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
Apple's SSD Strategy
Despite the rumors, the 2011 MacBook Pro lineup does nothing to change the storage setup of the machine. All of the models have a single 2.5" 5400RPM hard drive and an integrated slot-load DVD drive.
I personally don't mind the lack of hard drive options. While 5400RPM is pretty slow, any additional money you spend on storage should go towards an SSD and not a faster mechanical drive. If you need the additional capacity there's always the optibay route, which replaces the optical drive with another 2.5" HDD bay. Other than installing Mac OS X, I pretty much never use the optical drive so the optibay approach in my opinion is a good combination of the performance of an SSD with the mass storage of a mechanical disk.
Apple offers an array of BTO (Build to Order) SSD options, however the drives are likely of average performance. Pricing actually isn't bad for the upgraded 13-inch and especially the upgraded 15-inch models. At $100 for a 128GB drive you really can't beat the upgrade price there. We're probably only one more generation away from seeing a standard SSD on some of these models.
| Apple SSD Upgrade Pricing | |||||
| 128GB | 256GB | 512GB | |||
| 13-inch 2011 MacBook Pro | $250 | $650 | $1250 | ||
| 13-inch 2011 MacBook Pro (high end) | $200 | $600 | $1200 | ||
| 15-inch 2011 MacBook Pro | $200 | $600 | $1200 | ||
| 15-inch 2011 MacBook Pro (high end) | $100 | $500 | $1100 | ||
| 17-inch 2011 MacBook Pro | $100 | $500 | $1100 | ||
In the MacBook Air Apple standardized on a Toshiba controller, delivering performance nearly identical to Kingston's SSDNow V+100. I wouldn't be surprised if Apple used the same controller in the new MacBook Pros. The SSDs are still 3Gbps and will be a huge improvement over the standard hard drive, but just know that you aren't getting the best performance possible. In exchange for the price premium, what you do get is a drive that Apple will support completely (and also official TRIM support, no 3rd party drives have TRIM support under OS X). In the past Apple has had serious compatibility issues with 3rd party SSDs, so there is some merit to the BTO SSD option.
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.
To be honest the new MacBook Pros feel slow to me right out of the box. The issue is that once you have a few applications installed and start multitasking with a notebook that only has a 5400RPM hard drive application response time stops being consistent.
It seems like the more you have installed, the greater the chances are of there being small file random reads/writes going on in the background while you're trying to do other things on your computer. These aren't huge IO operations, but since we're dealing with mechanical storage they significantly reduce the throughput of other IO requests. For example, opening an image in Photoshop will take longer if the sequential read operation is constantly interrupted by several other reads spread out over the platters. The same is true for launching an application. Application launch speed is one area where an SSD really shines. The process of launching an application involves a lot of sequential and seemingly random reads (they aren't totally random but they aren't totally sequential either). On a hard drive the seemingly random operations aren't fast to begin with, but interrupt them with any other IO requests that may be happening in the background (saving files, backing up a disk, launching another application, etc...) and the application you're trying to launch will take significantly longer. In my older SSD articles I called this the "fresh test". When you first get a new computer everything responds quickly and applications just fly open. After a few weeks/months/years the performance stops being so fresh and instead everything seems to take forever. The graph below is one I've used in the past, it simply shoes the performance benefit realized from switching to an SSD when trying to launch a few applications in parallel:
The improvement is staggering. Generally speaking application launch time isn't really impacted by which SSD you get. In my experience pretty much all of the current crop of SSDs on the market will launch single (or even multiple) applications in about the same time. What really separates one SSD from the next are three things:
1) Reliability
2) Performance in periods of unusually heavy IO activity
3) Performance over time
The first one is really difficult to quantify. Reliability is the one area where going with a larger manufacturer typically helps. Intel, Samsung, Toshiba, all of these controller makers sell in large quantities to OEM systems and have significant experience in testing and validation. Reliability is also an area where I would say the Apple SSDs are probably going to be a good bet. They may not be the fastest, but Apple has likely tested them and is comfortable that they will at least work problem-free for a while. Apple also apparently does some firmware tuning of its own to make its SSDs play a bit nicer with OS X.
The second vector of differentiation is worst case (or best case depending on how you look at it) performance under load. This isn't just launching a single application, or even loading multiple, but it's how the drive performs when you're doing a lot at once. Perhaps you're running a backup, installing an application, opening a document, loading a web page, downloading a movie, downloading emails and trying to open another application all at once. In these sorts of situations you will notice a difference between SSD performance.
Performance over time is another important factor to consider. Building a good SSD controller really boils down to knowing how to manage data written to the drive's NAND. To measure performance over time we're really looking at quantifying write amplification and measuring how effective TRIM is at restoring performance.
I try to tackle as much of these items in our SSD reviews as possible, and we're constantly evolving so expect to see even more depth here going forward.
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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?