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Uh what? The MBA is also several hundred dollars cheaper, much thinner, lighter and runs much cooler and quieter. For those who don't need the retina screen or anything else the rMBP offers above and beyond the MBA, why would they spend the extra cash? Makes no sense.

That's because the poster you are responding to habitually has great difficulty seeing the relevance of the needs of anyone else but himself. Make sense now?
 
External Thunderbolt 2 graphics card for the gamers maybe?

I'm a graphics professional and the only reason I've ever turned on the dedicated graphics in my Pro was for the odd game.
 
External Thunderbolt 2 graphics card for the gamers maybe?

I'm a graphics professional and the only reason I've ever turned on the dedicated graphics in my Pro was for the odd game.

The external GPU sounds very interesting, but this guy claims that it's impossible to get anything high-end connected by Thunderbolt 1 or 2: http://forums.creativecow.net/thread/378/2912
I don't know what the real situation is. I've seen conflicting analysis on this. I hope that it will work just because I want to see a tiny little 11" MacBook Air running desktop-level graphics processing with this just for the heck of it.
 
Bye, bye discrete gfx.
To justify the 'Pro' bit in the name I seriously hope that the benchmarks for the new integrated gfx are off the charts.
 
I don't understand the people eager for dropping a dgpu and having only a single, more powerful, integrated gpu. For those of you with that opinion, what is your viewpoint?


Surely you don't want to spend that much money for a machine that can't perform certain tasks in the way a dedicated gpu can? If you say that you don't need to do the tasks that require a dedicated GPU, I ask why buy such an expensive computer then? Stick with a mac air or 13inch pro right? If one is going to spend a lot of money on a fairly high end machine, one should expect fairly high end components and a dedicated gpu is one of those. For certain tasks, an integrated gpu will never be better than a dgpu. Not arguing/insulting here, so please don't flag me; just curious to the supporters of the removal of a dgpu.
 
The external GPU sounds very interesting, but this guy claims that it's impossible to get anything high-end connected by Thunderbolt 1 or 2: http://forums.creativecow.net/thread/378/2912
I don't know what the real situation is. I've seen conflicting analysis on this. I hope that it will work just because I want to see a tiny little 11" MacBook Air running desktop-level graphics processing with this just for the heck of it.

That guy is essentially wrong. Modern GPUs don't tend to saturate pci-e 16x and they certainly don't "require" it, the old mac pro doesn't support 16x links on each of it's slots, they're 16x physically but only play with a limited number of lanes.

Thunderbolt has plenty of bandwidth to give a significant graphics performance boost, is it less than a desktop pci-e 3.0 16x slot? sure, does it matter? not really.
 
If Apple drops Dedicated Graphics (with its own dedicated RAM) they should also drop the word 'Pro' from the name and call it Macbook Casual Consumer

Yes, because dropping a dGPU for an iGPU that has almost the same performance will prevent us from using it professionally. :rolleyes:

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Stick with a mac air or 13inch pro right?

I'd like a fast CPU and 15" screen. End of story.
 
If they drop the dgpu and the cmbp line I may just have to check out the Lenovo W series laptops. these bad-boys have real pro cards in them. fine tuned for stuff like Cad software. And you don't have to worry about scratching that pretty aluminum.:cool:

Or I could just buy a refurb classic mbp.

Has anyone here tried the Lenovo W series?
 
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I really hope they don't drop the non retina MBP because I'm looking at moving from a windows laptop to a macbook pro this refresh (I love my mid 2011 mac mini but hate that it is tied to my desk) and based on my current requirements I could really do with one with around 750Gb internal storage (minimum 500Gb) and the current £560 cost of the 768Gb SSD is way beyond my price limit before you even consider the much higher entry price...

I can live with a non retina screen (although the retina display is a thing of great beauty) but I couldn't live with having to lug around external storage everywhere I go just to have all my stuff with me when I'm working away from home. I can understand the push towards external storage for the iMac and new Mac Pro, but for a notebook designed to be transported you need a minimum amount of built in storage or it negates the portability of the design.

Sadly knowing Apples history of dropping what they see as outdated technologies at the first viable opportunity the non retina MBP is probably living on borrowed time already. I just hope it isn't this refresh where it disappears as an option.
 
The new Macbook Pro line all retina. No more none retina models.
13inch with 256GB SSD with clocked i5 haswell and 8GB of RAM. 1199$
13inch with 256GB SSD with clocked i7 haswell and 8GB of RAM. 1399$
15inch with 256GB SSD with clocked i7 haswell, dGPU and 8GB of RAM. 1599$
15inch with 512GB SSD with clocked i7 haswell, dGPU and 16GB of RAM. 1799$
17inch with 512GB SSD with clocked i7 haswell, dGPU and 16GB of RAM. 1999$

Standard: HD Face Time, Thunrbolt 2, WiFi 802.11ac.

Option: Swap the 256GB SSD for 1TB Fusion or the 512GB SSD for 2TB fusion for free.
 
That guy is essentially wrong. Modern GPUs don't tend to saturate pci-e 16x and they certainly don't "require" it, the old mac pro doesn't support 16x links on each of it's slots, they're 16x physically but only play with a limited number of lanes.

Thunderbolt has plenty of bandwidth to give a significant graphics performance boost, is it less than a desktop pci-e 3.0 16x slot? sure, does it matter? not really.

Thunderbolt 1 is 10Gb/s
Thunderbolt 2 is 20Gb/s
PCIe x8 v2.0 like the Mac Pro you referenced is 32Gb/s
PCIe x16 v2.0 is 64Gb/s
PCIe x16 v3.0 is 128Gb/s

Keep in mind when Intel and Apple discuss Thunderbolt they are talking in Gigabits not GigaBytes like on the PCIe spec pages. To make it simpler I have converted all GigaByte speeds in to Gigabit (GB -> Gb).

Thunderbolt 2 doesn't even reach the same performance as PCIe 2.0 x8 - It is closer to x4 (16Gb/s) and many sites have shown that modern graphics chips when run at PCIe 2.0 x4 speeds greatly diminish in performance. And the problem is compounded when looking at GPGPU workloads like those created by OpenCL and CUDA as those technologies heavily exchange data with the CPU and system memory.

Here is one benchmark showing an AMD HD 5870. This card launched in September 2009. That makes it almost 4 years old. Now take a look at the performance benchmarks:

DwpIyxJ.gif


As you can see by dropping down from PCIe x16 to x4 the average frames per second fell by 13%. Now keep in mind that may not seem like a lot but remember this testing was done with a 4 year old graphics card that is much slower than modern day processors that one may wish to connect over Thunderbolt in an external chassis.

In-fact my own testing with my GTX 780's has confirmed this hypothesis and not with x8 PCIe 2.0 but x16 PCIe 2.0. I actually saw a 300 point increase in the Unigine benchmark just by changing from PCIe 2.0 x16 to 3.0 x16. That resulted in a 7% performance increase in graphics performance.
 
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LOL a fusion drive will mean a standard HDD and this doesnt fit the retina macbook pro chase . And the price for the macbooks are 100$ less the the real deal

13" retina will start from 1299$
15" retina will start from 1799$
 
Damn, I'm not sure about the remove of the dedicated GPU when I saw this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X8b7beYeDko

A Haswell vs an Nvidia MacBook. The comparison might be weird as the laptops are different, but in my humble opinion it's the dedicated GPU which powns the Haswell completely. Double time for Haswell...ugh. Not sure now if I would accept half the performance...
 
I am happy with my last year's rMBP 15". I hope the new ones will be lighter and have better battery life. What is the chance?
 
yes with only IGPU HD5300 the battery will be better i think +4 more hours normal usage and 1-2 more hours heavy usage
 
I now believe, that these will find their way just into the 13inch model to improve its performance, while the 15 will share this and Dgpu.

They would probably redesign the 15inch if they took away he Dgpu, and we have seen nothing to suggest that
 
A MacBook Pro without dGPU should drop the 'Pro'.

I wonder if Apple will drop the non-Retina MBP. From what I hear in retail, the nrMBP accounts for about 60 - 80% of total MBP sales. Dropping the nrMBP could be a big hit to Mac sales that are already under pressure at the moment.
 
If there are still so much sales for the nrMBP it would be stupid to drop that.
 
Showing your ignorance here buddy. The Iris 5200 has the same performance as a dGPU, you don't need a chip from nVidia any more. That's the whole point of Iris, it's not like the traditional idea of an iGPU.

Seriously for everyone laughing off integrated graphics and saying gamers will be annoyed etc, you really don't understand what Iris is all about. It can match laptop dGPUs. Hence why Codemasters (who make Grid 2) have been advertising it loads, it can play their games at full pelt.

You're partially right. Thr problem Intel has had for a very long time is drivers. The drivers are simply very far behind AMD and Nvidia when it comes to gaming. The question is if they've managed to catch up a bit with this generation.
 
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