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
6Gbps SATA
Twenty eight days after Intel launched its Sandy Bridge microprocessors, it announced the stop-shipment of all 6-series Sandy Bridge chipsets. The first shipping version of these chipsets (B2 stepping) was affected by an unfortunate "oversight" that could cause failure in the four 3Gbps SATA ports that branch off the chipset. The remaining two 6Gbps SATA ports were unaffected by the bug.
Most notebooks only use two of the six SATA ports supported by most members of Intel's 6-series chipset family. If a notebook design used the 6Gbps ports exclusively, the notebook would be fine to ship using the flawed B2 stepping parts. With the 3Gbps ports not in use the bug would never show up. Notebooks that used more than just two ports or used at least one of the 3Gbps ports would be affected and would have to be remanufactured with a fixed version of the 6-series chipset. Intel promised to begin shipping fixed (B3 stepping) 6-series chipsets by the end of February.
Apple announced and started selling the 2011 MacBook Pro lineup on February 24, four days before the end of the month. Surely that would be too soon for Apple's manufacturing partners to have received B3 stepping chipsets, built boards around them, integrated them into MacBook Pro designs and shipped them half way across the world to Apple stores all around the US.
Naturally Apple wouldn't comment on what chipset revision was in the 2011 MacBook Pro, so the first thing we did was check to see what SATA ports were in use on our systems.
Here we have the high end 15-inch MacBook Pro. I installed an Intel SSD 510 in the lone 2.5" drive bay and it is connected via a 6Gbps port internally:
So far, so good. The only other bay in the new MacBook Pro is used for the optical drive. And it's connected to a:
...3Gbps SATA port. Uh-oh.
Apple doesn't directly report chipset IDs under OS X. I installed Windows 7 via Boot Camp and headed over to device manager to pull the device ID of the SATA controller: 1C01.
Cross referencing with Intel's datasheets I found that there are two revisions of the SATA controller: 04 and 05. The latter is used in the "fixed" B3 stepping chipsets. And what do we have here at the end of the hardware ID string for the SATA controller?
REV_05.
This is a B3 stepping chipset. In fact, Apple's manufacturing partners seem to have received B3 chipsets before anyone else given that boards were produced, tested and shipped in time for a February 24th launch. It would appear that Apple was among the first if not the first company to receive B3 stepping 6-series chipsets. Although I had concern for the health of the Apple/Intel relationship over the past couple of years, it looks like the two are back to being bedfellows.
Internally there are no visible changes to the MacBook Pro's primary SATA cable. It's still a flex cable but apparently capable of delivering twice the bandwidth of last year's model. Apple doesn't ship the new MacBook Pros with any 6Gbps drives and I would be surprised if it selected anything other than Samsung or Toshiba for SSDs, which means even the SSD options are 3Gbps. Luckily I happen to have a small cache of SSDs, including a bunch of new 6Gbps offerings.
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iwod - Friday, March 11, 2011 - link
iPad is only just starting to sell and iPhone still has lots of space to grow. The trend is Apple are making more units and more money from ARM specific products.Nvidia has just recently stated that Project Denver will be ARM 64 bit. And aiming at HPC and Desktop. Full Compatible with current ARM instruction set.
Currently Apple must have a ARM version of Lion testing, and few years down the road, they could switch their Mac over to ARM 64 bit. Using a single Instructions Set for their whole product line.
For some reason i have been thinking that Apple and Intel aren't doing too well together like anand has felt. I dont think Thunderbolt is any indication of their current relationship. it is merely they have been working on it for such a long time, no one wants to lose our at the end.
Of coz it could have been the other way round x86 moving into iPhone, although that depends how much intel is willing to bend towards apple.
jbh129 - Friday, March 11, 2011 - link
Anand,Can you guys run your high-end 15 through the Windoze tests that were used on the 13?
Thanks
tajmahal42 - Friday, March 11, 2011 - link
Hello guys!First, I have to say this review is really awesome, as usual! Just what I was hoping for. The thoroughness and practical sense of your reviews continues to amaze me every single time.
For the 13" MBP, you mention "bouts of instability". Can you elaborate on that? Stuttering? Crashes? In what way do you notice that instability? I'm a little concerned now.
tno - Friday, March 11, 2011 - link
+1alent1234 - Friday, March 11, 2011 - link
my wife has been bugging me about our wifi since we moved and get a poor signal in a lot of the new apartment. told her i can get a new router with 3 antennas but we will also need a new laptop as well with the antennas to take advantage of it.which brings me to my question. i know the 15" model has the 3 antennas. does the 13" do MIMO as well?
tipoo - Friday, March 11, 2011 - link
They all use the new card.By the way, have you tried switching wifi channels, or installing DD-WRT and boosting signal? Even so, you don't need a new laptop after getting a new router if signal strength was the only problem.
alent1234 - Friday, March 11, 2011 - link
i'll try that, thxa lot of wifi around me these days. we only have work laptops now so that would be our only personal computer if we bought one. i was looking for the cheap SB models when they come out
name99 - Friday, March 11, 2011 - link
"told her i can get a new router with 3 antennas but we will also need a new laptop as well with the antennas to take advantage of it."This is not completely true. A base station with multiple antennas CAN do the equivalent of phase-array beam steering to direct most of the output power towards the target laptop. The laptop will thus see a stronger signal, and one of the better modulation schemes (eg 64-QAM 5/6) can be used rather than one of the weaker schemes. Thus your laptop, even if it has only one (or two) antennas can still see better performance.
Note, this is a theoretical possibility. I do not know the current state of the art in how well base stations utilize the various forms of transmit diversity that are available. And no review ever seems to talk about this stuff, either by testing how well the kit works with a single antenna device, or by talking to the manufacturer about what's in their product.
Brian Klug - Friday, March 11, 2011 - link
The 13" does have 3x3 MIMO as well, the exact same broadcom solution as the 15" I tested extensively.-Brian
7Enigma - Friday, March 11, 2011 - link
Anand and crew,I am very disappointed with the battery life numbers in this review. This is the first review of a laptop where it appears you have used a 3rd party app (Cody Krieger's gfxCardStatus tool) to significantly inflate the numbers of the new 2011 systems. 35-60% by your own numbers back on the discrete GPU battery life page, which you then fail to report in the battery life tables later on!
When you are tasked to review a system (especially an Apple product I might add) it should be reviewed as is, with no tweaking or 3rd party add-ons to boost performance/benchmarks. When have you EVER installed an add-on for a Windows-based laptop to improve performance/life? I can't think of one.
At best this was a simple oversight where you have benchmark numbers WITHOUT the gfxcardstatus, at worst this was a cover-up job which I have always argued in the forums against and on your site's behalf.
Please update the tables to show what a stock newly-purchased laptop at the Mac Store would deliver.
I am very disappointed in this coverage.