I know the higher processor should be slightly faster but anyone know how much faster in real life situations? Also are there other advantages to the 1.3 chip such as running cooler? Will battery life be decreased with a faster processor? Would the 1.3 offer any future proofing over the Skylake core-m expected in the 2nd generation MacBook 12?
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Macbook 12 - 1.2 vs 1.3
- Thread starter kvyoung
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On benchmarks, the 1.3 has some, but not a lot, of a speed increase. It does not run cooler. Battery life wouldn't decrease by any noticeable amount, and the 1.3 would not future proof you any more (it's 100mhz....) than the 1.2.
Doesn't sound like there is any substantial benefit going with the 1.3 then. Since Skylake should give a 20% performance bump (higher for GPU) I thought maybe a 1.3 current gen would be same as a 1.2 Skylake unit.
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Future proofing in tech is an urban legend that needs to die.
A thing to keep in mind: you should be looking at the max turbo speeds of the different CPU choices, not just the idle speed. When you're concerned about performance, you're likely to be thinking of situations where the CPU has some actual work to do, in which case (particularly with core M) it will actually be running at the turbo speed most of the time. In that case, it's not just a 100 MHz difference, the gap fans out quite a bit from the 1.1 model up to the 1.3. Can't remember the numbers exactly but the specs are listed. It's still not a life-changing difference but it's significantly more than only the 100 MHz jump in basic clock speed the model names suggest.
In terms of real-world performance, the only metric I've seen that made any sense have been geek bench results. I ended up going for the 1.3 because for a start I wanted the larger storage so it was only 100 bucks or so more from there. And when I saw the average geek bench results for this model, they were consistently in the range of (and often better than) my 17" i7 MBP from 2010. So I just used this as a basic guideline that the performance would be somewhere in the area of a machine I already know, and plenty enough for what I wanted in a light portable for personal use. Turned out to be pretty much the case, although in reality the MB feels faster than the 2010 MBP, probably mostly because its flash storage is light speed fast compared to the spinning drive in the older MBP.
Thanks for the information. Looks like the 1.2 will turbo to 2.6 and the 1.3 will turbo to 2.9. From some benchmarking I read about there is about a 20% jump going from the 1.1 to the 1.3 and about an 8-9% boost going from the 1.2 to the 1.3. Going to hold off a few weeks to see if a Skylake model comes out and if not may just go with a 1.3 model. Originally I thought I wanted one in Gold but because the color varies depending on lighting I may instead go for a Space Gray.
