Should I get a intel based MacBook Pro with GPU inbuilt or wait for MacBook arm?

[ww1971]

I’m thinking of buying a Apple MacBook and I need advice on whether I should buy a Apple MacBook Pro with intel chip or the new upcoming arm silicon chip. As you know I use blender for 3D work and my existing intel iMac 21 inch from late 2013 has no GPU. It’s six years old.

What I want to know is would the new MacBook with silicon chip be right for blender? Will it have a GPU inbuilt?

 

[cmaier]

I’m thinking of buying a Apple MacBook and I need advice on whether I should buy a Apple MacBook Pro with intel chip or the new upcoming arm silicon chip. As you know I use blender for 3D work and my existing intel iMac 21 inch from late 2013 has no GPU. It’s six years old.

What I want to know is would the new MacBook with silicon chip be right for blender? Will it have a GPU inbuilt?

at wwdc, apple said during the breakout sessions that developers should treat arm macs as having GPU power equivalent to discrete graphics. Nobody knows much more than that.

 

[MarkAtl]

I don’t think anyone not restricted by a NDA could tell you. If you need portability then a 16” is your best bet For a MacBook. Or if you’re doing 3D work at a desk maybe a 13” with eGPU like the RX580.

 

[thekev]

None of the machines Apple offers are particularly exceptional for rendering 3D viewing environments. That being said, if you're using machines that long, you should probably avoid buying systems with questionable long term support. I don't expect strong support for Intel machines more than 3 years or so past the transition. Third party vendors tend to drop support once it becomes inconvenient. Apple marks things as vintage 5 years after they're displaced. I would not expect software support past that point, but it can drop off earlier in some cases.

 

[ww1971]

Is a 2020 intel i5 core Macbook pro 13” 1.4 ghz with intel 645 graphics with 512gb total storage a good buy? does the graphics have a GPU in it?

 

[MarkAtl]

Is a 2020 intel i5 core Macbook pro 13” 1.4 ghz with intel 645 graphics with 512gb total storage a good buy? does the graphics have a GPU in it?

All computers have a GPU, but the 13” do not have a discrete GPU, just an integrated one.

I would get the $1799 2.0 i5 which has a newer chip, 4 TB3 ports and faster graphics. I just picked one up for $1579 and Apple has refurbs on sale for $1529.

MacBook Pro 2020 13-Inch Performance Comparison: EveryMac.com

Compares the performance of the 2020 13-Inch MacBook Pro to other 13-Inch MacBook Pro models with Geekbench and real-world tests.

everymac.com

“The Ice Lake processor is equipped with the Iris Plus Graphics, which takes care of all the graphics calculations. It is the faster G7 version with 64 EUs. The performance is on the expected level, but the higher TDP classification is no advantage over the Windows rivals. Compared to the Iris Plus Graphics 655 (with eDRAM cache) of the previous MacBook Pro 13, the performance is about 30-40% higher.”

 

[ght56]

An Intel Mac makes more sense to me unless you are okay waiting a year or so to upgrade. It seems unlikely you will immediately have software support, and initial releases of Blender for Apple Silicon will probably not have nearly as good of performance as they will after a couple years of optimizations. If you are in a point where it is getting hard to wait, I would upgrade now.

None of the machines Apple offers are particularly exceptional for rendering 3D viewing environments. That being said, if you're using machines that long, you should probably avoid buying systems with questionable long term support. I don't expect strong support for Intel machines more than 3 years or so past the transition. Third party vendors tend to drop support once it becomes inconvenient. Apple marks things as vintage 5 years after they're displaced. I would not expect software support past that point, but it can drop off earlier in some cases.

I would expect longer software support with Intel Macs than many expect because Intel Macs will probably continue to generate Apple a huge amount of revenue in refurbished sales for at least several years to come, and new Intel Macs may continue to be sold in the refurbished store until current contracts with Intel and supply is exhausted (which will probably overlap with AS releases). The exception to this might be if Apple decides to stop doing direct refurbished sales immediately when the transition occurs and then has a third party company do all of their refurbished sales on Intel Macs...which I think is extremely unlikely given that potentially risks their own reputation and the branding they have achieved with their refurbs.

 

[theluggage]

What I want to know is would the new MacBook with silicon chip be right for blender? Will it have a GPU inbuilt?

I think that Apple Silicon vs. Intel is pretty irrelevant to the future of Blender on Mac. AFAIK Blender already runs on ARM Linux. The issue is that Apple are depreciating standard frameworks like OpenCL and OpenGL on Mac in favour of Metal - that's happening in the long term with or without Apple Silicon - and have pretty much blocked CUDA. So the question is, what is the possibility of Metal support in Blender and/or what is the status of the various projects to implement OpenGL-to-Metal etc. libraries. That's probably best asked in forums about Blender.

My speculation is that where supported by software the GPU in Apple Silicon is going to be a significant upgrade over the lower-end Macs with integrated Intel GPUs - which will be the ones released Real Soon Now - but that the 16" MacBooks and 5k iMacs might have to wait for an "Apple Silicon Pro" later next year for something that is better than their half-decent AMD GPUs. Nobody who knows is telling.

I'm not sure that the Mac would be anybody's first pick for 3D at the moment because of the OpenGL/OpenCL/CUDA uncertainty - the good news is that I believe that the Blender UI is just as straightforward, intuitive and user friendly on Windows and Linux as it is on Mac. </sarcasm>

To be fair, Apple have a hard choice in areas like 3D - they're never going to beat commodity PC hardware in terms of bangs-per-buck when it comes to running industry-standard software via industry-standard interfaces. ASi has a big advantage in the ultraportable market due to it's unbeatable power-to-performance ratio and more cores per chip, but for higher-end tasks the game will be to use that power & core size advantage to cram more special-purpose acceleration technologies (GPU cores/shaders, vector units, neural engines) onto the chip, and those will be easier to exploit by software written for Apple's proprietary frameworks. I think the "pro" ASi Macs will come into their own when they're running FCPX, Logic etc. and third-party software that enthusiastically supports MacOS.

 

[ww1971]

An Intel Mac makes more sense to me unless you are okay waiting a year or so to upgrade. It seems unlikely you will immediately have software support, and initial releases of Blender for Apple Silicon will probably not have nearly as good of performance as they will after a couple years of optimizations. If you are in a point where it is getting hard to wait, I would upgrade now.

i was advised by other sources to steer clear of the 1st generation of Mac machines with the Silicon chip so I bought the laptop as I mentioned above because the landlord recommended me to get a portable computer like a laptop to replace the ageing 6 year old desktop iMac 21 inch late 2013 which was seen as a safety hazard in the place where I am currently staying in. as it stands I’m sticking with intel for the time being. But in few years time I may switch to mac silicon when there are less teething problems