New 13" rMBP got discrete GPU?

[Zink]

Actually, the base MBA 2012 model is 47% to 24% (Turbo Boost taken into account) slower than the Pro model. The max upgrade of the Air model is 45% to 12.5% (again, Turbo Boost taken into account) slower than the i7 Pro model once again, so it's actually quite slow. Turbo Boost does not kick in except for short intervals because the thermal profile of the MacBook Air is not adequate to sustain the load for a longer period of time.

Not to mention Intel HD 4000 in the air is 80% slower than Intel HD 4000 in the Pro when it doesn't get a boost from Turbo.

So the Pro machine is still worth it if you want a faster Integrated GPU and a higher resolution screen. Anyone who cares enough about the Pro machine would take their time to research and look things up.

It's likely the Thunderbolt ports were routed through GT 650M in the rMBP, so when you force Intel HD 4000, it can't reach them to display anything.

I'm actually thinking Apple also requested Intel to increase the base clocks of the Intel HD 4000 in the rMBP 13"... judging from the fact that they pushed more VRAM to it.

Say... the ULV models have 350MHz base clocks, the regular volt models have 650MHz base clocks.

I'd say it's not unlikely to see a 800MHz base clocks in the modified cores... but then... I may just be grabbing at straws, and Apple really just increased VRAM.

So here are the magic 22nm chips we’re talking about, they’re very similar except for frequency and thermals:

Base 2012 MB Air 13
i5-3427U 1.8 GHZ: 2.6 GHz 2 core turbo, 2.8 GHz max single core
HD 4000: 350 MHz – 1150 MHz max

Base 2012 MB Pro 13
i5-3210M 2.5: 2.9 GHz 2 core turbo, 3.1 GHz max single core
HD 4000: 650 MHz – 1100 MHz max

Benchmark choice shouldn’t really matter here because these CPUs are identical, just different clocks and thermal environment. According to Notebookcheck, the Air can finish the multithreaded benchmark wPrime 2.0 1024m in 664 seconds while the Pro can do it in 575 seconds. That’s 87% of the pro’s score while running for 11 minutes with the CPU pegged.
They also tested for throttling by looping Cinebench R11.5 multithreaded 50 times and did not see a drop in score. The MBA hits 91% of the MBP’s performance even while doing this long render.

Extended multithreaded workloads don't seem to bring the Air off it's turbo clocks and it obviously does very well vs. the Pro using a single core where the thermal disadvantage matters less. Base clocks matter deceptively little; If the CPU has extra thermal headroom it will run at Turbo clocks and if it is too hot it will throttle right down bellow base clock if necessary. The CPU goes to some some super low clock speed at idle so I think base clock speed can be regarded as a number mostly for marketing purposes.

The Air also scores within 1% of the Pro in every 3DMark bench. The Air has the slightly higher max HD 4000 turbo and it would seem that Turbo clocks are being used for it to match the Pro. To stay this cool the air puts out noticeably more noise but it is amazing that it runs without significant throttling. I bet the new 13" Pro with dual fans is amazingly silent with only a 22nm dual core to cool. It will be interesting to see what Intel did for Apple with the IGP in this new 13” Pro. With all that cooling the penalty for turning up HD 4000's clock speed might be worth it to make using that resolution smoother.

Source:
http://www.notebookcheck.net/Review-Apple-MacBook-Air-13-Mid-2012-Subnotebook.80041.0.html
http://www.notebookcheck.net/Review-Apple-MacBook-Pro-13-2-5-GHz-Mid-2012-Notebook.79640.0.html

 

[kLy]

To stay this cool the air puts out noticeably more noise but it is amazing that it runs without significant throttling. I bet the new 13" Pro with dual fans is amazingly silent with only a 22nm dual core to cool. It will be interesting to see what Intel did for Apple with the IGP in this new 13” Pro. With all that cooling the penalty for turning up HD 4000's clock speed might be worth it to make using that resolution smoother.

This is very interesting Makes sense then with the double fan thermal design even though it only has IGP.

Is there a way a current 13" rMBP user could test what this clock is to verify?

 

[runawayprisoner]

So here are the magic 22nm chips we’re talking about, they’re very similar except for frequency and thermals:

Base 2012 MB Air 13
i5-3427U 1.8 GHZ: 2.6 GHz 2 core turbo, 2.8 GHz max single core
HD 4000: 350 MHz – 1150 MHz max

Base 2012 MB Pro 13
i5-3210M 2.5: 2.9 GHz 2 core turbo, 3.1 GHz max single core
HD 4000: 650 MHz – 1100 MHz max

Benchmark choice shouldn’t really matter here because these CPUs are identical, just different clocks and thermal environment. According to Notebookcheck, the Air can finish the multithreaded benchmark wPrime 2.0 1024m in 664 seconds while the Pro can do it in 575 seconds. That’s 87% of the pro’s score while running for 11 minutes with the CPU pegged.
They also tested for throttling by looping Cinebench R11.5 multithreaded 50 times and did not see a drop in score. The MBA hits 91% of the MBP’s performance even while doing this long render.

Extended multithreaded workloads don't seem to bring the Air off it's turbo clocks and it obviously does very well vs. the Pro using a single core where the thermal disadvantage matters less. Base clocks matter deceptively little; If the CPU has extra thermal headroom it will run at Turbo clocks and if it is too hot it will throttle right down bellow base clock if necessary. The CPU goes to some some super low clock speed at idle so I think base clock speed can be regarded as a number mostly for marketing purposes.

The Air also scores within 1% of the Pro in every 3DMark bench. The Air has the slightly higher max HD 4000 turbo and it would seem that Turbo clocks are being used for it to match the Pro. To stay this cool the air puts out noticeably more noise but it is amazing that it runs without significant throttling. I bet the new 13" Pro with dual fans is amazingly silent with only a 22nm dual core to cool. It will be interesting to see what Intel did for Apple with the IGP in this new 13” Pro. With all that cooling the penalty for turning up HD 4000's clock speed might be worth it to make using that resolution smoother.

Source:
http://www.notebookcheck.net/Review-Apple-MacBook-Air-13-Mid-2012-Subnotebook.80041.0.html
http://www.notebookcheck.net/Review-Apple-MacBook-Pro-13-2-5-GHz-Mid-2012-Notebook.79640.0.html

Few things...

Cinebench is no longer a good throttling tool.

It doesn't do anything to the 15" MacBooks with quad-core CPUs, either.

You'll likely see throttling in games, though, if you do any gaming at all:

Source: http://www.anandtech.com/show/6023/the-nextgen-macbook-pro-with-retina-display-review/12

Similarly, any workload that is longer than 30 minutes should start showing signs of throttling. I know this is not a MacBook Air comparison, but it shows just how light of a load Cinebench has become. And thus the throttling test is not very valid.

But you are right. The performance of the 2.0GHz Core i7 Air is pretty close to the 2.9GHz i7 Pro. Like I said, it can be within 20 - 10% once Turbo kicks in... Especially for the i7 model. Here's a more in-line chart of benchmarks that shows what I'm trying to say:

Source: http://www.macworld.com/article/1167418/ultimate_macbook_air_2012_models_put_to_the_test.html

Incidentally, the i5 Air is also proportionally 80 - 90% the i7 version on average.

Other differences is actually quite hard to say because the Pro version comes default with an HDD... and the Air comes with an SSD. SSDs do skewer benchmark scores... even if it's pure encoding or pure decoding workloads (as things still have to be loaded from storage to encode/decode).

I think the key here is that the 2012 Air model is clearly the better value (especially the 11.6" machine) compared to the Pro machines... even taking performance into account. However, if you really need that extra 10 - 20% performance over time, then the Pro machine is worth the investment. There's nothing you can do on the Air that helps you grab that extra 10 - 20% performance.

Plus if you compare the i5 Air to the i7 Pro, the difference in performance actually goes up to about 40 - 20%, and with regards to the 13" model, the i7 Pro is $100 cheaper than the i7 Air.

 

[Zink]

I agree that some CPU loads are hotter than others but I don’t think you've shown that Cinebench or wPrime are lighter than any professional workload.

I would hope your MBPR doesn't throttle under any CPU loads so I don’t know what it working properly shows. It has a dual fan cooling system designed to cool the 45W CPU and 45W GPU simultaneously with minimal throttling. Run something that only uses the CPU and I think there is plenty of thermal headroom. As for the Air, I still can’t find any evidence of reduced performance due to throttling. I guess I could look for some kind of burn test but I don’t think that helps users choose Air vs Pro.

No one lists how long they run the benchmarks for but I haven’t found any demonstration of throttling on the 13" Air. Ananad even says in his 2012 MBA review “with no discrete GPU, thermal throttling isn't really a problem” for the 11" Air. Do you have any evidence to back up the throttling past 30 minutes figure? From my experience with laptops, temperatures level off much quicker (5 min?).

From the images you posted, base 13" i5 Air vs 13" i7 Pro:
The Portal 2 test they ran shows the Air hitting 86% of what the 13" i7 Pro can do even though the i7 has GPU clocks 8% higher and a 31% CPU clock advantage. Cinebench CPU is at 76%, right in line with having 77% of the clock speed of the top i7 model. The H.264 encoding test in Handbrake is also right at 77%. Other tests that put the Air bellow the i7 Pro are 88% in Cinebench OpenGL, 83% in Mathematica 8, and 97% for processing in Photoshop. I understand that these numbers are boosted by the SSD, but it does show a lack of throttling so we can justify using clock speed to compare performance.

This is comparing the cheapest 13" Air with the CPU that is in the $1900 13" Retina. If you adjust the 77% scores to account for the base Air having 90% of the CPU frequency of the base 13" Retina, then even video encoding is right at 90%.

Comparing the base model 13” Air and Pro as I was originally, I can find no benchmark where the Air scores less than 87% of the Pro. If we consider that the Air and Retina both have similar SSDs, that means the $1300 8GB air gets you 87% to 100% of the $1700 Retina model’s performance in any given task. If the Retina model has a tweaked HD 4000, then there may be some games where it is faster than that but hopefully gaming is not be a big part of why someone might buy a $1700 laptop with only an IGP.

My first comment should have said 90%:

The 13" air has 80-90% of the cpu/gpu performance of this machine and as high of a resolution as you'd need without retina x2 scaling. 128GB, 8GB RAM and $400 cheaper. All of the extra cost is to have a few ports or ultra res and IPS. Not worth it for most people, I guess that's why it is a MB Pro.

 

[Pia]

The 13" MBP is such a useless design. Why do they make another computer that offers basically nothing over the 13" Air? Why won't they offer anything smaller than 15" with decent GPU?

For me, 13" is about the upper limit of where I want to be for portability, but I'd be glad to pay a little bit in price, weight and thickness to get a discrete GPU and be able to reasonably play modern games on the go.

That said, they don't offer reasonable GPUs on any desktop machine either.

 

[Ciber]

The 13" MBP is such a useless design. Why do they make another computer that offers basically nothing over the 13" Air? Why won't they offer anything smaller than 15" with decent GPU?

For me, 13" is about the upper limit of where I want to be for portability, but I'd be glad to pay a little bit in price, weight and thickness to get a discrete GPU and be able to reasonably play modern games on the go.

That said, they don't offer reasonable GPUs on any desktop machine either.

How is it that people still don't understand that Apple has no interest in making gaming laptops? They make laptops for a totally different market. Alienware has you covered if you need a huge, heavy, plastic machine with loud fans that runs for an hour on battery power while playing a game. There ARE tradeoffs to what you want.

I'm perfectly happy with my Apple laptops that do what i need them to do, WORK...

 

[Pia]

How is it that people still don't understand that Apple has no interest in making gaming laptops? They make laptops for a totally different market. Alienware has you covered if you need a huge, heavy, plastic machine with loud fans that runs for an hour on battery power while playing a game. There ARE tradeoffs to what you want.

I'm perfectly happy with my Apple laptops that do what i need them to do, WORK...

I didn't ask for a gaming laptop nor did I ask for a top-of-the-line GPU. I asked for a 13" laptop that has a better than [bottom] tier GPU, so that I would have a reason to upgrade from my existing Air. What they released is just an Air with another name. Why offer two Airs and no actual Pro machines when they could offer an Air and an actual Pro machine?

I would also have use for a better GPU for light 3D modeling as well as graphics programming. You know, WORK.

Which is more important for WORK, shaving a few fractions of an inch off the computer so you look more stylish at Starbucks while accomplishing the same you could accomplish with an Air, or putting in more functionality? The old 13" MBP chassis was already small and light enough to be very mobile, and it would have had room for a discrete GPU after ditching optical drive and mechanical HD.

Same problem with their desktops. They are completely failing to present reasonable GPU options.

No profanity in the tech forums please
-ViRGE

 

[ViRGE]

Why won't they offer anything smaller than 15" with decent GPU?

Space, cooling. Take a look at the 13" MBP disassemblies; there's absolutely nowhere to stick a GPU the way Apple builds them.

 

[runawayprisoner]

Space, cooling. Take a look at the 13" MBP disassemblies; there's absolutely nowhere to stick a GPU the way Apple builds them.

Actually, the rMBP 15" didn't dedicate that much space to the dGPU, nor did it dedicate any more cooling power.

Here's the board of the 13" rMBP (taken directly from iFixit):

It's just an extra chip on the board. In fact, the rMBP 15" should have less space since it's thinner than the 13" rMBP.

I think Apple's decision probably has more to do with battery life than with space or cooling.

But if it's anything to do with space, it's probably that... portion they dedicated to the SSD drive underneath the trackpad. It's actually big enough that you can fit a regular 2.5" drive in there... although not the same drives that are 9.5mm in depth, so you still can't easily update the SSD on the 13" rMBP.

See, they could have easily laid the board out the same way they laid out the 15" rMBP (without wasting that much space for the thin SSD controller) and allowed for a dGPU... but somehow, they didn't do it.

 

[Pia]

Space, cooling. Take a look at the 13" MBP disassemblies; there's absolutely nowhere to stick a GPU the way Apple builds them.

Sure there is, if the design incorporates the GPU from the start. Look at the volume and weight difference of 13" MBP and 13" rMBP: about 20% and 25% respectively. That's more than enough for a good GPU. They could have incorporated a mid-tier mobile GPU and still slimmed the computer down slightly or added extra battery. Instead, they chose to make another Air, even though Air is a perfectly good Air. It's like they hate functionality.

 

[Zink]

A GPU is not just a chip on a board. Everything that goes on a desktop graphics card is jammed on to the 15" RMBP's motherboard. There is DDR5, the memory bus, PCIe lanes, video out lanes, voltage supply traces, and extra power supply components. It might be possible but it's not that easy and the 13" RMBP is already very expensive so that could be one reason they decided to go this wimpy route. Having a 13" start at $1900 would have made it very close to the 15".

The two fans in the 15" model are at least 50% larger than the new RMBP's fans from those pictures. It wouldn't work to somehow put a GPU in there without making it more powerful than what they designed for a CPU only. Even the 15" RMBP has measurable throttling under normal gaming use with a cooling system designed for that much power. Adding a GPU with an undersized cooling system wouldn't make people happy because it would be running at half speed to stay cool.

That said, it is very strange how they decided to create an open space under the trackpad. Maybe there was a plan to use Fusion Drive with a thin hard drive in that space? It does look like with a complete redesign it should have been possible to jam in at least a dual core with a lower spec GPU using a layout similar to the 15" Retina. They could have also stuck to the old 13" MBP design that is very popular and put a SSD, quad i7, and GPU in it.

But they didn't, so cough up $2200 for the 15". The 13" is just an overpriced pretty screen.

 

[Pia]

Adding a GPU with an undersized cooling system wouldn't make people happy because it would be running at half speed to stay cool.

Sure, if you are going to put in more GPU, you need to put in a corresponding amount of cooling. The 20% volume and 25% weight Apple cut from the MBP 13" chassis would have been plenty for that.

The 15" really isn't in the same class of portability as the 13":s. I found that out way back with a 15" Powerbook. Sold it less than a year after buying it. Since then I have always had a 12" or 13" laptop, and I have it with me on most days. I don't have a car, so when I carry the laptop, I physically carry it every step I'm outside my home. And the 13" form factor is good for using the laptop, not just for carrying. 15" is too much for many places where a 13" still has decent ergonomics - cramped auditoriums, trains, buses, planes, etc.

 

[runawayprisoner]

A GPU is not just a chip on a board. Everything that goes on a desktop graphics card is jammed on to the 15" RMBP's motherboard. There is DDR5, the memory bus, PCIe lanes, video out lanes, voltage supply traces, and extra power supply components.

The GPU, as in "graphics processing unit" is simply just a chip... on any board.

The rest that you mentioned are actually the necessities to get it up and running, but that holds the same for the CPU.

It's like you are saying that the "CPU" is not just a chip on a board... but that one should also consider the RAM, power supply unit, battery, etc... too... Well, I agree, but I think we are having some confusions regarding terminology here.

And in any case, the rest of those things wouldn't have taken up that much since Apple also had the other side of the board.

Apple could have saved up quite a significant amount of space by integrating the SSD in the rMBP 13" the same way they did for the 15" version, and the MacBook Air.

They chose to have a lot of free space underneath the trackpad for some other reason.

Also if you're stacking the price of the rMBP 13" up for the GPU, then the i7 version is just $200 shy of the 15" rMBP. Do you seriously think the dedicated GeForce GT 650M GPU chip + GDDR5 ram modules (1GB of it) + a bigger higher resolution display + a quad-core i7 + bigger battery + extra materials needed to mold the bigger casing + bigger glass for the screen + 50% bigger fans are all worth just $200 difference? Even taking into account additional labor costs and other things?

I already coughed up for my rMBP 15" a long while ago. I'm just baffled at the pricing scheme Apple put for the 13" machine and how they configured it. If there is any logic to this, I'm not seeing it.

 

[Zink]

The 15" really isn't in the same class of portability as the 13":s. I found that out way back with a 15" Powerbook. Sold it less than a year after buying it.

I am still learning this. I went from a 13" ultra-portable that was with me every day to a 15" Thinkpad and it has become my new desktop. I found out I don't really need a laptop with me but the next experiment is to make a go of using an iPad or Nexus 10 at school.

And in any case, the rest of those things wouldn't have taken up that much since Apple also had the other side of the board.
...If there is any logic to this, I'm not seeing it.

There is a 13" teardown and there is no room on the board for a GPU and the necessary components, even with the comparatively undersized fans. That strange trackpad space and silly SSD leave no room for big fans or a bigger motherboard. I agree that they should have boosted performance with either quad i7 option or a GPU and it would have been possible with a proper design.

There is no logic to the pricing, Apple is as crazy as a coconut.

MBA + iPad display - don't rape me discount
$1300 + $499 - 100 = $1700