Question about i7-equipped MBPs...

[jtcedinburgh]

Hey folks,

I'm about to sell my mid 2009 MBP (2.26GHz C2D/8Mb 13") and plan to buy a 2012 MBP (hopefully with retina display).

Anyway, I also have a 2010 iMac i7 2.9GHz 27" with 12Gb ram and the Apple 256Gb SSD. That machine is very fast and still more machine than I probably need.

My question is: are any of the current mobile i7-equipped MBPs going to feel as fast as my iMac? Has 18 months of i7 improvement brought the current mobile chips up to the level of the 2010-era desktop i7s? And is there anything else about the architecture of the imac that might make getting that level of performance out of a MBP unlikely? I'm really hoping someone with a similar iMac can let me know.

Second thing: logic would make me think that an i7 MBP would use a fair bit extra power over a C2D MBP - is this correct? I'm getting around 3-4 hours from a full charge on my MBP (2.5 year old battery, OCZ Vertex 2E 240Gb SSD) - what's typical of (say) a 15" i7?

I'd be happy even to reach 80% of the performance of the iMac in my new MBP, but wouldn't want to do so if the battery life is dramatically reduced.

Any tips/advice?

 

[NutsNGum]

snippety

Going by (reported) Geekbench scores for the 2012 models, they should be faster than your iMac, particularly if they get the SSD treatment, and I don't think there's any reason that they won't.

The only aspect not likely to be as impressive as the iMac is the GPU. So if you game, that might be an issue, but if not, I'd go MacBook Pro/Thunderbolt Display.

That's what I did!

 

[Coldmode]

Unless you're doing video work, heavy gaming or compiling 500,000 lines of code it's the SSD that's making your iMac feel fast, not the processor. You'd have to get a MBP with an SSD to replicate that performance.

Second, the mobile i7s run at a lower clock speed than the desktop i7s, but the architecture has changed. I don't have benchmarks, but seriously, unless you're encoding video or doing mathematical computations it's not going to make a difference. However, a new i7 will run blazing fiery circles of death around your C2D machine, especially if paired with an SSD. You could also expect to get around 6-7 hours of battery life on a new i7. Also, you could take it outside. I suppose you could take an iMac outside, but that sounds like a lot of trouble.

 

[yusukeaoki]

If you compare it equally, like iMac SSD vs MBP SSD, iMac would be faster.
The GPU and CPU both are above the MBP.

Even though iMac uses mobile GPU, they can hold up to 2GB.
And the CPU, they are desktop grade and not mobile CPU.

 

[jtcedinburgh]

Thanks, folks. I think I'm going to spring for an i7 anyway - it's a business purchase and so I can reclaim vat and offset against corporation tax, which makes the relative prices much closer. So it's not so much a money thing as a justification thing...

Assuming, for a moment, that the new MBPs don't have dual disk capability - would transplanting my 240Gb OCZ Vertex 2E from the C2D be worthwhile or do you think the new MBP deserve an even faster boot disk? I'd keep the OCZ anyway, get a USB3 enclosure and use it for media, etc.

In case you are wondering, the purchaser of my C2D MBP is buying it diskless, and is paying separately for a 256Gb SSD which should arrive any time. So I get to keep my OCZ.

My main use for this machine is a combination of general web & mail and running Windows 7 Enterprise N under Parallels 7 for Visual Studio 2010 and SQL Server 2008 R2 dev work. This can bog down even on an 8Gb C2D MBP, and I think part of that bogging down is CPU-based.