The next-gen MacBook Pro with Retina Display Review
by Anand Lal Shimpi on June 23, 2012 4:14 AM EST- Posted in
- Mac
- Apple
- MacBook Pro
- Laptops
- Notebooks
Thunderbolt Performance
Apple’s 2011 Macs were the first to enjoy Thunderbolt, an interface co-developed with Intel that carries PCIe and DisplayPort over a single cable. As it derives most of its revenue from mobile, Apple wasted no time in bringing its Thunderbolt Display to market. A single Thunderbolt cable could bring Gigabit Ethernet, Firewire 800, high-speed mass storage, external audio and display to an otherwise IO-deprived MacBook Air.
At a high level, Thunderbolt is pretty easy to explain. The current implementation of Thunderbolt pairs four PCIe 2.0 lanes with DisplayPort, offering a maximum bandwidth of 2GB/s in either direction in addition to DP bandwidth. The Thunderbolt interface itself can deliver 10Gbps of bandwidth in each direction, per channel. The physical Thunderbolt port is compatible with mini DisplayPort to allow for the use of mini-DP displays as well as Thunderbolt chains. Each Thunderbolt port can carry up to two Thunderbolt channels, although one channel is typically reserved for DisplayPort duties.
In the past we measured a maximum of 1GB/s of unidirectional bandwidth for a single Thunderbolt channel in addition to video bandwidth over DisplayPort. There’s no shipping device that will deliver this sort of performance, I needed to outfit a Promise Pegasus with a handful of SSDs to truly saturate the bus.
In the 2012 Macs Apple, like the rest of the PC industry, has switched to using Intel’s 2nd generation Thunderbolt controllers codenamed Cactus Ridge.
The Retina MacBook Pro uses a four-channel Cactus Ridge controller and drives two Thunderbolt ports with it. Each port can drive a mini-DP display or a Thunderbolt chain with a mini-DP/Thunderbolt Display at the end of or in it. The rMBP can actually drive a fourth panel (counting the integrated Retina Display) via the integrated HDMI port although that’s not an officially supported configuration.
Unlike most other implementations, Apple hangs the Cactus Ridge controller off of the Ivy Bridge CPU rather than the PCH. The GeForce GT 650M in the system only gets the use of 8 PCIe 3.0 lanes instead of the full 16, but with PCIe 3.0 this is not an issue (it wouldn’t be an issue with PCIe 2.0 either to be honest).
I performed the same test as before to test if maximum bandwidth has gone up since switching to Cactus Ridge. Initial results remained unchanged, I was able to get north of 900MB/s to an array of SSDs in the Pegasus connected to a single Thunderbolt port. Now with two Thunderbolt on the rMBP however I was able to create a second chain of devices. I only have a single Pegasus so I resorted to chaining a LaCie Little Big Disk (SSD) and Elgato Thunderbolt drive. The combination of the two isn’t anywhere near as fast as the SSD array in the Pegasus but it allowed me to push the limits of the controller even more:
1380MB/s, over copper, to the rMBP. I suspect if I had another Pegasus SSD array I’d be able to approach 1800MB/s, all while driving video over the ports. Apple may limit the internal storage expansion of the rMBP but you still have a path to expansion for storage of large media files and other archives. And it’s very fast.
Unfortunately Thunderbolt behavior is still not perfect, although it is improved compared to previous Macs. If you write to Promise’s Pegasus for long enough while playing audio through Apple’s Thunderbolt Display you will still drop audio frames. Subjectively it seems to take longer to trigger this phenomenon but it does still happen. On my early 2011 MacBook Pro the problem has gotten so bad that I’ll even drop other USB packets for devices connected to the Thunderbolt Display. If I’m writing to the Pegasus I’ll miss keystrokes and the mouse will jump around until the high-speed write is complete. So far I haven’t had anything this bad happen on the Retina MBP but it took a while for this behavior to manifest on my early 2011 model so we’ll see what happens. I’m not sure what the fix will be for these types of issues as it seems there’s no good quality of service assurance for PCIe devices residing on Thunderbolt. As Thunderbolt was supposed to be as transparent as possible, it’s not surprising that even QoS overhead is nonexistent but it’s something that is clearly necessary. I’m not sure this is Apple’s fault as I’ve seen similar behavior under Windows. I suspect it’s something that Intel is going to have to figure out a way to address.
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OCedHrt - Sunday, June 24, 2012 - link
He missed another important point. All of that was in 3 lbs. Now, the current generation starting from last summer has an external discrete graphics and optical drive connected via a thunderbolt based connector (because Apple had exclusivity) with the laptop being only 2.5 lbs.This isn't going to compare to the retina macbook pro though - at 15 inches 4.5 lbs is pretty impressive though I think if Sony wanted to do it they could do 4 lbs or less.
deathdemon89 - Saturday, June 23, 2012 - link
I agree completely, I'm a proud owner of the old Z, and even today it doesn't feel the least bit dated. And the 1080p screen is holding up admirably well, with no signs of pixellation at normal viewing distances. This device was truly innovative for its time. I still don't understand why it received such mixed reviews by the press.Spunjji - Monday, June 25, 2012 - link
Mainly the price. Only Apple are allowed to charge that much for a laptop. Also, only Apple can have hot systems. Repeat ad infinitum.mlambert890 - Wednesday, November 28, 2012 - link
Really ridiculous comment. I can see you are bitter, as is the other mega z fan, but come on already. I worked for Sony for 5 years and love the company. I have owned probably a dozen Vaios including the top of the line last gen Z (with the SSD RAID)Instead of ranting and raving you need to ask yourself *why it is* that "only Apple can charge so much" and why "Anand only gives a free pass to Apple"
You feel what exactly? That there is some grand conspiracy in play? Do you realize how ridiculous that sounds?
WHY has Sony *lost the ability to charge a premium*? In other words WHY have they *burned all customer loyalty and good will*? I left the company back in 1999 because I saw the writing on the wall.
You (and the other Z guy) are no different than any other apologist. Companies dont bleed marketshare and fail to sell cancer curing products (you guys are presenting the Z as "truly revolutionary" right?) for no reason. Sorry to tell you there is no "big conspiracy".
Sony sells super high priced products into a super commoditized market and then they layer on a CRAP TON of bloatware dragging the machine to a stop, make idiot decisions like the HDMI one, and push proprietary crap *worse* than Apple ever has. All of that into the Wintel space which, sorry to tell you, was *always* driven by the cheapest possible parts at the best possible price.
The PC industry grew *because it was cheap*. Apple *always* occupied a premium niche. I vividly remember the initial release of the Apple I, the Lisa, the Mac 128. These were all always premium products and the competition at the time (be it Commodore, Atari, Ti, or the wintel ecosystem) *always* captured share by being cheap.
That may annoy you for some reason, but Apple has pretty much *always* held a core premium audience. The only exception was the period of insanity when Jobs had been pushed out and Scully destroyed the company. Even then, the core fans stayed.
You two make it sound like poor Sony is a victim because the world doesnt all run out and by the Vaio Z.
Even *without Apple* Sony would be going under, hate to tell you. Sony's problems are Sony's and the whole is *not* the sum of its parts with a laptop.
solipsism - Saturday, June 23, 2012 - link
None of that makes sense and is, in fact, rubbish.Sony added 1080p because it was it was popular not because it made sense. You have a 168 PPI display on 13" machine which makes text too small to be a good experience for most users.
They also didn't use a good quality display or add anything to the SW to make the experience good (unlike what Anand talked about in this review), they just added the single metric that was trending because of HDTVs.
Blu-ray in a notebook has always been a silly option for most users. There is a reason the BRD adoption failed on PCs and it's not because everyone is stupid... except you. ODDs are long overdue for being removed since they take up 25% of the chassis, require them to placed at an edge reducing over 5" of port real estate and restricting design, require a lot of power, are noisy, more prone to break due to the many moving parts, are slow, are just too expensive to be feasible, and add nothing visually that most users trying to watch a movie can discern.
Quad-SSDs? Really? That's a sensible solution for a consumer notebook?
EnzoFX - Saturday, June 23, 2012 - link
and that really is what people don't get. It isn't just about raw specs. The package needs to be complete, polished, what have you. In this case of high dpi screens, is good scaling support, and Apple did it. Support on the software side is something they never get credit for by the Apple haters. All they can see is numbers and think "I've seen numbers like that before".mabellon - Saturday, June 23, 2012 - link
No Apple didn't do it. Just like on the iPad, they increased resolution by doubling width and height. Their software simply doesn't scale well to arbitrary higher resolution. If it was done right then Chrome would work out of the box - instead the OS 2x scales everything without increasing resolution/quality.To the consumer, the choice means a good experience without breaking apps. But claiming that Apple was successful simply bc of software? HA!
Ohhmaagawd - Saturday, June 23, 2012 - link
Did you actually read the retina part of the review?Chrome doesn't work right because they do their own text rendering. Read the review. If an app uses the native text rendering, the app will look good (at least the text portion). They will have to update the graphical assets of course.
BTW, Chrome Dev builds have this issue fixed.
Windows DPI setting isn't default, so few use or even know about the setting and devs haven't made sure they work properly in the high DPI settings.
Apple has made a move that will be short-term painful in having apps that aren't updated look a bit fuzzy. But since they made it default, this will force devs to update.
OCedHrt - Sunday, June 24, 2012 - link
What do you mean Windows DPI setting isn't default? You can change it in a few clicks, but the same thing applies - if your app does not read the DPI values, then Windows can't help you. This is because windows UI is not vector based (I don't know about now, but older apps definitely not) and many applications back then were coded with hard coded pixel counts.When the DPI is changed, windows scales the text but the UI dimensions is controlled by the application implementation.
KitsuneKnight - Saturday, July 7, 2012 - link
On Windows, changing the DPI will generally mean a huge amount of applications will become simply unusable.On this Retina MBP, the worst case appears to be slightly blurry text (which was quickly updated).
Apple's solution is a good one, because it does things in a way that should keep existing apps working fine, while allowing future developers to leverage new APIs to take advantage of the increased resolution.