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Real talk: performance comparison

T

Talbot

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Jun 12, 2011
29
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So I've been pretty set on getting one of the new macbook's. But a recent article from 9to5 mac pointed out that the performance of the new processor could be very limited.

http://9to5mac.com/2015/03/16/macbook-12-benchmarks/

I know obviously not to expect a powerhouse... but let me explain where I'm coming from.

I currently have a new mac pro and a macbook air. I don't use the air for heavy stuff. The heaviest thing I use it for is creating photoshop documents that are 1920x1080 and have like 20-30 layers. Nothing crazy. And it works fine. Everything else I do is ms word, safari, email, spotify etc.

My air is:

MacBook Air (13-inch, Mid 2011)
1.7 GHz i5
4gb 1333 mhz ddr3
intel hd graphics 3000 384 mb

I mainly want to upgrade for the screen and battery life.

Can someone tell me how the performance will compare? I'm assuming since it's so old the new on has to be better but this article just made me question that though process.

Thanks in advance!
 
Unless you absolutely need the screen, get a new mba.
If you absolutely want the screen get a rmbp.

At this point nobody really knows about the performance of the new MB
 
Check out Anandtech's review of the new Yoga, using the same CPU.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/9061/lenovo-yoga-3-pro-review

The salient bit:
Just to put the numbers in a bit more context, I also ran the benchmarks on my Core i7-860 based Desktop (running Chrome, as were the Yogas) and it is pretty clear just how far we have come. The i7-860 is a four core, eight thread 45 nm processor with a 2.8 GHz base clock and 3.46 GHz boost, all in a 95 watt TDP. It was launched in late 2009. Five years later, we have higher performance in a 4.5 watt TDP for many tasks. It really is staggering.

There seems to be a general concensus that Core M equates slow, but clearly this is not the case. For some sustained workloads, yes, the 4.5 watt TDP limits how much performance you are going to get from the CPU, but for many tasks, especially short burst loads, the performance of the 5Y71 is very competitive, often outperforming the Haswell Core i5-4200U from last year’s Yoga 2 Pro. This says a tremendous amount about the Intel 14 nm process, because the IPC improvements of Broadwell vs Haswell are fairly limited. Clearly the CPU has quite a bit of headroom on the 14 nm process to keep the clock speeds up.
Click to expand...

This processor is nothing to sneeze at, and for anything other than sustained load, will be perfectly fast - and considerably faster than the Air you own now. Do you feel as if the CPU is a bottleneck in your current use?

More than likely the new MacBook will suit you fine.
 
Talbot said:
Can someone tell me how the performance will compare?
Click to expand...

No. Not until it's out.

That said :

- Your MBA is a 2011, these benchmarks are comparing the 13" 2014 MBA, which is years ahead of yours. There will always be more powerful machines, benchmarks are just that. What matters is real-life usage.

- Read the full article on Anandtech, that will give you a better idea. For example it says that the Yoga 3 Pro is good enough at short burst stuff, but not so much at long running tasks.

- I've been under the impression that Photoshop is more RAM-hungry than CPU-hungry.

- If you don't care about the portability, the 13" rMBP is a sure bet for only $100 more.
 
Certainly comparative, if you follow the links for the Core M Ultrabooks, the reviews are a further indication of how we can expect the new MacBook to perform, certainly not a powerhouse, nor big on multitasking.

list of Broadwell (Core M and Core i3/i5/i7) portable laptops and ultrabooks

http://www.ultrabookreview.com/5165-broadwell-ultrabooks/

I have had chance to spend time with a Lenovo Yoga Pro 3 and to me the performance was adequate, given my expectations. Hopefully Apple have squeezed a little more out the Core M. As a lightweight business machine, little multimedia the MacBook will likely excel. Setting yourself up for multimedia powerhouse or big number cruncher or gaming machine will only bring disappointment.

Q-6
 
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Talbot said:
So I've been pretty set on getting one of the new macbook's. But a recent article from 9to5 mac pointed out that the performance of the new processor could be very limited.

http://9to5mac.com/2015/03/16/macbook-12-benchmarks/

I know obviously not to expect a powerhouse... but let me explain where I'm coming from.

I currently have a new mac pro and a macbook air. I don't use the air for heavy stuff. The heaviest thing I use it for is creating photoshop documents that are 1920x1080 and have like 20-30 layers. Nothing crazy. And it works fine. Everything else I do is ms word, safari, email, spotify etc.

My air is:

MacBook Air (13-inch, Mid 2011)
1.7 GHz i5
4gb 1333 mhz ddr3
intel hd graphics 3000 384 mb

I mainly want to upgrade for the screen and battery life.

Can someone tell me how the performance will compare? I'm assuming since it's so old the new on has to be better but this article just made me question that though process.

Thanks in advance!
Click to expand...

I found the article very misleading, particularly the headline. The new MacBook with a 5w processor has similar CPU performance as the 14w CPU used in last years MacBook air.

Read through the full anandtech article and you can see where it's better or worse than last years air.
 
KrisLord said:
I found the article very misleading, particularly the headline. The new MacBook with a 5w processor has similar CPU performance as the 14w CPU used in last years MacBook air.

Read through the full anandtech article and you can see where it's better or worse than last years air.
Click to expand...

Well said.
 
zhenya said:
Check out Anandtech's review of the new Yoga, using the same CPU.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/9061/lenovo-yoga-3-pro-review

The salient bit:


This processor is nothing to sneeze at, and for anything other than sustained load, will be perfectly fast - and considerably faster than the Air you own now. Do you feel as if the CPU is a bottleneck in your current use?

More than likely the new MacBook will suit you fine.
Click to expand...

Don't forget Yoga 3 Pro comes with active cooling. The rMB w/o fan will be throttled earlier and suffer more.
 
powersteer said:
Don't forget Yoga 3 Pro comes with active cooling. The rMB w/o fan will be throttled earlier and suffer more.
Click to expand...

That depends entirely on how the MacBook is designed. You only need active cooling if you exceed the heat transfer threshold of your heatsink. The Yoga, with a plastic housing, has to have a separate heatsink, which has to be quite small in order to fit in such a slim device. If Apple is able to transfer the heat to the aluminum housing of the laptop and use that as part of their sink, they should be fine.
 
zhenya said:
That depends entirely on how the MacBook is designed. You only need active cooling if you exceed the heat transfer threshold of your heatsink. The Yoga, with a plastic housing, has to have a separate heatsink, which has to be quite small in order to fit in such a slim device. If Apple is able to transfer the heat to the aluminum housing of the laptop and use that as part of their sink, they should be fine.
Click to expand...

Don't bear too much hope on using the aluminium housing as an effective heatsink. Apple wudn't dare to risk law suits rained on them when unsuspecting customers got their lap burnt watching youtube.
 
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powersteer said:
Don't forget Yoga 3 Pro comes with active cooling. The rMB w/o fan will be throttled earlier and suffer more.
Click to expand...

This is my concern hopefully Apple has a smarter solution than Lenovo, I do believe the preproduction models released to the press had less than stellar performance. I have had a good look at the new Yoga Pro 3 and I found it ok, certainly not "dog slow"

I think Apple will do a better job on the CPU management, however what concerns me more is the load on the GPU due to the way Apple implements Retina.

Q-6
 
powersteer said:
Don't bear too much hope on using the aluminium housing as an effective heatsink. Apple wudn't dare to risk law suits rained on them when unsuspecting customers got their lap burned by 70-80 deg C while watching youtube.
Click to expand...

Aluminum Apple laptops have always gotten quite warm. Like I said, it depends on how it is designed. I would expect that if it works this way, the case is secondary to a primary heatsink that then transfers it to the case. Given the overall size and mass of the case, I wouldn't expect any significant hotspots from a 5w chip.
 
zhenya said:
Aluminum Apple laptops have always gotten quite warm. Like I said, it depends on how it is designed. I would expect that if it works this way, the case is secondary to a primary heatsink that then transfers it to the case. Given the overall size and mass of the case, I wouldn't expect any significant hotspots from a 5w chip.
Click to expand...

Let's keep our faith high, fingers crossed they get it right ... and even push GPU performance beyond the Yoga 3 Pro!

That GPU performance will be my main worry, running the retina screen at scaled native resolution may be challenging
 
Talbot said:
So I've been pretty set on getting one of the new macbook's. But a recent article from 9to5 mac pointed out that the performance of the new processor could be very limited.
Click to expand...

Few things to consider (sorry if I am repeating what someone has already said above):

- We know nothing about how thermal engineering of Yoda 3 Pro compares to that of rMB. There is a good change that rMB will be better at cooling the CPU
- Benchmarking Core M is tricky and I find is surprising that not many reviewers get it (Anandtech does, at least partially). Core M is certainly not designed for sustained performance. If you need to run heavy-duty simulations or convert videos — looks elsewhere. However, its an excellent burst chip. Most everyday interactions with the computer consists of very long (by CPU's timescale) intervals of waiting and then brief intervals of activity (e.g. changing the contents of the window following a button click). Core M is very good at getting from 0 to 100, better than any CPU before it. What this means is that it might do some short workloads faster than a nominally faster chip. To put it a bit dramatically, a Core M will is able to turbo boost to its max, and be done with the work before a Haswell even realises that it should initiate the turbo boost (please beware that this is my interpretation of what I have read about these chips, I would welcome a correction should this be inaccurate). This is why Core M performs so well in actual real-world browser benchmarks. In contrast, it will perform poorly in synthetic benchmarks or any activity that requires prolonged high power state.
- The media decoding engine of Core M has been dramatically improved from Haswell, which means more power-efficient video decoding.
- Finally, no matter what, the new rMB will be definitively faster than your 2011 MBA.

But of course, we should first wait for the benchmarks and see how it does. I expect it to be fairly close to 2014 MBA in real-world usage. Gaming performance will suffer though.
 
powersteer said:
Let's keep our faith high, fingers crossed they get it right ... and even push GPU performance beyond the Yoga 3 Pro!

That GPU performance will be my main worry, running the retina screen at scaled native resolution may be challenging
Click to expand...

Not sure how Apple can 'push' the GPU, unless they plan on overclocking it - which comes at a hefty price given there's very little room to play with in terms of power and ventilation.

In any case nobody gets a Yoga 3 Pro or Macbook or Zenbook X301 for its GPU - as long as 1080p playback works fine, that's all one should be happy with - gaming is and always will be out of the question.
 
Personally, I think the GPU will be a bottleneck before the CPU. I'm really excited for in-depth reviews.
 
The iPad GPU will be faster than the retina MacBook. That's worrying.

Another worrying thing is the keyboard wish no one seem to have liked at the first hands on reviews. If it feels like typing on an iPad it's gonna be a big problem.
 
Yea. I think I may wait to try one out before pulling the trigger. I Wanted to pre order but the keyboard worries be a bit.
 
petsk said:
The iPad GPU will be faster than the retina MacBook. That's worrying.

Another worrying thing is the keyboard wish no one seem to have liked at the first hands on reviews. If it feels like typing on an iPad it's gonna be a big problem.
Click to expand...

I trust that I can get used to the keyboard. I have adjusted before.
 
leman said:
How did you reach that conclusion?
Click to expand...

From AnandTech's review of the Yoga 3 Pro, which is using the same GPU as the rMB?

Quoted: "the GFXBench scores placing HD 5300 well behind the top tablet GPUs of today"
 
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