Single-threaded performance is essentially on par with the 2012 11” MacBook Air (Ivy Bridge), and even as recent as the Core i5-equipped 2014 13” MacBook Air the 2015 MacBook is within 10%. In both single-threaded and multi-threaded workloads it’s well behind the pack, though in different ways. Meanwhile our large collection of Cinebench 11.5 results helps put Core M’s sustained performance in perspective. Still, it goes to show that although the MacBook is well ahead of tablets, it’s not leaps and bounds ahead like more powerful laptops would be. If my earlier hunch about Safari optimizations is correct and OS X needs some more tuning, then the MacBook is farther ahead than what these benchmarks show. The MacBook is less than 2x faster than the iPad Air 2 in both benchmarks, which means that within a couple of generations it’s likely that the iPad will exceed the current MacBook’s scores. Since each platform is running a high performance browser (either Safari or Chrome) and from hardware capabilities standpoint these Core M devices are all relatively close, I suspect what we’re seeing here is that OS X Safari as not as well tuned as iOS Safari is.Ĭompared to the tablets on the other hand the MacBook is still well ahead of any of the tablets – as it should be with Core M’s greater power consumption and the larger chassis – but there’s no denying that by scaling down the MacBook so far, the performance gap between tablet and laptop has shrunk significantly. The MacBook ends up being a laggard against both of our other Core M devices. Truth be told these results are a bit surprising, though not for good reasons. Meanwhile since we’ve also just recently looked at several Core M devices, I’ve also included those to provide a point of comparison to other Core M devices.
#BEST 2015 MAC FOR BMCC PLUS#
Plus this gives us a chance to compare the MacBook to tablets, including of course the iPad Air 2.
These benchmarks run a number of sub-tests, and as a result the MacBook gets a brief respite between benchmarks. Switching gears, we have an example of a semi-bursty workload with a couple of our web benchmarks. Still, whether it’s Core M or Yosemite, it shows that Apple’s boot times here aren’t quite as good as they have been in the past. To be clear here this is a historical chart – each machine is running the version of OS X it launched with – so the only Yosemite MacBook here is the 2015 MacBook. On an absolute basis the MacBook doesn’t do too poorly, but on a relative basis it’s behind a lot of our other MacBooks. We’ll kick things off quickly with a look at boot time. Ultimately what this means is that we expect that the MacBook should be able to compete with its larger brothers in those short, bursty workloads that Core M is optimized for, while in sustained workloads it’s going to fall behind MacBook Air and other laptops using Intel’s larger 15W processors. The end result is that for workloads that go longer than a short burst, Core M’s performance is tightly coupled to the cooling capabilities of the laptop it’s in. Case in point of course is the MacBook, which utilizes a simple aluminum case without any kind of fans (active cooling).
What sets it apart along with its package and power optimizations are its much lower power threshold – the official TDP is just 4.5W, while it can burst higher for short periods of time – and the fact that it’s designed for systems with less cooling than Broadwell-U.
#BEST 2015 MAC FOR BMCC PRO#
Of course all of this is in part dependent on how OEMs go and design their laptops – go stuff a Core i5 in a Surface Pro 3 and watch it throttle – but at the end of the day the point is that Core M is not designed to offer the same kind of high performance under sustained workloads that Intel’s more powerful processors do.Ĭore M is at its heart still a power optimized Intel Broadwell design, so despite the different Core M branding it’s not all that far removed from the dual-core Broadwell-U processors in the MacBook Air and 13” Retina MacBook Pro. Which is to say that its performance is heavily tuned around performance bursting and racing back to idle, as opposed to more traditional Intel processors which turbo as well, but overall are also designed to hold at relatively high clockspeeds under sustained workloads. But briefly, from a performance standpoint Core M behaves a lot more like a modern tablet processor than it does a traditional Intel x86 processor. Now that we’ve had a chance to take a look at the construction and component selection of the MacBook, it’s time to get down the business end of the review: performance.įor the sake of brevity I’m not going to completely rehash how Core M works, especially since we just did an in-depth look at the CPU last week.
0 kommentar(er)
