The MacBook Pro Review (13 & 15-inch): 2011 Brings Sandy Bridge
by Anand Lal Shimpi, Brian Klug & Vivek Gowri on March 10, 2011 4:17 PM EST- Posted in
- Laptops
- Mac
- Apple
- Intel
- MacBook Pro
- Sandy Bridge
Final Words
For as little attention as the 2011 MacBook Pro launch was given by Apple, there sure is a lot to talk about.
The advantages are numerous. With the 13-inch MacBook Pro, under OS X at least, there simply aren't any downsides. You get much better CPU performance over the previous generation. In fact, the new 13 can outperform last year's 15 thanks to Sandy Bridge. The new 13 is quite possibly the best balance of portability and performance. It's the single largest upgrade you'll find in the lineup. If you own a previous generation 13-inch MBP, the upgrade is 100% worth it. Graphics performance is solid under OS X however questionable under Windows. For some reason we actually saw a step back in GPU performance vs. last year's 13-inch MBP when running games in Windows 7.
The 15-inch MacBook Pro is a beast. Although it comes in the same chassis as last year's model, it delivers much more performance. The move to quad-core Sandy Bridge makes the 15-inch MacBook Pro's performance formidable. Whereas I couldn't use the 2010 15 as my primary work machine, with an SSD the 2011 15-inch MBP does just fine.
Displays haven't really changed, which is both good and bad. On the one hand, Apple's MacBook Pros have always used good quality panels. On the other hand I'd like to see a higher res option for the 13-inch display—1280 x 800 is a big turnoff for me with the 13-inch model.
Thunderbolt is a nice addition however I expect that it'll be grossly underused for a while. We'll see some nice Thunderbolt enabled external storage solutions this Spring (helping perpetuate the mobile desktop usage model), but it'll be a while before we get the single-cable carrying USB, Ethernet, FireWire and DisplayPort to a display.
The WiFi improvements are welcome, although surprisingly absent from Apple's marketing collateral. The front facing 720p camera is also a nice touch.
It's not all rosy however. Apple fails to really take advantage of one of Sandy Bridge's biggest features: Quick Sync. The hardware encoder is used in FaceTime HD but you still get some very high CPU usage (at least of a single core). There's no support in QuickTime or iMovie 2011 for Quick Sync as of now, which is a major disappointment.
I mentioned that the 15-inch MacBook Pro is easily a desktop replacement, however you do have to deal with a loud fan under heavier CPU loads. Something a well designed desktop won't bother you with.
SSD support is still problematic. There are far too many reports of drives that don't work properly in the 2011 MacBook Pro, and Apple refuses to validate/ship anything but fairly mainstream SSD solutions. To make matters worse, although TRIM is finally enabled under OS X—it only works on Apple branded SSDs. I can understand Apple's desire to want to avoid dealing with the pitfalls of early SSDs with questionable firmware maturity, but I also believe it's Apple's duty to support as much hardware that's out there in the market today. If Apple offered something with SandForce SF-2200 class performance I'd have less of a bone to pick, but presently it doesn't.
Then there are the concerns about battery life. Under light usage there's a clear improvement over last year's models. The new 15-inch MacBook Pro is good for anywhere between 7—9 hours of light usage. That is assuming you don't have the dGPU running of course, at which point you should start talking about numbers below 5 hours. Even without the discrete GPU enabled, in the hands of a multitasker the new 15-inch MacBook Pro can easily burn through its 77Whr battery quicker than last year's model. While our worst case numbers don't look much lower than the 2010 model, the chances of you getting less than 2.5 hours out of the new 15 are much higher than they were last year.
The new 13-inch model is less of a concern when it comes to battery life. It's still got a 35W TDP dual-core CPU and no discrete GPU to sap power. It's the move to four cores and the additional GPU that really hurt the 15-inch MacBook Pro under heavy usage.
Overall the new lineup is a significant step forward. As I mentioned earlier, if you're in the market for a 13-inch system the 2011 Sandy Bridge MacBook Pro is likely the one to get. The 15 is just as easy to recommend, provided you're ok with the downsides (higher temperatures, louder fans, shorter battery life under load). If you aren't ok with the downsides, just wait another year and get the Ivy Bridge based successor.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
198 Comments
View All Comments
Anand Lal Shimpi - Friday, March 11, 2011 - link
Thank you for reading them, comments like this really do make it all worthwhile :)You wouldn't believe how much time was spent making sure Apple wasn't doing something funny with the max turbo frequencies. At the end of the day it was a non-issue, but we had to be sure.
Take care,
Anand
Ryan Smith - Friday, March 11, 2011 - link
Just to add some technical background to this, it's actually quite complex to get a CPU speed reading on modern CPUs. Mac OS X's Sysctl reports the base speed of the processor, regardless whether Turbo Mode is active or not. So on the 15" low-end QC model you will always see 2.3GHz.To actually read the instantaneous speed of any given core, you need to peek at the CPU itself and count the cycles - Intel actually has a handy document detailing an algorithm to do this(1). The issue with that is that it requires peeking at the Model-Specific Registers (MSRs), which require Ring 0 access; or in other words you need a broker at the driver level to do it.
Linux already does this (/proc/cpu/0/msr), and on Windows it's fairly trivial to load a driver alongside an Admin-level application to do this(CPU-Z, etc). Under Mac OS X this requires installing an Extension (at least as far as I know) which gets messy. If you don't go through this process you'll never be able to read the core speeds accurately, which is why there's virtually no Mac software capable of this.
Fortunately MSR Tools exists, and it has a 32bit extension to allow it to peek at the MSRs. The right answer of course is always the last answer you try, so this was only after trying several other ways of calculating the CPU speed and a couple different OS-agnostic benchmarks to try to rule out OS differences.
1) http://download.intel.com/design/processor/applnot...
tno - Friday, March 11, 2011 - link
+1I've been planning to plunge into Mac ownership for sometime, especially with grad school looming I really want something that's more comfortable to work on than my netbook but still fairly portable. This review really helped me gauge whether it was worth putting in the extra cost for a 2011 13" MBP or settle for a discounted 2010.
So am I all set? Hardly! Now I need to see what the 2011 13" MBA has to offer! I'm praying that cost stays roughly the same and a move to a ULV SNB leads to 12+ hour battery life and a similarly huge leap in performance as the move lead to in the MBP. I am a sucker for lightweight form factors.
This article is also the first one to make me ever consider the 15" MBP. I have been fairly opposed to the bulk but the performance is quite something. If I went that route then I would probably have a C2Q, water-cooled, ATI and SSD driven rig to put up on AT forums. Taking offers!
tno - Wednesday, May 4, 2011 - link
Rezzing a dead thread! I bought the 13" MBP! $999 at MicroCenter, too good to pass up! So . . . who wants my rig?JasperJanssen - Saturday, August 6, 2011 - link
I, on the other hand, have gone the other way. My MBA13 is being put together in China now.ltcommanderdata - Thursday, March 10, 2011 - link
A great review. I do have some additional questions though. First, given Apple was the instigator of OpenCL, it'd be great if you could run some OpenCL benchmarks. Are the Sandy Bridge MacBook Pro's disproportionately faster than the Arrandale MacBook Pro to indicate that OS X has CPU OpenCL drivers that can take advantage of AVX? Probably not, and this will hopefully come with Lion. Given nVidia's GPGPU push can the HD 6490 still keep up with the 330M GT in OpenCL? How does the HD6750 do?http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/graphics/2011/01/...
"'[Intel] will be releasing OpenCL graphics drivers to developers during the course of 2011. [Intel] continue to evaluate when and where OpenCL will intercept various products"
And is there secret Sandy Bridge IGP OpenCL support? Bit-tech got a quote from Intel that Sandy Bridge IGP OpenCL support was inbound sometime this year and if anyone would be motivated to get it done it'd be Apple.
And finally, does Apple now support hardware H.264 decoding on ATI or Intel GPUs? Previously, only a few nVidia GPUs were supported in Snow Leopard, such that the Arrandale MacBook Pro actually had to power up the 330M GT to decode H.264 wasting power compared to the perfectly fine Arrandale IGP if Apple just wrote the drivers. Do the new Sandy Bridge have the ATI GPUs doing H.264 decoding now, is the Intel IGP supported, or in the worst case is no H.264 hardware acceleration available now that nVidia GPUs are gone? Perhaps lack of hardware H.264 decoding is what makes the FaceTime HD CPU usage so high? QuickSync is only accelerating the encoding phase?
Anand Lal Shimpi - Friday, March 11, 2011 - link
Some answers:1a) I don't know of any good GPU based OpenCL tests under OS X at this point. I'm not even sure if Apple's Intel HD 3000 driver supports OpenCL.
1b) Intel mentioned SNB's GPU technically supports OpenCL however there are no plans to release a public driver at this point.
2) Hardware H.264 decoding is enabled on the 2011s and it is used while FaceTiming, at least according to Apple.
Take care,
Anand
ltcommanderdata - Friday, March 11, 2011 - link
Thanks for the reply.http://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/33632/smallluxgpu
In regards to OpenCL testing, most people in OS X seem to use SmallLuxGPU which is an OpenCL raytracing benchmark. I don't have much experience with it, but it might be worth a try.
In regards to hardware H.264 decode, do you know if the IGP is doing it or does the discrete GPU still have to be powered up as in the 2010 Arrandale MacBook Pros?
Thanks
Anand Lal Shimpi - Friday, March 11, 2011 - link
It's my understanding that the IGP can do the decoding, although note that while FaceTime is running the dGPU is enabled by default.Good call on SLG, I had forgotten about that :)
Take care,
Anand
secretmanofagent - Thursday, March 10, 2011 - link
Hello authors,On one of the pages, you mentioned this:
"This isn't Mac specific advice, but if you've got a modern Mac notebook I'd highly recommend upgrading to an SSD before you even consider the new MacBook Pro. I've said this countless times in the past but an SSD is the single best upgrade you can do to your computer."
Is there an article where you recommend the best update for my model? Should I even bother with the drive? I realize the X3100 is going to still hamper any sort of graphical performance, but wondering if it's worth the effort.
Out of curiosity as well, would a Time Machine restore be possible if you update the drive?