Apple's 11-inch MacBook Air (Core i7 1.8GHz) Review Update
by Anand Lal Shimpi on August 1, 2011 6:08 PM EST- Posted in
- Mac
- Apple
- Intel
- Core i7
- Sandy Bridge
- MacBook Air
Performance
In our 2011 MacBook Air review I presented a couple of numbers that showed up to a 27% increase in performance from the i7 over the stock i5 in the 11. I ran the upgraded 11 through our complete performance suite and came up with an average increase in performance of about 22%. Given the increase in base clock speed is only 12.5% for the i7, the rest of the performance improvement had to have come from the higher turbo ratios and larger L3 cache.
I tend to follow the 10% rule: performance improvements greater than 10% are noticeable. In the case of the 11-inch MacBook Air, the upgraded i7 delivers a noticeable increase in performance.
Note that due to the smaller chassis, the upgraded 11 isn't always as fast as the 13-inch MacBook Air with the same CPU. Maximum single threaded performance looks pretty similar but under a prolonged heavily threaded workload the upgraded 13 is actually a bit faster:
| Core i7 1.8GHz Comparison: 13-inch vs 11-inch MacBook Air | ||||||
| Cinebench R10 (1 thread) | Cinebench R10 (4 threads) | Cinebench 11.5 (4 threads) | ||||
| Core i7 1.8GHz (13-inch MBA) | 4083 | 8234 | 2.46 | |||
| Core i7 1.8GHz (11-inch MBA) | 4087 | 7785 | 2.36 | |||
The advantage is around 5% in Cinebench so I doubt it's anything noticeable.
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kingzad - Wednesday, September 28, 2011 - link
I see the performance gain is not much with 13 inches i7 upgrade but can the 4 MB cache shows itself in other ways that may not be directly measured by typical performance tests? For example will it help with faster switching applications if a large number of applications are running at the same time. As an example lets say we are running XCode with many files open, Interface Builder, iPhone Simulator, Firefox, Safari, MS Word, iTunes plus some other apps. How about if I don't turn off my mac for many many days (quite typical) and there are just more and more applications which are active on it. Could it be more responsive with i7's 4MB cache rather than i5's 3 MB?ningmeng - Friday, March 23, 2012 - link
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