The 2013 MacBook Air Review (13-inch)
by Anand Lal Shimpi on June 24, 2013 12:01 AM ESTMore GPU Performance Numbers
The next set of benchmarks are taken from our 2013 Laptop Bench. Here we're comparing to HD 4000 and HD 4400, both using Acer S7s. Compared to HD 4400 the HD 5000 in Apple's 2013 MBA ends up being around 15% faster in most tests. Compared to Ivy Bridge/HD 4000 the gap ranges from lower single digits in thermally constrained environments to 25% or 40% in the best case scenarios.
3DMark GPU Performance
We close out our look at Intel's HD 5000 performance using a historical collection of 3DMark data. The comparison gives us some more data points to characterize Intel's HD 5000. The data here is all best case scenario for HD 5000 as there are no situations where we hit thermal limits.
On average, Intel's HD 4400 ends up being 18% faster than HD 4000, while Intel's HD 5000 is 31% faster.
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spronkey - Monday, June 24, 2013 - link
Hmm. Very interested to see the CPU and battery life numbers for the i7 upgrade. If it manages to increase performance by 10% or so, and decrease battery life 10% or so, it could be a nice sweet spot.Bkord123 - Tuesday, June 25, 2013 - link
I can't wait for the i7 review. I think it's the once I'm leaning toward getting.timmyj9 - Monday, June 24, 2013 - link
i would be curious to know if the same 802.11ac file sharing bottlenecks occur when using NFS as the file sharing protocol?Kevin G - Monday, June 24, 2013 - link
It would as the tweak to resolve it was made to TCP and modern NFS are built on top of that.Khato - Monday, June 24, 2013 - link
Can't agree more that Haswell battery life is already blurring the lines with current tablets. I'm curious how the 2013 Tablet Bench Web Browsing suite compares specifically to the one used on notebooks? In the details provided in this review the specific frequency of web page loading is specified while it's not in the Tablet version.The iPad 4 with it's 42.5Wh battery and 9.48 hours of run-time in the test draws an average of 4.48W. If that test is comparable to the Light version shown here then you have the Haswell Macbook Air drawing an average of 4.9W, while if it's comparable to the Medium version then the average is 6.05W. Either way, when you consider that the Macbook Air's 13.3" diagonal screen has 1.88x more surface area than the iPad 4 (nit is another term for cd/m^2, so total luminous intensity of a 13.3" screen at 200 nits is 1.88x that of a 9.7" screen at 200 nits) it's pretty much a given that display power for the Macbook Air is higher than for the iPad 4 despite the lower resolution. Pretty cool.
Shivansps - Monday, June 24, 2013 - link
The HD5000 is running on single channel right? there is a 2do slot for another memory?Kevin G - Monday, June 24, 2013 - link
The entire SoC has dual channel memory. The MacBook Air has no memory expansion slots. If you want to get one of these, be sure to order with the amount of memory you think you'd need in the future.Shivansps - Monday, June 24, 2013 - link
Im saying that because of the IGP performance, i cant find any confirmation on the review that the MBA is running on dual channel memory, 4GB LPDDR3 sounds like 64 bit single channel to me, and that will impact IGP performance, even HD3000 has reduced 3D performance if not running on dual channel.Glindon - Monday, June 24, 2013 - link
Every Macbook Air that I've owned ran in dual channel mode. Why would this year's be any different.Kevin G - Monday, June 24, 2013 - link
Note the part in this article referring to the LPDDR3. It indicates that it has four 32 bit LPDDR3 packages which indicate a 128 bit wide bus (dual channel).