i've been paining over when is the right time to upgrade. i've got the early 2011 first gen quad mbp. the retina display, larger standard ssd, and ac wifi all make the haswells look appealing, but i can't shake the feeling that the actual processing oomph, which at the end of the day is most critical for my work, has only inched ahead the past few years.
i actually have the luxury of borrowing a work machine which is the latest model so i'm going to see how they stack up next to each other for my most common tasks (3d and after effects rendering). i'll maybe post any findings if this thread is still alive in a few hours
sounds like there are a few other people coming from the 2011s who are contemplating the upgrade as well.
to MBX, i'm curious what after effects projects you're doing. i would have expected that after effects would always throw maximum processing power behind a render and get it done quicker, rather than only use a portion of the cpu. the quad i7 should go up to 800% CPU, all cores/threads considered, so 20% makes it sound like there is a pretty severe bottleneck happening somewhere. i can't see how ram / disk speed could be an issue on the new models either. were you rendering over a network or external drive?
UPDATE:
boy was i wrong! i think i'm about sold on taking the plunge. the comparison was between:
2011 15", 2.2ghz, 16gb ram, 256 ssd (apple, not 3rd party)
2013 15", 2.0ghz, 8gb ram, 256 ssd
blender 3d cycles benchmark:
2:56 (2011) vs. 1:57 (2013)
after effects project:
3:04 (2011) vs. 2:59 (2013)
this seemed like a rather mediocre improvement, and i noticed that activity monitor reported both machines were not maxing out their cpus, so i went into AE preferences and tried turning on multiprocessing:
3:07 (2011) vs (2:09) (2013)
this was much more in line with the 3d rendering performance. i normally avoid AE multiprocessing because, as you will notice, on my current machine it tends to perform the same or worse. but the newer machine seems to really take advantage of it!
overall i was surprised to see such a noticeable real-world clock-for-clock improvement since the 2011s; the 2013 model with a slower base frequency still outpaces the old machine by almost 50%. and i'm looking at getting the 2.6ghz version, which i hope will bring even more substantial gains!
