its as good as you'll get.

 

[moel]

The 930 is a 4 core desktop processor


The chip inside the mbp, is a 2 core (4 virtual cores) processor. It would be somewhere between 1/2 to 2/3rds as fast as your pc. However we've yet to really see it fly as us pro's are waiting for 64 bit FCS.

 

[Josh Kahane]

Ok thanks guys for that. Really helpful.

On a side note, I have heard that the i7 is barley faster than the i5, true? Or worth the extra money?

 

[Glumpfner]

My biggest concern between Laptop and Desktop Computers is always the heat. My 2.8 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo in my MacBook Pro gets already so damn hot I can't have it on my lap when watching HD YouTube videos, I would literately burn myself.

 

[Mirabella]

My biggest concern between Laptop and Desktop Computers is always the heat. My 2.8 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo in my MacBook Pro gets already so damn hot I can't have it on my lap when watching HD YouTube videos, I would literately burn myself.

My 2010 2.66 i7 MBP is rather cooler than my 2006 2.16 Core Duo MBP.

 

[dusk007]

Depending on what you do and if it doesn't benefit too much from 4 cores the difference running stock speed isn't too big.

A list of what cripple the Arrendale i7 compared to the Desktop Bloomfield:

• you cannot overclock (stuck with default values)

• Bloomfield as an integrated Memory controller - Arrendale has one on a sperate chip with worse Latency than old C2D-FSB tech. easily 10% worse per clock per core maybe more

• Bloomfield has 3 64bit memory controllers but that doesn't make much of a difference as it has to feed 4 cores

• Bloomfield has more cores. 100%+ difference depending on how multithreaded stuff is

• Bloomfield has a faster uncore but that hardly makes a significant difference

Arrendale advantage:

• it has a better Turbo. 2.83Ghz max with 2 cores which is essentially the same and 3.33 Ghz single core. Bloomfields Turbo is much less aggressive.

• It has a advanced Westmere core with AES support. AES is nice if you need it, but the IPC (instrucions per clock) is more crippled by the memory controller than what the slight changes can make up.

I guess a corei7 Arrendale 2.66Ghz is about 45%-100% of the speed of your 930 Bloomfield, not considering that you can overclock the Bloomfield to probably something close to 4Ghz.