“On Tuesday Apple updated its MacBook Pro lineup,” John Poole reports for Primate Labs. “Geekbench 3 results for most of the new models have appeared in the Geekbench Browser which lets us see how performance has improved across the lineup.”
“For the 15-inch MacBook Pro, processor speeds were increased by 200 MHz, leading to a 6% to 9% increase in performance,” Poole reports. “For the 13-inch MacBook Pro, processor speeds were also increased by 200 MHz, leading to a 7% to 8% increase in performance (note that we do not yet have results for the new high-end model).”
“Both the 2013 and the 2014 models use Haswell processors, so all of the performance gains come from the increased clock speeds,” Poole reports. “We will have to wait for the new Broadwell processors (currently scheduled for mid-2015) to see more signficant improvements in MacBook Pro performance.”
See all of the benchmarks here.
Related article:
Apple updates MacBook Pro with faster Haswell processors, increased base RAM; cuts price of non-Retina model – July 29, 2014
“We will have to wait for the new Broadwell processors (currently scheduled for mid-2015) to see more signficant improvements in MacBook Pro performance.”
Wrong.
Broadwell is scheduled to ship in the fourth calendar quarter of 2014. Intel’s CEO has gone on the record as saying Broadwell will ship in quantity for the 2014 holiday season, and he explicitly stated that it will not be the last few days of the 2014 holiday season.
This does not mean that the schedule can’t slip again. It could. But stating that the *current* schedule is mid 2015 is flatly false.
Plus, Apple never ships a new laptop or desktop within a a few weeks after Intel starts shipping new chips, and Apple often waits 3+ months before new Macs based upon new chips are available. Thus, new Macs based upon Broadwell will likely be February 2015 at the earliest and June/July 2015 at the latest (baring some catastrophe in Broadwell production).
I’m looking at waiting for Skylake. Except in very limited, special cases, we’ll likely skip Broadwell. Skylake will be a new architecture, and, if the planned changes come through, will be a significant step up from both Haswell and Broadwell. I currently expect those Macs to be available calendar Q3 2016. But then I’m a schedule pessimist. There are many in the industry advising skipping Broadwell as they predict Skylake systems will ship before the end of 2015.
Only Core M Broadwell chips, which compete with the ARM tablet chips, are scheduled to launch in the fourth calendar quarter of 2014. That’s designed to hurt Apple, not help.
Didn’t Apple once release machines with a brand new Intel CPU before anyone else could get them? I thought they got priority access to them on that occasion?
i believe that you are right. Early in the Apple/intel relationship Apple had preferred status. Plus, at that time, Apple was not shipping a large number of units, so Apple could jump in on new CPUs earlier than Dell and the other major Windows laptop vendors, who were forced to wait until intel was producing large commercial quantities.
In addition, there is far less incentive to attempt to rapidly jump to new CPUs. The risk of early adoption still exists, but the gains from generation to generation of CPUs is typically modest and incremental than in the past. The importance of having the very latest CPU is greatly reduced in comparison to ten years ago.
By what metric are you measuring performance? Performance these days for most tasks is moot.
flash video playback. 60 fps is usually enough to bring a modern computer to its knees.
Well, I certainly appreciate the MBP speed bump just in time to equip my son for college. Seven percent faster than fast is good. I wish the 15″ MBP was less expensive, but it looks like the 13″ MBP/256GB is the current sweet spot in price/performance, especially with the education discount and the gift card promotion. Thanks, Apple. This will be Mac number five for the family.