New MacBook Pro

[fabuliciosa]

I am just needing to buy a new Laptop (wishing for a faster one) when to my surprise just yesterday the new MacBook Pro goes out.

To my very high disappointment, the new collection has a slower processor.

I have a 2.6GHz i7 from mid 2012. Now I can only have a 2.0Ghz processor. I really don't care about Retina display. I don't need a sharper screen, it is good enough already.

How come an iMac (desktop home computer) is faster (2.9Ghz) than a professional laptop?

I don't get it really!

 

[yjchua95]

I am just needing to buy a new Laptop (wishing for a faster one) when to my surprise just yesterday the new MacBook Pro goes out.

To my very high disappointment, the new collection has a slower processor.

I have a 2.6GHz i7 from mid 2012. Now I can only have a 2.0Ghz processor. I really don't care about Retina display. I don't need a sharper screen, it is good enough already.

How come an iMac (desktop home computer) is faster (2.9Ghz) than a professional laptop?

I don't get it really!

The new MBPs have been around since October last year.

A higher clock speed doesn't necessarily mean a faster processor.

A 2.9GHz i5-4570S (the one in the 21.5" iMac) gets a Geekbench score of around 10800.

A 2.0GHz i7-4750HQ (the one in the base 15" retina) scores around 12200 on Geekbench.

This is because a quad-core i5 only has 4 cores/4 threads, while a quad-core i7 has 4 cores/8 threads.

Meanwhile, your i7-3720QM (2.6GHz mid-2012) scores around 12800. The i7-4960HQ in the late-2013 rMBP (also 2.6GHz) scores way faster at around 14500.

 

[Joelist]

It's because of battery life and thermals. Mobile CPUs have lower clocks than desktop ones to conserve power. But remember that clock speed does not equal performance. Haswell is a more efficient CPU in and of itself. So evaluate it in real world scenarios first.

 

[maflynn]

I have a 2.6GHz i7 from mid 2012. Now I can only have a 2.0Ghz processor. I really don't care about Retina display. I don't need a sharper screen, it is good enough already.

There's other improvements to the cpu design that cause the Haswell chipset to be faster then just the clock speed. With that said, going from year to year, you'll not really see a huge jump in speed.

The GHz race is long dead, and Intel has stopped using that as an identifier for speed.

 

[glenthompson]

To add to the other comments, few people are CPU bound in the majority of their tasks. They see better performance from more memory and faster drives (SSD) than the processor. Unless activity monitor shows high CPU usage consistently you don't need a faster processor.

 

[dalupus]

I really don't care about Retina display. I don't need a sharper screen, it is good enough already.

Probably because you have never used one. I compare a using a standard versus retina display to watching standard definition or HD TV. Once you use a retina display you will realize how horrible you old display was.

As for the processor speeds, they haven't changed much in a decade. The performance improvements are in other areas of the chip.

 

[maflynn]

To build upong dalupus's post. I highly recommend you try the MBPs out at your local apple store (or authorized apple dealer) and see if its "fast enough" I think you're fixated on the clock speed without seeing how truly fast it is.

 

[bbeagle]

To build upong dalupus's post. I highly recommend you try the MBPs out at your local apple store (or authorized apple dealer) and see if its "fast enough" I think you're fixated on the clock speed without seeing how truly fast it is.

Clock speed really means NOTHING when comparing different processors. I'll try to give you an extremely simplified example to show what I mean.

Imagine that Processor A has an instruction that can put 1 pixel on the screen. Processor B is much more powerful, and has an instruction that can draw a 5,000 pixels on the screen.

Processor A can execute 10,000,000 instructions a second (10MHz). Processor B can only execute 1,000,000 instructions a second (1MHz).

Which processor would be faster drawing to the screen? Processor B looks 10x SLOWER than Processor A if just comparing MHz. But that's not the entire truth.

After 1 second goes by, a 640x480 screen with 3,000,000 pixels is able to be drawn 3.33 times (frame rate of 3.33) by Processor A. Processor B, however has a frame rate of 1,000,000 / 5,000 = 200 frames per second.

So, Processor B with a 1MHz rate is actually about 60x better than Processor A with a 10MHz rate.

 

[SarcasticJoe]

At the risk of beating a dead horse, I'll also bite:

What Intel has been doing over the last few years is rather developing chips that run faster by using higher and higher clocks, have been developing chips that run faster by being able to do more per clock. This mentality was at it's height around 2005 and started in the late 90's with a clock frequency race against AMD.

The reason for this change in ideology is that the "let's increase the clocks"-mentality eventually ran into problems when it combined with the manufacturing techniques at the time lead to chips that ran extremely hot and consumed a LOT of power. For instance they had one model that ran at 4.0GHz, but ran so hot they couldn't release it so it only spooks their list of products and nobody outside of Intel has ever seen it. This issue meant that it became very difficult to make even faster chips and lines products where low heat production and energy consumption had to be their own lines.

To resolve the problem they took very drastic actions and basically rewrote their product roadmap from there on, shifting focus from their then desktop chips to a new line of chips based on their mobile chips (know to us consumers as Pentium M) that later became known (to us consumers as) as the Core 2 Duo-family.

So since then Intel has not just focusing on making their chips not just faster and faster, but also more energy efficient which in turn leads to clock frequency numbers that confuse the wannabe pro crowd.

 

[dmccloud]

The new MBPs have been around since October last year.

A higher clock speed doesn't necessarily mean a faster processor.

A 2.9GHz i5-4570S (the one in the 21.5" iMac) gets a Geekbench score of around 10800.

A 2.0GHz i7-4750HQ (the one in the base 15" retina) scores around 12200 on Geekbench.

This is because a quad-core i5 only has 4 cores/4 threads, while a quad-core i7 has 4 cores/8 threads.

Meanwhile, your i7-3720QM (2.6GHz mid-2012) scores around 12800. The i7-4960HQ in the late-2013 rMBP (also 2.6GHz) scores way faster at around 14500.

I'm getting 14735 on my machine with the i7-4960HQ. Seems to be on the high end compared to most results, but I won't complain about that. I will say that in real-world usage (photo editing, audio editing, even gaming), this machine powers through everything like butter.

 

[yjchua95]

I'm getting 14735 on my machine with the i7-4960HQ. Seems to be on the high end compared to most results, but I won't complain about that. I will say that in real-world usage (photo editing, audio editing, even gaming), this machine powers through everything like butter.

I got more or less the same on my RMBP with i7-4960HQ. Around 14820 if I'm not mistaken.