MacBook Pro Performance (July 2014)

On Tuesday Apple updated its MacBook Pro lineup. Geekbench 3 results for most of the new models have already appeared in the Geekbench Browser which lets us see how performance has improved across the lineup.

For the 15-inch MacBook Pro, processor speeds were increased by 200 MHz, leading to a 6% to 9% increase in performance:

Processor20132014
GoodCore i7-4750HQ @ 2.0 GHzCore i7-4770HQ @ 2.2 GHz
BetterCore i7-4850HQ @ 2.3 GHzCore i7-4870HQ @ 2.5 GHz
BestCore i7-4960HQ @ 2.6 GHzCore i7-4980HQ @ 2.8 GHz

For the 13-inch MacBook Pro, processor speeds were also increased by 200 MHz, leading to a 7% to 8% increase in performance (note that we do not yet have results for the new high-end model):

Processor20132014
GoodCore i5-4258U @ 2.4 GHzCore i5-4278U @ 2.6 GHz
BetterCore i5-4288U @ 2.6 GHzCore i5-4308U @ 2.8 GHz
BestCore i7-4558U @ 2.8 GHzCore i7-4578U @ 3.0 GHz

Overall performance improvements for the new MacBook Pros are modest and unsurprising. Both the 2013 and the 2014 models use Haswell processors, so all of the performance gains come from the increased clock speeds. We will have to wait for the new Broadwell processors (currently scheduled for mid-2015) to see more signficant improvements in MacBook Pro performance.


 
John Poole is the founder of Primate Labs and lives in Toronto, Ontario with his wife Deborah. You can find John on Twitter or .