The IT Nerd

You may recall that I wrote a story about a noted YouTuber that ran some tests on the new MacBook Pro with the i9 processor and found that it ran slower than the previous model due to thermal management issues. Well, GeekBench ran tests of their own and came up with some interesting results. I encourage you to read the full report here, It is kind of geeky (and I guess I should expect that seeing as it is GeekBench that we are talking about here), but it is a worthy read. For those of you who want to get to the point, here it is. The issue could not be replicated by GeekBench because of the way their test was run versus what the YouTuber did. Here’s why:

So what’s going on here? Why does this test not replicate the throttling seen in other tests? Part of the issue is the test themselves. Premiere uses both the CPU and the GPU, while Geekbench only uses the CPU. If the GPU contributes significant heat, then that will cause the CPU to throttle more aggressively. It’s possible the decrease in performance observed in Premiere is due to a combination of new AMD GPUs with new Intel processors, or to the new AMD GPUs themselves. 

My recommendation? If your work doesn’t involve long-running tasks that are CPU- and GPU-intensive (such as Premiere) then the new MacBook Pro should provide a considerable increase in performance. Otherwise, it might be wise to wait until more performance data is available.

What this implies is that game players, video editors or anyone else who uses a new MacBook Pro with the i9 processor might have something to worry about. Other people with different use cases may not. Very Interesting. And clearly worthy of more investigation to find out the use cases where performance will be what you expect to be, and where performance will suck.

This entry was posted on July 20, 2018 at 5:32 pm and is filed under Commentary with tags Apple. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.