MBP 13" 2020 - i5 or i7

[ImBen]

Looking to get those 2020 MBP 13 that were just announced. Been waiting a couple of years already as I value the keyboard and the escape key way too much to have settled for the previous iteration of MBP. And the 16" is too big for me. So, today, finally, my (our ?) calls to "make the MBP 13 great again" were finally heard.

Now, I'm only wondering wether I should get the i7 model (10th gen) or the i5 (also 10th gen). The +250€ (for me, as an European citizen) is a price I'm willing to pay, so this is not a question about whether the upgrade is worth it's price or not.

What I'm wondering is:

• Is it worth it performances wise ? Can I expect a decent bump in overall computing speed ? Or will its potential clock speed will be throttled so it won't make much of a difference anyway (you know what I'm talking about, 15" MBP owners) ?
• Is it worth it battery wise ? Meaning, is the different in battery life important ?

I'm a dev and use my computer a lot and often to do pretty computationally expensive operations. Also, I use my laptop in clamshell mode most of the time, so this has a negative impact on heat dispersion and thus on potential thermal throttling.

I fully understand it might be hard to answer those questions right now, but if you have previous experience owning and / or just using both an i5 and i7 MBP of the same generation at the same time, I'm interested. I've read before that some people discouraged the i7 upgrade because of the modest performance boost overshadowed by higher battery drain & poor heat dispersion. Do you think it will be the case this year ?

 

[Muyfa666]

I wonder the same thing.

With the MBP13 2019, almost noone recommended the i7 over the i5 due to dimishing returns. I suspect this will be the case with the 2020 also.

It seems the turbo of the 2020 is lower, which could actually be a good thing as it hopefully can maintain the turbo longer without thottling.

Gonna be fun to read the reviews in following weeks.

 

[magbarn]

Went ahead and ordered i7/32gb/2TB which actually has the same shipping time as base models. I think it’s the ultimate edition which would’ve been in stock at Apple stores

 

[hardwickj]

So these aren't officially released CPU's in Intel's lineup, but rather custom bins specifically for Apple, which clouds things a bit. In addition, I can no longer keep up with Intel's terrible marketing across product lines.

- I assume both the i5 and i7 support Hyperthreading (so 8 virtual cores). But 🤷🏻‍♂️ because Intel has been waffling on that so much I can no longer keep track.
- i5 presumably 6MB L3 cache, i7 presumably 8MB L3 cache.

So presumably, you're only paying for a slightly higher peak freq and modest bump in cache. Probably not worth it for the average Joe.

 

[nutmac]

10th gen processors on 13-inch MacBook Pro seem exactly the same except for the base clock (2.0 vs. 2.3GHz), Turbo Boost (3.8 vs. 4.1GHz), L3 cache (6MB vs. 8MB), and minor boost in GPU clock speed (probably 0.05GHz).

I doubt most people will notice much -- 5-15% difference at best. I would probably take the battery life savings of the lower clocked version, and use $200 toward RAM or SSD. A general rule of thumb: get larger SSD first, then RAM, then CPU.

 

[ImBen]

Thanks for your replies everyone. I went with the i5 in the end, the first benchmarks didn't convince me to go for the i7. I did bump the ram & SSD so I should be getting a pretty decent machine anyway.

Thanks

 

[BlueseaApple]

I have the 13" i7 with 32GB and 2TB. Works wonderfully.