Apple this week updated its entry-level 13-inch MacBook Pro with a Touch Bar and Intel's latest 8th-generation Core quad-core processors, and benchmarks for the 2019 model are now beginning to surface.
Geekbench 4 scores indicate the base 2019 model with an 8th-generation 1.4GHz quad-core Core i5 processor has up to a 6.8 percent increase in single-core performance, and up to 83.4 percent faster multi-core performance, compared to the base 2017 model with a 7th-generation 2.3GHz dual-core Core i5 processor.
Specifically, the 2019 model has average single-core and multi-core scores of 4,639 and 16,665 respectively based on eight Geekbench results, while the 2017 model averages 4,341 for single-core and 9,084 for multi-core.
The new entry-level 13-inch MacBook Pro is powered by Intel's Core i5-8257U processor, which appears to be a custom variation of its Core i5-8250U processor designed for Apple. The 15W chip is part of the Coffee Lake family and has a max Turbo Boost frequency of up to 3.9GHz.
The notebook can also be upgraded to an 8th-generation 1.7GHz quad-core Core i7 processor. This configuration uses Intel's Core i7-8557U, which is likewise believed to be a custom variation of its Core i7-8550U processor, with a TDP of 15W and a max Turbo Boost frequency of up to 4.5GHz.
Only one Geekbench result is available for the 1.7GHz configuration so far with single-core and multi-core scores of 4,835 and 15,515 respectively. There is room for variance here as more results come in, but this would be a performance increase of up to around 60 percent compared to the equivalent 2017 model.
Apple advertises the new entry-level 13-inch MacBook Pro as "two times more powerful" than the previous generation. The benchmarks approach this at up to 83 percent, but performance in real-world usage will vary.
Apple did not update the entry-level 13-inch MacBook Pro in 2018, which is why 2017 models serve as the previous-generation comparisons.
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Top Rated Comments
(View all)The bottleneck for MacBooks has always been the terrible cooling implementation. Once it goes over the 90c mark, you know things will downclock on the CPU to keep it from having a meltdown.
Impressive, but iPad Pro is where you should be putting your money now.
Can it connect my external drive with all my photoshop, illustrator and indesign files, go through files and folders quickly and run the Adobe Creative Suite with a mouse?
Answer: of course not. So why should I be putting my money on a gimped device that serves only as a glorified smartphone?
Impressive, but iPad Pro is where you should be putting your money now.
This is a post-modernist falsehoodMy 7 year old MacBook Pro isn't that much slower than this. However, those numbers are meaningless; sure it can perform well in short bursts (Geekbench isn't exactly an intense benchmark) but can it perform like that over 15 minutes? 30 minutes? 2 hours? Try running handbrake for an extended length of time, exporting a movie from Adobe Premiere or rendering some kind of 3D animation.
The bottleneck for MacBooks has always been the terrible cooling implementation. Once it goes over the 90c mark, you know things will downclock on the CPU to keep it from having a meltdown.
If you want to ever do any real CPU-intensive work, a laptop is never your answer. No laptop is.
Serious, does anyone really need a laptop that is even faster? What is big the hurry?
Yes, when I'm running Xcode builds that take 10+ minutes.