New 2018 MacBook Pro: The Intel Processors Driving Performance And Benchmarks
The 2018 MacBook Pro is a serious performance upgrade over last year's models with serious new Intel silicon inside. What do benchmarks say?
Apple has picked up the processor update pace considerably this year and the new MBPs parallel the Windows world in adopting Coffee Lake mobile processors, which were just released in the second quarter of this year.
2018 MacBook Pro 13:
$1,799 MacBook Pro 13 (Touch Bar) with Core i5-8259U (quad-core): This Coffee Lake processor has a base frequency of 2.3GHz but Turbo Boosts up to 3.8GHz and is rated up to 28 watts* not the typical 15 watts. More wattage, more performance.
$2,099 MacBook Pro 13 (Touch Bar) with Core i7-8559U (quad-core): This has a base frequency of 2.7 and Turbo Boosts up to 4.5 GHz and is rated up to 28W.
The upshot from Primate Labs: the 2018 MacBook Pro 13 pretty much matches the performance of the 2017 MacBook Pro 15:
For the 13-inch models, single-core performance is up 3%-11%, and multi-core performance is up 81%-86%. Again, higher Turbo Boost frequencies and more cores are responsible for the increases (the 2018 13-inch models still use DDR3 memory).What’s interesting is that the 2018 13-inch models are competitive with the 2017 15-inch models in both single-core and multi-core performance, making the new 2018 13-inch MacBook Pro a smaller and lighter replacement for the 2017 15-inch MacBook Pro.--MacBook Pro Performance (July 2018), July 15, 2018, Primate Labs
However....
Review site Notebook Check had some issues with Coffee Lake.
"We will investigate further, but it seems Coffee Lake-U is just not as efficient as Kaby Lake-R...This begs the question why the new 28W models are not based on Kaby Lake-R. All in all, the new MacBook Pro 13 is faster than the...previous 2017 model, but some Windows devices are faster with supposedly slower CPUs," Notebook Check said.
2018 MacBook Pro 15:
$2,399 MacBook Pro 15 with Intel Core i7-8750H (six-core): This has a base frequency of only 2.2 GHz but Turbo Boosts to a decent 4.1 GHz. Like all the Coffee Lake six-core processors, it is rated up to 45W.
$2,799 MacBook Pro 15 with Intel Core i7-8850H (six-core): This has a base frequency of 2.6 GHz and Turbo Boosts to a decent 4.3 GHz. (See Lisa Gade's review, at MobileTechReview, where she discusses throttling on these new high-end Core processors.)
$3,099 MacBook Pro 15 with Intel Core i9 8950HK processor (six-core): This has a base frequency of 2.9 GHz and Turbo Boosts to a whopping 4.8 GHz. This processor also has 12 MB of on-board SmartCache, compared to 9 MB on the other six-core Core i7 processors. (Also, see Lisa Gade's review where she discusses the Core i9 8950HK as more marketing than substance in some respects.)
DDR4 memory with optional configs up to 32GB are new to the 2018 MBP 15. Here's what Primate Labs says:
For the 15-inch models, single-core performance is up 12-15%, and multi-core performance is up 39-46%. Since the underlying processor architecture hasn’t significantly changed between the 2017 and 2018 models, the increases in performance are due to higher Turbo Boost frequencies, more cores, and DDR4 memory.OpenCL performance for the discrete GPUs is also up 28-32%. The increase in performance is due, in part, to higher frequencies. For example, the AMD Radeon Pro 560 has a maximum frequency of 0.9 GHz, while the AMD Radeon Pro 560X has a maximum frequency of 1.0 GHz.
However....
Again, Notebook Check wasn't pleased with performance compared to the Windows camp.
"The old MacBook Pro 2017 with the Core i7-7700HQ is beaten by almost 30%, but many rivals are faster," Notebook Check said.
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*U series processors in lower-end MBP 13 models are typically 15 watts, while higher-end MBP 13 models typically have processors rated up to 28 watts. But Notebook Check has something to say about this: "Apple usually removed the TDP limit for Intel processors, so the temperature was the only limiting factor
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