10 ms·

From a quick read, in case anyone is wondering, this is built on the latest-gen 10nm process which is a refinement on the previous 10nm process. Intel's goal wa

From a quick read, in case anyone is wondering, this is built on the latest-gen 10nm process which is a refinement on the previous 10nm process. Intel's goal was to focus on clock increases, so the instruction per clock is apparently not much changed. From looking at the tables, the whole line of processors appear to have nicely improved one core max clock speeds, which should hopefully help single core performance, which isn't something that has been increasing much lately. Anecdote: a family member and software dev just bought the latest macbook pro coming from about an 8 year old macbook pro. Apparently he doesn't perceive much real world performance difference between the 2 machines. He said single core synthetic benchmarks were higher, but not by much.

tashoecraft 6y ago
Worked swapped out my mid 2015, 2-core 16gb with a 2019 8 core, 32gb, and this machine is night and day better. It's so much faster at every task I throw at it.
- ithkuil 6y ago
  I concur. The machine "feels" not much faster because of the OS, but raw computation speed like compilation etc are noticeably faster
- burntcookie90 6y ago
  What is the difference between the storage drives?
- srtjstjsj 6y ago
  In 2015 the 15" was 4-core.
  - tashoecraft 6y ago
    It was a 13’
joakleaf 6y ago
I agree. I don't feel much difference between the 15" MB-Pro i7 4-core from 2014 and the i9 8-core from 2019. The i9 really isn't noticeable faster on single core. Instead it gets hotter and its fans starts sooner. So I recommend keeping the old one if you have it.
- iKevinShah 6y ago
  Wouldn't newer ones be more power-efficient as compared to the older one? I remember reading a post on HN which stated the OP buying older, high spec hardware for cheaper than latest one and almost all comments pointed to power-efficient thing
  - drran 6y ago
    Newer processors do the same amount of work faster using multiple cores, so they burn same amount of energy in shorter period of time.
    - clinta 6y ago
      But newer processors use less power at idle, and doing work faster means it can spend more time at that idle, low-power state.
      - drran 6y ago
        Yes, of course. Processors are idle most of the time anyway, but single processor has more time to dissipate heat passively doing same amount of work (e.g. 2% work, 98% idle), while multiple processors, e.g. 4, will use same amount of energy 4x faster (0.5% work, 99.5% idle), so fan will kick in.
  - srtjstjsj 6y ago
    The dGPU is much hotter due to a no-downclocking driver bug that is worse on a chip that is more powerful, and bad software that wastes CPU cycles had more cycles to waste.
  - 6y ago
whynotminot 6y ago
FWIW, I upgraded to one of the 2020 MBP Ice Lake machines. I've seen much, much improved CPU and GPU performance that makes my daily life better. I think much of the increase comes from going from dual core to quad core and perhaps not as much the single core gains, but still, I'd be curious what kind of software he's deving to not see much improvement. If he's doing compiling or web-dev transpiling kinda stuff, I'm really surprised he's not seeing better gains.
- dr_zoidberg 6y ago
  I recently got a chance to use a 1005g1 (lower end i3 of Icelake family) and was quite surprised. I had it in my hands a bit more than a week before we had to send it back due to issues (SSD "died" and resurrected 3 times in 10 days, was definitely faulty). Felt definitely faster than the 7200u I keep using, though I didn't get much of a chance to benchmark both. I also noticed that, despite having a much weaker battery (some 36W/hr mess), it managed to pull 6hs on a single charge, on merit of dropping to 1.2Ghz as fast as it could (though it quickly climbed to 3.4Ghz if required).
- fomine3 6y ago
  It's not well known due to Intel's fab failure, but Ice Lake is huge improvement for IPC and perf/watt.
  - whynotminot 6y ago
    Ice lake definitely brings IPC improvements, but there’s a big asterisk: it can’t clock as high as their 14nm parts. So results can be a little mixed. It’s clearly pulling more weight at lower clocks but lacks the high frequency performance of intel’s hella refined at this point 14nm process. And that’s what makes Tiger Lake interesting. It’s all the good stuff Ice Lake has going for it, but now Intel is able to take off the training wheels.
PragmaticPulp 6y ago
> Anecdote: a family member and software dev just bought the latest macbook pro coming from about an 8 year old macbook pro. Apparently he doesn't perceive much real world performance difference between the 2 machines. He said single core synthetic benchmarks were higher, but not by much. It really depends on the workload. My old MacBook Pro feels the same as the newer model 98% of the time that I'm using it, but I really appreciate the extra RAM and double the core count when I need it. Reducing build times from 30 seconds down to 15 seconds doesn't sound like much when you're not pressing the compile button very often, but it really does help improve my engagement and focus. The newer graphics cards are also much better at handling large and high-resolution external monitors. The difference isn't pronounced if you're just using the built-in laptop screen, but start using multiple external 4K+ monitors and the faster GPU starts to shine.
- parsimo2010 6y ago
  Also anecdotally, I'd say the only things that would make a clearly noticeable performance difference to a layperson or casual computer user from the last few years would be: 1. If they previously had less than 4GB of memory and were often swapping 2. If they previously had a spinning HDD and moved to an SSD 3. If they previously had a really low end CPU like something outside the Core range, and moved to an i5 or better Beyond that, all the other stuff is either a marginal performance gain or a convenience feature. The only other "must have" thing from the last few years that I wouldn't want to lose is a high res monitor, but that falls into the convenience category for me and not performance. Power users like your family member got quantifiable benefit from performance upgrades over the years, but if they were already running decent hardware like a Macbook Pro, they didn't get any life altering upgrades. Taking 15 seconds to compile vs 30 is definitely faster, but you still have to sit and wait each time you push the button, so any habits that you learned from the 30 second pause will probably continue.
  - Taek 6y ago
    In my opinion the jump from 1080p to 4K is as significant as the jump from hdd to ssd. That's a lot of screen real estate and especially when programming I put it to use.
throwaway4good 6y ago
I did a similar shift. I would say the new one is quite a bit faster.
- rpastuszak 6y ago
  And much hotter! I’m happy with the purchase but sometimes the machine gets so hot I can barely use it.
  - throwaway4good 6y ago
    True but there is no denying that it is a much faster machine.
gruez 6y ago
>He said single core synthetic benchmarks were higher, but not by much. Really? i7-9750H (from 2020) scores more than twice as high in cinebench single threaded than i7-3615QM (from 2012) https://hwbot.org/benchmark/cinebench_-_r15/rankings?hardwareTypeId=processor_5870&cores=6 https://hwbot.org/benchmark/cinebench_-_r15/rankings?hardwar... https://hwbot.org/benchmark/cinebench_-_r15/rankings?hardwareTypeId=processor_2668&cores=4 https://hwbot.org/benchmark/cinebench_-_r15/rankings?hardwar...
sitkack 6y ago
Like the move away from clock speed to signal computational power, focusing on the XXnm process for a cpu isn't something the user should use as a selection factor. Dollar cost per compute, Watt-hr/compute, latency, io bandwidth, running on real world workloads. The process size is a red herring. Any increases in single node performance are not red herrings and should be called out. This is excellent news.
lelandbatey 6y ago
On the topic of noticing performance improvements, I'd definitely say that we've plateaued as far as "general snappyness" in all aspects but one: high-refresh rate, low latency displays. I recently upgraded my monitor from a Dell U3014 to an OMEN 27i (it's gaudy and "gamer" oriented, but it was the best I could get in an afternoon at a physical store). That's an upgrade from a 60 Hz monitor to a 165 Hz monitor, and a significant (though not numerically measured so far) drop in input delay, some tens-of-milliseconds. This has been the biggest improvement in "snappyness" that I've experienced since I moved to solid-state storage 10 years ago.
chx 6y ago
There's only 15-20% IPC increase from Ivy Bridge (which a 2012 Macbook Pro would've used) to Skylake, there's a similar increase once again to Ice Lake but the clock has actually dropped from 2.5 to 2.0 at least on the 13" side (at least that's what everymac tells me). It is only the core count that shows an increase and their use case might not be more than two cores.
qes 6y ago
> a family member and software dev just bought the latest macbook pro coming from about an 8 year old macbook pro. Apparently he doesn't perceive much real world performance difference between the 2 machines. I'd say the same thing about upgrading from an i7-6800K (2016 Broadwell-E) to a Threadripper 3960X. Barely a difference (my main work is a ~250k loc c# solution, also a similar medium-ish sized Angular app).
- marmaduke 6y ago
  Maybe your build systems work incrementally or otherwise don’t use 4x the cores? A Ryzen with the higher clock speed might have been a better choice.
- sdflhasjd 6y ago
  I went from a i7-4770k to an AMD 3900X and my workload is almost identical. The difference has been absolutely night-and-day
agumonkey 6y ago
what about power consumption ? and igpu perf ?
danudey 6y ago
> Anecdote: a family member and software dev just bought the latest macbook pro coming from about an 8 year old macbook pro. Apparently he doesn't perceive much real world performance difference between the 2 machines. He said single core synthetic benchmarks were higher, but not by much. Honestly, I think this speaks to the quality of Apple's hardware and engineering (8 years ago), combined with the lack of serious improvement from Intel lately. That said, one thing I've noticed when doing IT and desktop support is that, unless someone's hardware is woefully inadequate, they won't notice a huge change going from slower to faster, but they will notice faster to slower after they've been using it for a week or two.
foobiekr 6y ago
It doesn't help that Catalina seems to have some serious performance regressions. As one of may examples, set up an SMB3 connection to a network-attached storage device and then write a short program that uses two or three threads that walk a big director calling stat and lstat on every file. For large complex file hierarchies, Catalina (unlike Mojave) will start stuttering the entire UI and media playback. "rclone" with --transfers=3 can bring a 2019 mbp to its knees, like Windows 3.1 writing to a floppy disk.
SkyPuncher 6y ago
> Anecdote: a family member and software dev just bought the latest macbook pro coming from about an 8 year old macbook pro. Apparently he doesn't perceive much real world performance difference between the 2 machines. He said single core synthetic benchmarks were higher, but not by much. I'm in a not dissimilar position with my (older) personal laptop and my (newish) work laptop. Two things I notice: * Battery life. My work laptop lasts longer on battery because it uses less power to do the same amount of work. Not really a problem 99% of the time when I'm plugged into an outlet. * Compile times. Work laptop is much faster at compiling, but this is really only noticeable on cold-builds. Incremental builds are fast enough in both cases.
Spooky23 6y ago
I run a pretty big VDI environment — my observation is that the the latest gen stuff on Xeon is about the same as the Haswell era gear, and slower for some use cases. We’re actually planning on running that gear longer and moving people with more memory needs to newer gear with more memory — it’s all about the maintenance cost curve. We can get much more memory now with the same density, which offsets the CPU suckage.
- ci5er 6y ago
  Is that network constrained?
  - Spooky23 6y ago
    No, we’re blessed with lots and lots of network capacity. It’s possible to have a peak demand that would saturate one of the fabrics, but our usage patterns allow us to avoid that.
brandonmenc 6y ago
> Anecdote: a family member and software dev just bought the latest macbook pro coming from about an 8 year old macbook pro. Apparently he doesn't perceive much real world performance difference between the 2 machines. He said single core synthetic benchmarks were higher, but not by much. I just upgraded my 13" MBP from a 2017 i7 to the 2020 i7. Single core benchmarks are basically the same but it's also running at 2/3 the clock speed, so much cooler. Plus two additional cores.
macjohnmcc 6y ago
This is why I haven't plunked down the money to go to the 2019 model when my early 2013 model isn't quite half as fast. The only thing I will be missing is that this laptop won't be able to run the new OS coming out in the fall.
- srtjstjsj 6y ago
  Since 2017 (and much worse in 2019 version) the (15") MBP dGPU overheats whenever it is use (including whenever external monitor is used) due to a driver bug. Stay away
vijaybritto 6y ago
For me, the perceived performance improvements have been always slower. The only mind blowing perf improvement was when I first used SSD, Thunderbolt/USB-C. The other things like RAM and CPU are hard to notice unless we are doing some computation heavy tasks like video editing. I also notice windows starting up faster than it used to before, but I know its because of the SSDs and caching. These 20% and 30% YOY improvements are simply not worthy to invest in because the returns are negligible for me.

tashoecraft 6y ago

Worked swapped out my mid 2015, 2-core 16gb with a 2019 8 core, 32gb, and this machine is night and day better. It's so much faster at every task I throw at it.

ithkuil 6y ago
I concur. The machine "feels" not much faster because of the OS, but raw computation speed like compilation etc are noticeably faster
burntcookie90 6y ago
What is the difference between the storage drives?
srtjstjsj 6y ago
In 2015 the 15" was 4-core.
- tashoecraft 6y ago
  It was a 13’

joakleaf 6y ago

I agree. I don't feel much difference between the 15" MB-Pro i7 4-core from 2014 and the i9 8-core from 2019. The i9 really isn't noticeable faster on single core. Instead it gets hotter and its fans starts sooner. So I recommend keeping the old one if you have it.

iKevinShah 6y ago
Wouldn't newer ones be more power-efficient as compared to the older one? I remember reading a post on HN which stated the OP buying older, high spec hardware for cheaper than latest one and almost all comments pointed to power-efficient thing
- drran 6y ago
  Newer processors do the same amount of work faster using multiple cores, so they burn same amount of energy in shorter period of time.
  - clinta 6y ago
    But newer processors use less power at idle, and doing work faster means it can spend more time at that idle, low-power state.
    - drran 6y ago
      Yes, of course. Processors are idle most of the time anyway, but single processor has more time to dissipate heat passively doing same amount of work (e.g. 2% work, 98% idle), while multiple processors, e.g. 4, will use same amount of energy 4x faster (0.5% work, 99.5% idle), so fan will kick in.
- srtjstjsj 6y ago
  The dGPU is much hotter due to a no-downclocking driver bug that is worse on a chip that is more powerful, and bad software that wastes CPU cycles had more cycles to waste.
- 6y ago

whynotminot 6y ago

FWIW, I upgraded to one of the 2020 MBP Ice Lake machines. I've seen much, much improved CPU and GPU performance that makes my daily life better. I think much of the increase comes from going from dual core to quad core and perhaps not as much the single core gains, but still, I'd be curious what kind of software he's deving to not see much improvement. If he's doing compiling or web-dev transpiling kinda stuff, I'm really surprised he's not seeing better gains.

dr_zoidberg 6y ago
I recently got a chance to use a 1005g1 (lower end i3 of Icelake family) and was quite surprised. I had it in my hands a bit more than a week before we had to send it back due to issues (SSD "died" and resurrected 3 times in 10 days, was definitely faulty). Felt definitely faster than the 7200u I keep using, though I didn't get much of a chance to benchmark both. I also noticed that, despite having a much weaker battery (some 36W/hr mess), it managed to pull 6hs on a single charge, on merit of dropping to 1.2Ghz as fast as it could (though it quickly climbed to 3.4Ghz if required).
fomine3 6y ago
It's not well known due to Intel's fab failure, but Ice Lake is huge improvement for IPC and perf/watt.
- whynotminot 6y ago
  Ice lake definitely brings IPC improvements, but there’s a big asterisk: it can’t clock as high as their 14nm parts. So results can be a little mixed. It’s clearly pulling more weight at lower clocks but lacks the high frequency performance of intel’s hella refined at this point 14nm process. And that’s what makes Tiger Lake interesting. It’s all the good stuff Ice Lake has going for it, but now Intel is able to take off the training wheels.

PragmaticPulp 6y ago

> Anecdote: a family member and software dev just bought the latest macbook pro coming from about an 8 year old macbook pro. Apparently he doesn't perceive much real world performance difference between the 2 machines. He said single core synthetic benchmarks were higher, but not by much. It really depends on the workload. My old MacBook Pro feels the same as the newer model 98% of the time that I'm using it, but I really appreciate the extra RAM and double the core count when I need it. Reducing build times from 30 seconds down to 15 seconds doesn't sound like much when you're not pressing the compile button very often, but it really does help improve my engagement and focus. The newer graphics cards are also much better at handling large and high-resolution external monitors. The difference isn't pronounced if you're just using the built-in laptop screen, but start using multiple external 4K+ monitors and the faster GPU starts to shine.

parsimo2010 6y ago
Also anecdotally, I'd say the only things that would make a clearly noticeable performance difference to a layperson or casual computer user from the last few years would be: 1. If they previously had less than 4GB of memory and were often swapping 2. If they previously had a spinning HDD and moved to an SSD 3. If they previously had a really low end CPU like something outside the Core range, and moved to an i5 or better Beyond that, all the other stuff is either a marginal performance gain or a convenience feature. The only other "must have" thing from the last few years that I wouldn't want to lose is a high res monitor, but that falls into the convenience category for me and not performance. Power users like your family member got quantifiable benefit from performance upgrades over the years, but if they were already running decent hardware like a Macbook Pro, they didn't get any life altering upgrades. Taking 15 seconds to compile vs 30 is definitely faster, but you still have to sit and wait each time you push the button, so any habits that you learned from the 30 second pause will probably continue.
- Taek 6y ago
  In my opinion the jump from 1080p to 4K is as significant as the jump from hdd to ssd. That's a lot of screen real estate and especially when programming I put it to use.

throwaway4good 6y ago

I did a similar shift. I would say the new one is quite a bit faster.

rpastuszak 6y ago
And much hotter! I’m happy with the purchase but sometimes the machine gets so hot I can barely use it.
- throwaway4good 6y ago
  True but there is no denying that it is a much faster machine.

gruez 6y ago

>He said single core synthetic benchmarks were higher, but not by much. Really? i7-9750H (from 2020) scores more than twice as high in cinebench single threaded than i7-3615QM (from 2012) https://hwbot.org/benchmark/cinebench_-_r15/rankings?hardwareTypeId=processor_5870&cores=6 https://hwbot.org/benchmark/cinebench_-_r15/rankings?hardwar... https://hwbot.org/benchmark/cinebench_-_r15/rankings?hardwareTypeId=processor_2668&cores=4 https://hwbot.org/benchmark/cinebench_-_r15/rankings?hardwar...

sitkack 6y ago

Like the move away from clock speed to signal computational power, focusing on the XXnm process for a cpu isn't something the user should use as a selection factor. Dollar cost per compute, Watt-hr/compute, latency, io bandwidth, running on real world workloads. The process size is a red herring. Any increases in single node performance are not red herrings and should be called out. This is excellent news.

lelandbatey 6y ago

On the topic of noticing performance improvements, I'd definitely say that we've plateaued as far as "general snappyness" in all aspects but one: high-refresh rate, low latency displays. I recently upgraded my monitor from a Dell U3014 to an OMEN 27i (it's gaudy and "gamer" oriented, but it was the best I could get in an afternoon at a physical store). That's an upgrade from a 60 Hz monitor to a 165 Hz monitor, and a significant (though not numerically measured so far) drop in input delay, some tens-of-milliseconds. This has been the biggest improvement in "snappyness" that I've experienced since I moved to solid-state storage 10 years ago.

chx 6y ago

There's only 15-20% IPC increase from Ivy Bridge (which a 2012 Macbook Pro would've used) to Skylake, there's a similar increase once again to Ice Lake but the clock has actually dropped from 2.5 to 2.0 at least on the 13" side (at least that's what everymac tells me). It is only the core count that shows an increase and their use case might not be more than two cores.

qes 6y ago

> a family member and software dev just bought the latest macbook pro coming from about an 8 year old macbook pro. Apparently he doesn't perceive much real world performance difference between the 2 machines. I'd say the same thing about upgrading from an i7-6800K (2016 Broadwell-E) to a Threadripper 3960X. Barely a difference (my main work is a ~250k loc c# solution, also a similar medium-ish sized Angular app).

marmaduke 6y ago
Maybe your build systems work incrementally or otherwise don’t use 4x the cores? A Ryzen with the higher clock speed might have been a better choice.
sdflhasjd 6y ago
I went from a i7-4770k to an AMD 3900X and my workload is almost identical. The difference has been absolutely night-and-day

agumonkey 6y ago

what about power consumption ? and igpu perf ?

danudey 6y ago

> Anecdote: a family member and software dev just bought the latest macbook pro coming from about an 8 year old macbook pro. Apparently he doesn't perceive much real world performance difference between the 2 machines. He said single core synthetic benchmarks were higher, but not by much. Honestly, I think this speaks to the quality of Apple's hardware and engineering (8 years ago), combined with the lack of serious improvement from Intel lately. That said, one thing I've noticed when doing IT and desktop support is that, unless someone's hardware is woefully inadequate, they won't notice a huge change going from slower to faster, but they will notice faster to slower after they've been using it for a week or two.

foobiekr 6y ago

It doesn't help that Catalina seems to have some serious performance regressions. As one of may examples, set up an SMB3 connection to a network-attached storage device and then write a short program that uses two or three threads that walk a big director calling stat and lstat on every file. For large complex file hierarchies, Catalina (unlike Mojave) will start stuttering the entire UI and media playback. "rclone" with --transfers=3 can bring a 2019 mbp to its knees, like Windows 3.1 writing to a floppy disk.

SkyPuncher 6y ago

> Anecdote: a family member and software dev just bought the latest macbook pro coming from about an 8 year old macbook pro. Apparently he doesn't perceive much real world performance difference between the 2 machines. He said single core synthetic benchmarks were higher, but not by much. I'm in a not dissimilar position with my (older) personal laptop and my (newish) work laptop. Two things I notice: * Battery life. My work laptop lasts longer on battery because it uses less power to do the same amount of work. Not really a problem 99% of the time when I'm plugged into an outlet. * Compile times. Work laptop is much faster at compiling, but this is really only noticeable on cold-builds. Incremental builds are fast enough in both cases.

Spooky23 6y ago

I run a pretty big VDI environment — my observation is that the the latest gen stuff on Xeon is about the same as the Haswell era gear, and slower for some use cases. We’re actually planning on running that gear longer and moving people with more memory needs to newer gear with more memory — it’s all about the maintenance cost curve. We can get much more memory now with the same density, which offsets the CPU suckage.

ci5er 6y ago
Is that network constrained?
- Spooky23 6y ago
  No, we’re blessed with lots and lots of network capacity. It’s possible to have a peak demand that would saturate one of the fabrics, but our usage patterns allow us to avoid that.

brandonmenc 6y ago

macjohnmcc 6y ago

This is why I haven't plunked down the money to go to the 2019 model when my early 2013 model isn't quite half as fast. The only thing I will be missing is that this laptop won't be able to run the new OS coming out in the fall.

srtjstjsj 6y ago
Since 2017 (and much worse in 2019 version) the (15") MBP dGPU overheats whenever it is use (including whenever external monitor is used) due to a driver bug. Stay away

vijaybritto 6y ago

For me, the perceived performance improvements have been always slower. The only mind blowing perf improvement was when I first used SSD, Thunderbolt/USB-C. The other things like RAM and CPU are hard to notice unless we are doing some computation heavy tasks like video editing. I also notice windows starting up faster than it used to before, but I know its because of the SSDs and caching. These 20% and 30% YOY improvements are simply not worthy to invest in because the returns are negligible for me.