Apple's 15-inch Core i5 MacBook Pro: The One to Get?
by Anand Lal Shimpi on April 14, 2010 10:38 PM EST- Posted in
- Mac
- MacBook Pro
- Arrandale
- Core i5
- Laptops
No AES-NI Support in OS X?
One of the features of Arrandale (and all other Westmere derived architectures) is support for AES-NI. The six instructions that fall under the AES-NI umbrella can accelerate encryption and decryption operations.
Microsoft's full disk encryption feature in Windows 7, BitLocker, is AES-NI accelerated. Simply upgrading to a supported Core i5 or i7 processor gives you better disk performance with BitLocker turned on.
While I'm still waiting for Apple to get back to me on a number of questions, I decided to see if FileVault, OS X's encryption system was AES-NI accelerated as well.
I ran XBench's disk tests on an encrypted home directory and then again on a completely unencrypted portion of the drive. If Apple takes advantage of the Core i5's AES-NI I should see a smaller drop in performance on the new MacBook Pro compared to the old one:
| FileVault Disk Performance Comparison | ||||||
| Sequential Read (256KB) | Sequential Write (256KB) | Random Read (4KB) | Random Write (4KB) | |||
| Core 2 Duo MacBook Pro - FV Off | 172.5 MB/s | 127.1 MB/s | 10.9 MB/s | 134.1 MB/s | ||
| Core 2 Duo MacBook Pro - FV On | 79.5 MB/s | 61.9 MB/s | 6.8 MB/s | 67.8 MB/s | ||
| Core i5 MacBook Pro - FV Off | 175.1 MB/s | 160.0 MB/s | 21.5 MB/s | 112.7 MB/s | ||
| Core i5 MacBook Pro - FV On | 80.5 MB/s | 66.6 MB/s | 13.2 MB/s | 61.0 MB/s | ||
And it looks like we have no AES-NI support in FileVault at least. It's not terribly surprising. Apple usually takes a while to implement new features enabled by hardware changes. Remember how long it took Apple to get GPU accelerated video decoding?
These numbers do tell us something else entirely though: the new MacBook Pro appears to offer better SATA performance.
Not too long ago I published a quick look at 6Gbps SATA controller performance and concluded, among other things, that Intel's SATA controllers are quite good. The numbers above support that theory as disk performance has gone up considerably compared to last year's NVIDIA based MacBook Pro. While random write speed dropped a bit, random read and sequential write performance jumped up significantly.
This is quite noticeable with a SSD but less of a problem with a hard drive. Needless to say Apple's return to Intel is a good thing, especially because we didn't have to give up NVIDIA's graphics.
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ReaM - Friday, April 16, 2010 - link
I think the update is not worth paying the extra for.330GT is not much better than 9600GT and the Core2Duo in overall is not that much faster. It feels I will pay more for just a slight improvement.
For 1700buck you can build a i7 980X Six core computer and be happy with 30,000 cinebench scores.
I am having my 10nth mac right now, but they seem to get more expensive for what they can do. If you add the 1050 display, that's gonna cost you even more.
I hoped for more.
ReaM - Friday, April 16, 2010 - link
The new MagSafe connector seems to be crappy. If pulled on cord, because if it is now vertical direction, will pull the whole macbook with it.overzealot - Friday, April 16, 2010 - link
I want some on my 5770overzealot - Friday, April 16, 2010 - link
Far more fun than stream processorsDanaGoyette - Friday, April 16, 2010 - link
No USB 3.0? And no ExpressCard slot, so you can't add it later? FAIL. Oh, here's an SD Card slot for you, instead. Good luck trying to connect an external hard drive to that.Frankly, Apple's MacBook "Pro" line is thoroughly outclassed by HP's "EliteBook" series. Rather than making myself sound like a rabid fanboy by describing why, I'll just link to this:
http://hpfansite.com/category/hp-elitebook/
kuwan - Friday, April 16, 2010 - link
Just a comment on the Aperture 2 RAW Import...Importing RAW images is actually more disk bound than it is CPU bound - at least it is in Bibble 5. It usually involves decoding to a low-resolution image and saving a preview which can often be done faster than the disk can read the files. If you're looking for a CPU benchmark then exporting the images to JPEG after you've imported them will likely give you a much better metric on how the CPUs perform.
Also, why not use Bibble 5 as a RAW image benchmark? ;-) I've seen it included in a number of CPU reviews and it runs just as well on Mac OS X as it does under Windows or Linux. Aperture doesn't actually scale very well with multiple CPUs/threads so it isn't a particularly good CPU benchmark now that 2-4 cores is pretty much standard. Also, the nice thing about Bibble as a benchmark is that we actually report the times it takes to run a batch - so you won't have to use a stop watch. ;-)
Anyway, thanks as always for a great review.
Note that I'm the lead Mac engineer for Bibble Labs.
Cheers
I am as mad as hell - Friday, April 16, 2010 - link
No (Cr)apple product reviews on Anandtech please! Make this site Apple free. There are tons of other sites devoted to the "other" OS. Thanks you.TEAMSWITCHER - Friday, April 16, 2010 - link
Don't you think that you should be a bit more open minded? There are a lot of AnandTech readers and many of us look forward to reading the Apple coverage. No one is forcing to read the Apple related material.webdev511 - Sunday, April 18, 2010 - link
Apple computers do a great job at running Windows. I enjoy reading reviews of Apple hardware. If AnandTech hadn't reviewed this crop of MacBook Pros, I would never have know that they fall short of what I expected.I'd actually like to see a Spring 2010 Laptop shoot out that includes the MBP running the same OS as the rest. It would be a great way to see how Apple hardware stacks up to the rest of what's out there.
Tempsis - Monday, April 19, 2010 - link
My only issue is that, these days, it seems like the only notebook systems that get deemed worthy of Anand's review time are Apple's system. All of the other notebook reviews get dealt out to other writers, but when it comes to Apple-based information/product reviews, only Anand seems to do it/etc. Seems to indicate a favoritism towards Apple on Anand's part.