12 ms·

2014 MacBook Air: Performance benchmarks

87 points by ytch 12y ago

duskwuff 12y ago
Really, really sloppy benchmarking work here -- only four machines were tested, and every one of them had a drive from a different manufacturer. They weren't even all the same size! It's already well-known that Apple sources SSDs (as well as other parts) from a variety of suppliers, and not all of them perform identically. Concluding that the 2014 model is "slower" than the 2013 models from a sample this small is totally inappropriate, though.
- BorisMelnik 12y ago
  Completely agree. I suppose the benchmark tests were a good start, but far from complete. To back up what you said here is a post from 2013 "not all Mac SSD's are the same" http://blog.macsales.com/19008-performance-testing-not-all-2013-macbook-air-ssds-are-the-same http://blog.macsales.com/19008-performance-testing-not-all-2...
- meisterbrendan 12y ago
  Is the variance between manufacturers really that dramatic? If so, as a future buyer, how can I make sure I get the fastest among the ostensibly identical SSDs for a given configuration?
  - macspoofing 12y ago
    Return policy
- Lagged2Death 12y ago
  >Concluding that the 2014 model is "slower" than the 2013 models from a sample this small is totally inappropriate, though. You only need one sample to make the point that it may be slower, and that's very much contrary to expectations.
  - coldtea 12y ago
    He already explained that the expectations are wrong to begin with. 2013 models had drives from different manufactures and some of those were slower than others. Here's an example: Say 2013-A-SSD > 2013-B-SSD and we have the same two A and B SSDs in 2014 machines. Then 2013-A-SSD > 2014-B-SSD. With just one machine (and without knowing the specifics) you can deduce from the above that "2014 drives are slower than 2013s" when in fact they are the exact same 2 models that 2013 Air's had.
    - pdpi 12y ago
      Which still means that, if you buy a 2014 model, you might get a machine that's slower than the 2013 model. It's not always the case, but it _can_ be -- which, as a prospective buyer, is infuriating.
      - shabadoop 12y ago
        >Which still means that, if you buy a 2014 model, you might get a machine that's slower than the 2013 model. I think what you mean is "You might get a machine that's slower than _a_ 2014 model". Assuming every 2014 model performs at the baseline, unless that baseline is lower than the previous generation's you're still getting better performance than the _official_ 2013 model.
        nezza-_- 12y ago
        And which model is the "official" one if not the one that I bought in the Apple Store? There is no official and unofficial one, they're all sold under the same name. If I have a 2013 MBA I expect the SSD when I upgrade to a 2014 one to be at least as fast as the old one.
        coldtea 12y ago
        OK, let's put it this way: Apple doesn't guarrantee you a specific speed, and doesn't tell you you'll get a specific SSD model in your Air. It just tells you you'll get a speedy SSD of X capacity (true), and you're not supposed to obsess over manufacturer and a couple percentage points of performance. Else, you wouldn't have bought the Air, but some custom rig.
- yeukhon 12y ago
  > already well-known that Apple sources SSDs (as well as other parts) from a variety of suppliers Ah. Why would they do that? Someone could spend $3000 on MacBook Pro 16GB + SSD highest spec and risk the chance of getting bad parts? I never knew this was a practice. Is this even common in the industry otherwise Apple?
  - wmf 12y ago
    Apple would probably argue that all the SSDs provide acceptable performance and some of them provide bonus performance beyond what was promised. The specs only mention "PCIe-based flash storage": http://www.apple.com/macbook-air/specs.html http://www.apple.com/macbook-air/specs.html Apple has done this various times in the past, like shipping a 16x DVD drive when they advertised 8x. More problematic was the rMBP where LG LCDs were noticeably lower quality than Samsungs. http://9to5mac.com/2013/03/20/macbook-pro-with-retina-display-problems-in-every-dimension/ http://9to5mac.com/2013/03/20/macbook-pro-with-retina-displa...
    - john2x 12y ago
      Wow, that's unfortunate about the LG vs Samsung screens. How could you tell what screen you have? I'd like to spread awareness about this to my friends.
      - sudhirj 12y ago
        This was pretty easily fixed, though. The technician took one look at it, nodded, and I had it replaced for free while on Christmas + New Year vacation.
        john2x 12y ago
        Maybe in the US. But in the Philippines, we're out of luck. EDIT: I mean about the replacement part. Sure, they'll probably replace it after a several back and forth, plus the replacement will take serveral weeks.
      - nimeshneema 12y ago
- xutopia 12y ago
  What you're saying is scary to me. Does this mean I could buy a Macbook Air and get a slower one than if you buy one?
- konstruktor 12y ago
  Apple are sourcing parts from several component vendors, with varying performance, and name the resulting product exactly the same. They don't even specify what variants exist. How is somebody doing benchmarks supposed to test all possible configurations if they don't know how many exist, and have no way of determining which configuration they are buying?
  - Holbein 12y ago
    Exactly. You could argue that if Apple is happy with this situation where some of its customers get worse products than others, then this is absolutely worth punishing Apple for. And a good way to do this is by publishing benchmark reviews with bad values for the new thing.
    - shabadoop 12y ago
      They all meet a baseline standard, it's just some people get machines that are above those baselines. Yes, sometimes the "good" machine from a previous generation will outperform the baseline from the next generation in a given benchmark, but that's an inevitability of having machines that outperform the baselines of their generation.
      - Pacabel 12y ago
        This really depends on where you set the baseline standard. You may see the worst-performing variants of a given model as defining the baseline, with some being above the baseline. But it's perfectly legitimate to define the baseline at the best-performing variants of a given model, with some unfortunately being below the baseline. Personally, I prefer to set expectations high, and define the baseline based on the best that has been achieved so far. The worst-performing variant from 2014 should still be expected to exceed, or at the very worst be equal to, the best-performing variant from 2013.
celebril 12y ago
And it's still faster than PCs. :)
- tomf64 12y ago
  It has nothing to do with them being Macs vs. PCs, it just depends on who they buy the SSDs from.
- wnevets 12y ago
  my brain just exploded
- Viper007Bond 12y ago
  Apple makes some nice hardware but they are not alone in making good stuff. They have some stiff competition. For example my Sony Vaio Pro is significantly faster than any of the numbers mentioned in the article. It gets nearly 1GB/sec in read speeds: http://i.imgur.com/24GdPiz.png http://i.imgur.com/24GdPiz.png The drive is partitioned so ignore the odd size.
  - huxley 12y ago
    They won't get much stiff competition from Sony: http://www.cnet.com/news/sony-agrees-to-sell-pc-business-revises-forecast-to-loss/ http://www.cnet.com/news/sony-agrees-to-sell-pc-business-rev...
    - Viper007Bond 12y ago
      Going forward, no, but they did in the past and others will step in to fill those shoes. I hear ASUS makes some good stuff currently.
  - SG- 12y ago
    The thing is, you don't need 1GB/sec for an 11-13" laptop.
    - CSDude 12y ago
arielweisberg 12y ago
I will admit I did not read the article. Flash is trending towards fewer higher capacity chips. In some cases this is resulting in less parallelism and slower response times for individual reads and writes. Not saying anything about this article and set of hardware, just in general that this has been my observation with new models of SSDs as they are released. Unfortunately the way most applications are written the response time of SSDs is the primary benefit because they present low concurrency and don't parallelize the procesing of data as it comes off of disk. Still way better than seek times on spinning disk, but far from what could be.
- userbinator 12y ago
  The situation with NAND flash has been pretty disappointing, I think; in the quest for more capacity, manufacturers have been sacrificing other desirable aspects of storage, like write endurance and data retention. In particular, 3-bit and 4-bit MLC are becoming the norm, and they are both slower and less reliable than older 2-bit MLC or SLC, while requiring more complex error correction and bad block management. The relatively increasing fragility of flash storage is never mentioned, and many people don't find out until it's too late --- because the typical consumer only focuses on capacity. I still miss the days when SLC was the norm, and you didn't need complex error-correcting-codes and bad block management. Now SLC is considered "high-end", even in enterprise applications, and becoming rarer to find, while 2-bit MLC, which used to be considered the inferior, consumer-level grade, has also become more difficult to find and a "professional" feature. Considering that endurance and retention decrease exponentially with each additional bit-per-cell while capacity only increases multiplicatively, the tradeoffs don't seem quite so great.
  - wmf 12y ago
    I'm glad TLC exists; the 840 Evo is fast enough and reliable enough and it's much cheaper than a 2-bit MLC SSD.
    - userbinator 12y ago
      I'm not saying it is a bad thing if you understand the tradeoffs and can work within them, but what I'm getting at is that a lot of consumers unfortunately don't. The extreme endurance torture tests that get reported often don't tell the whole story either - the more flash cells are cycled, the "leakier" they become and retention goes down significantly. Figures I've seen for SLC are 10 years retention after 100K P/E cycles, earlier-generation MLC 5 years after 10K P/E cycles, newer MLC is 5 years @1.5~3K, TLC is 1 year @ <1K. Of course retention tests don't make for as interesting news articles as endurance ones since they're almost like watching paint dry, but IMHO they are just as if not more important, and manufacturers should provide warnings that flash-based devices are intrinsically unstable and their retention ability is measured in years. "Bit rot" is a reality with NAND flash. I only hope that people who think they've "backed up" data onto used SSDs, memory cards, and other forms of high-capacity flash don't find that much of it has literally self-erased and disappeared after only a few years.
will_lam 12y ago
Crap - I just bought a new Macbook Air the first day it was available. Oh well, I guess I'll never really notice...
- Synaesthesia 12y ago
  Seeing as the 2013 MacBook Air had 2X as fast an SSD as the 2012 model, which in turn was 2X faster than the 2011 model and he 2011 model feels super snappy, yeah I think you're ok.
  - mpg33 12y ago
    I have the 2010 model...probably time to upgrade...
- ytch 12y ago
  According to the replies above, you can run benchmark by yourself, maybe some Macbook Air still have fast SSDs.
- aleem 12y ago
  Hopefully you'll benefit from a better build. My 2013 MacBook Air has a nasty issue where trackpad doesn't work properly if the machine is tilted even 15 degrees. The adapter has failed once already and the second one stopped charging last week. Whatever you do, get the 3 year care is all I can say.
  - mverwijs 12y ago
    In the Netherlands, there are several shops that are offering 3 year guarantees on all laptops sold. Including Macbooks. Considering the terrible customersupport that I've received multiple times from Apple, I bought my latest Macs at one of those stores.
    - benihana 12y ago
      I'm in America and I've never had anything but incredibly good customer support from Apple. Interesting.
zobzu 12y ago
mixing up machines order and what is in bold for sensationalism much? The 2014 drives were faster than the 2013 in many of the test cases, specially 2nd page.
moloch 12y ago
...and still only 4Gb of memory.
- beedogs 12y ago
  I think a non-anemic amount of memory is the most important feature lacking in the Air. I often find my 4GB 2011 Air chugging and breaking a sweat swapping to "disk" simply because I've had Firefox open for too long. Would it be that difficult for them to finally double the amount of memory in the next base model to 8GB and make 16GB an available option?
  - chucknelson 12y ago
    I agree 4 GB is getting to be a little low for a modern laptop, but I'm curious as to how bad this "chugging" is considering swapping to SSD isn't too bad and is many times faster than any swapping that occurred on those old 5400 RPM drives.
  - jamesbrownuhh 12y ago
    I solved that problem by not using Firefox. (And this is not intended to be snarky - Firefox was my preference, but under near-identical conditions, Firefox exhibited this problem while Safari did not.)
  - jpalomaki 12y ago
    I think this could have something do with 16GB dimms being a new thing and not supported by Intel on the laptop chipsets. Lenovo has a similar problem in their new models. X240 has only one dimm slot and currently supports max 8GB of memory. While investigating the issue I found a discussion[1] where somebody mentioned that Intel would need to add support for these new dimms in the "memory reference code"[2]. [1] http://forums.lenovo.com/t5/X-Series-ThinkPad-Laptops/16GB-memory-for-X240-available-does-it-work/td-p/1476774 http://forums.lenovo.com/t5/X-Series-ThinkPad-Laptops/16GB-m... [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory_Reference_Code http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory_Reference_Code
- TillE 12y ago
  I have 8GB of RAM in my Macbook Air that's over a year old. I just checked, and yes, it's still a $100 upgrade on either model. I had 6GB of RAM in my main development box until very recently. Even ran a few VMs on it. 8GB is a good amount for most power users, especially considering that the limited CPU will probably be your bottleneck first.
rm445 12y ago
Could anyone offer any tips for evaluating processors in this post-megahertz age? My 2012 Macbook Air (base 11" model) has a 1.7 GHz Core i5 processor, yet I understand the 1.4 GHz (Haswell) Core i5 in the latest machines performs significantly better. Is the generation of the processor always the dominant factor nowadays? Is there a convenient way to estimate performance without poring over benchmarks? What are people's favourite sites for finding out about these things?
- Tuna-Fish 12y ago
  > Is the generation of the processor always the dominant factor nowadays? No. > Is there a convenient way to estimate performance without poring over benchmarks? Unless you are willing to quite a lot of time learning, not really. And unless you've been willing to do that, you haven't been able to conveniently estimate performance for about 14 years now. > What are people's favourite sites for finding out about these things? http://www.anandtech.com/bench/ http://www.anandtech.com/bench/ is pretty good, as they standardize all results into a convenient database with easy head-to-head comparisons.
- moe 12y ago
  PassMark: http://www.cpubenchmark.net/ http://www.cpubenchmark.net/
- themaen 12y ago
  http://www.notebookcheck.net/Mobile-Processors-Benchmarklist.2436.0.html http://www.notebookcheck.net/Mobile-Processors-Benchmarklist...
- szatkus 12y ago
  Tomshardware has the good benchmarks for "hacker" usage. In my opinion Phoronix does the best job about benchmarking, but usually you must wait a little.

87 points by ytch 12y ago

Really, really sloppy benchmarking work here -- only four machines were tested, and every one of them had a drive from a different manufacturer. They weren't even all the same size! It's already well-known that Apple sources SSDs (as well as other parts) from a variety of suppliers, and not all of them perform identically. Concluding that the 2014 model is "slower" than the 2013 models from a sample this small is totally inappropriate, though.

BorisMelnik 12y ago
Completely agree. I suppose the benchmark tests were a good start, but far from complete. To back up what you said here is a post from 2013 "not all Mac SSD's are the same" http://blog.macsales.com/19008-performance-testing-not-all-2013-macbook-air-ssds-are-the-same http://blog.macsales.com/19008-performance-testing-not-all-2...
meisterbrendan 12y ago
Is the variance between manufacturers really that dramatic? If so, as a future buyer, how can I make sure I get the fastest among the ostensibly identical SSDs for a given configuration?
- macspoofing 12y ago
  Return policy
Lagged2Death 12y ago
>Concluding that the 2014 model is "slower" than the 2013 models from a sample this small is totally inappropriate, though. You only need one sample to make the point that it may be slower, and that's very much contrary to expectations.
- coldtea 12y ago
  He already explained that the expectations are wrong to begin with. 2013 models had drives from different manufactures and some of those were slower than others. Here's an example: Say 2013-A-SSD > 2013-B-SSD and we have the same two A and B SSDs in 2014 machines. Then 2013-A-SSD > 2014-B-SSD. With just one machine (and without knowing the specifics) you can deduce from the above that "2014 drives are slower than 2013s" when in fact they are the exact same 2 models that 2013 Air's had.
  - pdpi 12y ago
    Which still means that, if you buy a 2014 model, you might get a machine that's slower than the 2013 model. It's not always the case, but it _can_ be -- which, as a prospective buyer, is infuriating.
    - shabadoop 12y ago
      >Which still means that, if you buy a 2014 model, you might get a machine that's slower than the 2013 model. I think what you mean is "You might get a machine that's slower than _a_ 2014 model". Assuming every 2014 model performs at the baseline, unless that baseline is lower than the previous generation's you're still getting better performance than the _official_ 2013 model.
      - nezza-_- 12y ago
        And which model is the "official" one if not the one that I bought in the Apple Store? There is no official and unofficial one, they're all sold under the same name. If I have a 2013 MBA I expect the SSD when I upgrade to a 2014 one to be at least as fast as the old one.
        coldtea 12y ago
        OK, let's put it this way: Apple doesn't guarrantee you a specific speed, and doesn't tell you you'll get a specific SSD model in your Air. It just tells you you'll get a speedy SSD of X capacity (true), and you're not supposed to obsess over manufacturer and a couple percentage points of performance. Else, you wouldn't have bought the Air, but some custom rig.
yeukhon 12y ago
> already well-known that Apple sources SSDs (as well as other parts) from a variety of suppliers Ah. Why would they do that? Someone could spend $3000 on MacBook Pro 16GB + SSD highest spec and risk the chance of getting bad parts? I never knew this was a practice. Is this even common in the industry otherwise Apple?
- wmf 12y ago
  Apple would probably argue that all the SSDs provide acceptable performance and some of them provide bonus performance beyond what was promised. The specs only mention "PCIe-based flash storage": http://www.apple.com/macbook-air/specs.html http://www.apple.com/macbook-air/specs.html Apple has done this various times in the past, like shipping a 16x DVD drive when they advertised 8x. More problematic was the rMBP where LG LCDs were noticeably lower quality than Samsungs. http://9to5mac.com/2013/03/20/macbook-pro-with-retina-display-problems-in-every-dimension/ http://9to5mac.com/2013/03/20/macbook-pro-with-retina-displa...
  - john2x 12y ago
    Wow, that's unfortunate about the LG vs Samsung screens. How could you tell what screen you have? I'd like to spread awareness about this to my friends.
    - sudhirj 12y ago
      This was pretty easily fixed, though. The technician took one look at it, nodded, and I had it replaced for free while on Christmas + New Year vacation.
      - john2x 12y ago
        Maybe in the US. But in the Philippines, we're out of luck. EDIT: I mean about the replacement part. Sure, they'll probably replace it after a several back and forth, plus the replacement will take serveral weeks.
    - nimeshneema 12y ago
xutopia 12y ago
What you're saying is scary to me. Does this mean I could buy a Macbook Air and get a slower one than if you buy one?
konstruktor 12y ago
Apple are sourcing parts from several component vendors, with varying performance, and name the resulting product exactly the same. They don't even specify what variants exist. How is somebody doing benchmarks supposed to test all possible configurations if they don't know how many exist, and have no way of determining which configuration they are buying?
- Holbein 12y ago
  Exactly. You could argue that if Apple is happy with this situation where some of its customers get worse products than others, then this is absolutely worth punishing Apple for. And a good way to do this is by publishing benchmark reviews with bad values for the new thing.
  - shabadoop 12y ago
    They all meet a baseline standard, it's just some people get machines that are above those baselines. Yes, sometimes the "good" machine from a previous generation will outperform the baseline from the next generation in a given benchmark, but that's an inevitability of having machines that outperform the baselines of their generation.
    - Pacabel 12y ago
      This really depends on where you set the baseline standard. You may see the worst-performing variants of a given model as defining the baseline, with some being above the baseline. But it's perfectly legitimate to define the baseline at the best-performing variants of a given model, with some unfortunately being below the baseline. Personally, I prefer to set expectations high, and define the baseline based on the best that has been achieved so far. The worst-performing variant from 2014 should still be expected to exceed, or at the very worst be equal to, the best-performing variant from 2013.

celebril 12y ago

And it's still faster than PCs. :)

tomf64 12y ago
It has nothing to do with them being Macs vs. PCs, it just depends on who they buy the SSDs from.
wnevets 12y ago
my brain just exploded
Viper007Bond 12y ago
Apple makes some nice hardware but they are not alone in making good stuff. They have some stiff competition. For example my Sony Vaio Pro is significantly faster than any of the numbers mentioned in the article. It gets nearly 1GB/sec in read speeds: http://i.imgur.com/24GdPiz.png http://i.imgur.com/24GdPiz.png The drive is partitioned so ignore the odd size.
- huxley 12y ago
  They won't get much stiff competition from Sony: http://www.cnet.com/news/sony-agrees-to-sell-pc-business-revises-forecast-to-loss/ http://www.cnet.com/news/sony-agrees-to-sell-pc-business-rev...
  - Viper007Bond 12y ago
    Going forward, no, but they did in the past and others will step in to fill those shoes. I hear ASUS makes some good stuff currently.
- SG- 12y ago
  The thing is, you don't need 1GB/sec for an 11-13" laptop.
  - CSDude 12y ago

arielweisberg 12y ago

I will admit I did not read the article. Flash is trending towards fewer higher capacity chips. In some cases this is resulting in less parallelism and slower response times for individual reads and writes. Not saying anything about this article and set of hardware, just in general that this has been my observation with new models of SSDs as they are released. Unfortunately the way most applications are written the response time of SSDs is the primary benefit because they present low concurrency and don't parallelize the procesing of data as it comes off of disk. Still way better than seek times on spinning disk, but far from what could be.

userbinator 12y ago
The situation with NAND flash has been pretty disappointing, I think; in the quest for more capacity, manufacturers have been sacrificing other desirable aspects of storage, like write endurance and data retention. In particular, 3-bit and 4-bit MLC are becoming the norm, and they are both slower and less reliable than older 2-bit MLC or SLC, while requiring more complex error correction and bad block management. The relatively increasing fragility of flash storage is never mentioned, and many people don't find out until it's too late --- because the typical consumer only focuses on capacity. I still miss the days when SLC was the norm, and you didn't need complex error-correcting-codes and bad block management. Now SLC is considered "high-end", even in enterprise applications, and becoming rarer to find, while 2-bit MLC, which used to be considered the inferior, consumer-level grade, has also become more difficult to find and a "professional" feature. Considering that endurance and retention decrease exponentially with each additional bit-per-cell while capacity only increases multiplicatively, the tradeoffs don't seem quite so great.
- wmf 12y ago
  I'm glad TLC exists; the 840 Evo is fast enough and reliable enough and it's much cheaper than a 2-bit MLC SSD.
  - userbinator 12y ago
    I'm not saying it is a bad thing if you understand the tradeoffs and can work within them, but what I'm getting at is that a lot of consumers unfortunately don't. The extreme endurance torture tests that get reported often don't tell the whole story either - the more flash cells are cycled, the "leakier" they become and retention goes down significantly. Figures I've seen for SLC are 10 years retention after 100K P/E cycles, earlier-generation MLC 5 years after 10K P/E cycles, newer MLC is 5 years @1.5~3K, TLC is 1 year @ <1K. Of course retention tests don't make for as interesting news articles as endurance ones since they're almost like watching paint dry, but IMHO they are just as if not more important, and manufacturers should provide warnings that flash-based devices are intrinsically unstable and their retention ability is measured in years. "Bit rot" is a reality with NAND flash. I only hope that people who think they've "backed up" data onto used SSDs, memory cards, and other forms of high-capacity flash don't find that much of it has literally self-erased and disappeared after only a few years.

will_lam 12y ago

Crap - I just bought a new Macbook Air the first day it was available. Oh well, I guess I'll never really notice...

Synaesthesia 12y ago
Seeing as the 2013 MacBook Air had 2X as fast an SSD as the 2012 model, which in turn was 2X faster than the 2011 model and he 2011 model feels super snappy, yeah I think you're ok.
- mpg33 12y ago
  I have the 2010 model...probably time to upgrade...
ytch 12y ago
According to the replies above, you can run benchmark by yourself, maybe some Macbook Air still have fast SSDs.
aleem 12y ago
Hopefully you'll benefit from a better build. My 2013 MacBook Air has a nasty issue where trackpad doesn't work properly if the machine is tilted even 15 degrees. The adapter has failed once already and the second one stopped charging last week. Whatever you do, get the 3 year care is all I can say.
- mverwijs 12y ago
  In the Netherlands, there are several shops that are offering 3 year guarantees on all laptops sold. Including Macbooks. Considering the terrible customersupport that I've received multiple times from Apple, I bought my latest Macs at one of those stores.
  - benihana 12y ago
    I'm in America and I've never had anything but incredibly good customer support from Apple. Interesting.

zobzu 12y ago

mixing up machines order and what is in bold for sensationalism much? The 2014 drives were faster than the 2013 in many of the test cases, specially 2nd page.

moloch 12y ago

...and still only 4Gb of memory.

beedogs 12y ago
I think a non-anemic amount of memory is the most important feature lacking in the Air. I often find my 4GB 2011 Air chugging and breaking a sweat swapping to "disk" simply because I've had Firefox open for too long. Would it be that difficult for them to finally double the amount of memory in the next base model to 8GB and make 16GB an available option?
- chucknelson 12y ago
  I agree 4 GB is getting to be a little low for a modern laptop, but I'm curious as to how bad this "chugging" is considering swapping to SSD isn't too bad and is many times faster than any swapping that occurred on those old 5400 RPM drives.
- jamesbrownuhh 12y ago
  I solved that problem by not using Firefox. (And this is not intended to be snarky - Firefox was my preference, but under near-identical conditions, Firefox exhibited this problem while Safari did not.)
- jpalomaki 12y ago
  I think this could have something do with 16GB dimms being a new thing and not supported by Intel on the laptop chipsets. Lenovo has a similar problem in their new models. X240 has only one dimm slot and currently supports max 8GB of memory. While investigating the issue I found a discussion[1] where somebody mentioned that Intel would need to add support for these new dimms in the "memory reference code"[2]. [1] http://forums.lenovo.com/t5/X-Series-ThinkPad-Laptops/16GB-memory-for-X240-available-does-it-work/td-p/1476774 http://forums.lenovo.com/t5/X-Series-ThinkPad-Laptops/16GB-m... [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory_Reference_Code http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory_Reference_Code
TillE 12y ago
I have 8GB of RAM in my Macbook Air that's over a year old. I just checked, and yes, it's still a $100 upgrade on either model. I had 6GB of RAM in my main development box until very recently. Even ran a few VMs on it. 8GB is a good amount for most power users, especially considering that the limited CPU will probably be your bottleneck first.

rm445 12y ago

Could anyone offer any tips for evaluating processors in this post-megahertz age? My 2012 Macbook Air (base 11" model) has a 1.7 GHz Core i5 processor, yet I understand the 1.4 GHz (Haswell) Core i5 in the latest machines performs significantly better. Is the generation of the processor always the dominant factor nowadays? Is there a convenient way to estimate performance without poring over benchmarks? What are people's favourite sites for finding out about these things?

Tuna-Fish 12y ago
> Is the generation of the processor always the dominant factor nowadays? No. > Is there a convenient way to estimate performance without poring over benchmarks? Unless you are willing to quite a lot of time learning, not really. And unless you've been willing to do that, you haven't been able to conveniently estimate performance for about 14 years now. > What are people's favourite sites for finding out about these things? http://www.anandtech.com/bench/ http://www.anandtech.com/bench/ is pretty good, as they standardize all results into a convenient database with easy head-to-head comparisons.
moe 12y ago
PassMark: http://www.cpubenchmark.net/ http://www.cpubenchmark.net/
themaen 12y ago
http://www.notebookcheck.net/Mobile-Processors-Benchmarklist.2436.0.html http://www.notebookcheck.net/Mobile-Processors-Benchmarklist...
szatkus 12y ago
Tomshardware has the good benchmarks for "hacker" usage. In my opinion Phoronix does the best job about benchmarking, but usually you must wait a little.