one two three go I got it all right hi I'm Roman Loyola from Macworld I'm here
with Intel processor guru from PC world Gordon MA hey hey we're here to talk
about the new MacBook Pro which is right here the one in front of Gordon this is
last year's model just a forcefully controversial now officially yes you
know MacBook Pro 15 now yes we're here to talk about the controversy is going
Wentz out so there are apparently some thermal issues with the new laptop that
affect performance Dave Lee a youtuber who does these great tech videos he did
a review of the 2018 MacBook Pro he found to be faster than the old model he
did not find it to be faster than the old model but a lot of it has to do with
these throttling thermal concerns so we thought we would do some of our own
testing to see I asked Gordon to help out since he knows Intel processors back
and like the back of his hand but yeah be sure you check out days Dave
leaves video on YouTube we'll have a link to it but but anyways right now
what are we doing Gordon so I think the thing is what we want to add because the
final word is not going to be done today or this weekend
we want to add nuance to what's going on here because if you're the kind of
person and I'm a PC person too but if you're the kind of person that's gonna
go MacBook Pro 15 20 18 with the new coffee Lake processor core 9 core i7 is
slower because it it can't handle the heat yes sometimes but a lot of time no
and in fact the takeaway is this laptop and a lot of tests is still faster than
this laptop so do not think this thing is just universally gonna be slower any
time you heat it up oh it's hot it's gonna be slower that is not true yeah we
show that now right we should buy it so right now we're running a test it's
called Corona it's a rendering test yeah so Corona is
a a I think it's a ray tracer test when
downloaded for Mac and PC and running on your own machine it is a pure CPU test
it is multi-threaded so the more cores you have the better performance you get
right now we kicked it off saw in the beginning and exactly the same time 2018
MacBook Pro 15 core I nine CPU 2017 core i7 KB Lake pointed 16 gigs of L lpddr3
32 gigs of DDR 4 yep memory difference does not make a difference in this test
as far as memory capacity it probably will not affect much of the performance
overall it's all about the CPU Grenn's maybe three or four minutes
while we're talking but we already know what the result is because we've run it
we run this one is much faster I was like - where do you have the numbers
there yeah so it was our results for this one on corona was what two million
two hundred and five thousand eight hundred raises it raised praise per
second points for sun rays per second two point two million raised per second
right whereas on the this laptop is is a 1.5 million raise per second right so
1.5 million versus 2.2 that is a kind of uplift you expect honestly to get from
going from 4 cores to 6 cores and we're seeing it no one I think one argument
people are gonna say is like well this benchmark is 3-4 minutes it's not enough
to heat that CPU another to where the performance drops and you actually did a
different test using blender right so brother is a free open source render
very popular a lot of movies have been made with it yes
we ran blender it's the gooseberry test and I got a 20% our preliminary results
are that the new laptop was a 20% improvement over the old laptop and I
think blender is important or gooseberry is important if you've never done
testing in blender because it doesn't take 5 minutes or 10 minutes to run it
takes it takes about an hour an hour on this laptop about an hour and 15 on this
laptop right oh sorry oh ok
oh the squiggly line so this is the frequency now again this is 2.2 million
on this much faster than 1.5 million but this squiggly ninis is sort of the issue
here it's basically the clock speed of this laptop bouncing up and down whereas
you look at this kb lake it's just a nice line so what happens on this laptop
it gets it starts reaching a power limit a thermal limit it starts getting hot
and it gets off the gas clocks dropped down temperatures go down
it gets back on the gas so it's bit it's constantly just bouncing back and forth
as they are hitting the gas to try to keep the CPU cool enough and consuming
enough power to to run within this this laptop but still 2.2 million versus 1.5
million and again and you saw in blender in a one hour load one hour CPU load
where you would expect the performance the clock speeds of this thing really to
have issues it's really good to sort of drop down because it's it's been running
for an hour so you build up a lot of heat the clocks gonna drop but you still
saw 20% more performance in that blender and I think also in v-ray we also ran
another has another ray tracer benchmark you can
download as well you got a register for beacon download and run that and I
forget yes and we found that this the new laptop was twelve percent faster
than last year's laptop so during the corona test I want to point out that
this laptop the fan kick there this laptop it did not kick in at all right
it's interesting to me because in a it just shows you this one is probably
within the power constraints thermal constraints of this with this new eighth
generation parts Intel has really swung for the fences they really like to run
them at very high temps very high wattage and when you get to a laptop
this then it's actually pretty tough yeah now I'll say when I went to the
original Intel event for the coronoid laptop launch a lot of the core I nine
laptops were like this this is an Acer predator Helios 15 great
gaming laptop I think I haven't tested it yet but this has a core i9 in it work
with a high-end GeForce graphics card at 1080 17-inch panel but you know the big
thing is its thick you can see I think this is a view look at Scott fans galore
on the bottom we've got massive heat pipes you've got a lot of cooling this
is what I always thought quinine was intended for and then I started to hear
after that event soon after people like oh we're gonna put him into thinner
smaller laptops I said really I thought it was like a highly overclockable
high-end performance part you trying to put me laptop since then I gotta say I
don't I know as much there's like oh that's not gonna be great this is this
is not a good look but I'm gonna think we're gonna see similar issues on other
core I nine laptops that are just super thin this just is really hard to manage
the cooling on this sorry I need some coffee
well so so clearly if you are but the takeaway is if you are doing CPU
constraint tasks like a lot of 3d rendering a lot of 3d modeling I think
definitely you're still getting performance out of six cores that you're
gonna get over a KB Lake quad core yeah right so I mean we've done three tests
and definitely does do that there was time though where I think Cinebench
underperformed or we expected it right so we also did a Cinebench the cpu test
right so we used Cinebench which is another made by max on it's another
three render it's different from so Cinebench offers two test ones that
OpenGL tests yeah there's a yeah and then you can also another thing that's
really cool about Cinebench what I like to do is you can say use all six cores
use all 12 threads or use one or two yes and we actually had we did a
single-threaded run insane a bench on both of these laptops right after we had
finished a previous encode really long encode and I was blown away because the
MacBook Pro fifteen was I think was 130 it was 130
it's interesting because we came with the first result that we had was 130
yeah and then the second result that we had after letting the laptop sit for a
while and not do anything maybe five minutes five minutes not very long it
was above 160 yeah so 116 which is pretty much what you got is what we got
from this on a consistent basis we got on the old laptop we got a score of 160
right on a consistent basis I gotta say I mean even that so that is it just
serves tells you about the variability of performance you may see out its
laptop in in even lightly thready tasks if this thing is really warmed up the
performance might kind of stink for a little while so yes so that of course is
the that was the premiere pro elephant in the room right so you want to bring
up what he did yeah so David Dave Lee rent did a premier protest where he rent
him out of video but his the details of his project probably a little more
intensive than what we have around here right so scarlet w5k video encoded it
out and right he saw 15% less performance on the new six core MacBook
Pro versus the older 2017 Mac Pro MacBook Pro 15 yeah and our results we
found that we found a five percent difference but it was a five percent
speed increase of the new laptop over the old laptop now again our project was
a lot different than Dave's project right who's lower res we we use 4k sony
alpha footage about a five-minute video project in fact you can go watch the
video it's the iPhone 10 camera shootout it's a real video on our slot made up
it's not just created just to test stuff it's an actual project that Adam Murray
did good-looking video go watch it yeah so yeah so but we need to look into that
a little more you do a little more research on into that and see what kind
of projects we can pull right so now you have some theories from that though so
we from the premier Pro testing we did we also won one thing you should know is
Premiere Pro renders on the GPU primarily a lot of the load will get
pushed off to the GPU these both have the same Radeon so we also did a premier
Pro render test using just the CPU you can do that by switching to the mercury
software engine and that basically does all of the rendering on the actual x86
cores in here and the results we got so it ends up being the the the test that
we did this the new laptop finished in two minutes before the old laptop right
it's so not a big different not a big difference and actually that does get
that does reinforce exactly what Dave Lee ran into writers doing that
rendering tests it's there's times where it's just gonna be the performance is
not gonna be that much better so that is I gotta say that is a very disappointing
number I also do think some of his results are even worse because he used a
combination I'm gonna believe of GPU and CPU but the design of this laptop and
most thin laptops uses one single cooling mechanism is single heat pipe
that also cools the GPU and the CPU if you start heating up the GPU you don't
have as much cooling Headroom for the CPU and the performance of the CPU may
drop or the GPU may drop depending on which one it is
also there's power of constraints too but I do think you there's a lot of
perfect storms you can hit into it made out of me with premiere definitely some
encode tasks that you use GPU that it just it just may not be pretty this may
not be pretty a good look so with all that under consideration I guess the
question is should who should buy a coronary MacBook Pro mmm I would say
probably a few people should buy the Kuran Iverson I would say Intel has this
chip Coffey Lake H that's in the laptop there's a core i7 that has six cores and
there's a core I nine version that has six course the quarry nine again you saw
it was sort of made for those great big gaming laptops I think if they were my
money I would buy the I would definitely want the six core Core i7 version
it's got lower clocks already so you're starting from not having to push it as
hard so the performance you still have the same cooling system but I do think
you're gonna get the best performance out of the MacBook Pro platform 15 from
that core i7 6 I mean because a lot of people are going
oh I want the old version out like I I gotta say no I don't I don't think so I
just don't think I don't think you really want to go backwards to that if
you could get it right so I you know there's a lot of advantages to the new
version 2 right there's yeah well you know the more cores around is always
better so and you know more RAM there's also the issue of software off of there
optimization you know we haven't tested Final Cut Pro yes so and Final Cut Pro 8
blazes on these machines true but you have the problem of heat there's gonna
be a lot of heat from the shared heat pipe design which again this is not
unique to Apple there's a lot of 15-inch laptops that use a single shared heat
pipe for both discrete graphics and the onboard so where else I think oh so I
think a lot of people want to know like is there anything that can be fixed is
your software fix for this is there anything Apple can do to improve the
performance of it or fix it right so well there's a third-party third-party
software hopefully they'll update their software
to take advantage of the new processor on Apple side what does it come down to
it comes down to being able to maybe a firmware update yeah so if what Apple
can do is they can say hey we for complaints alright you don't care about
noise you got this new laptop they can push out a new firmware update what
happens is then the fans kick on a lot sorry it'll be louder than it was before
but then you'll get better performance or no more heat means more noise means
you know all right more performance but what about the future of this particular
design do you know apples trend has been towards thinner and lighter right now
and I can't really see I don't really see them stepping back and saying yeah
we're gonna make a bigger laptop can they make to accommodate this processor
in particular so I don't think that's I don't think that's in Apple's DNA but I
could see couldn't you see everybody's been saying let's see a
17-inch MacBook Pro right no I was a big fan of the 17-inch MacBook Pro and I
miss it so but I'm also a big guy who doesn't mind carrying around a 17 inch
laptops right they could also I suppose redesign the
cooling system in this then you may have to make it look a little thicker but
separate a lot of gaming laptops the graphics card is separated from the CPU
so they don't hit each other up as much so it wouldn't interfere as much like I
think what we're seeing a lot of the premier render tests
another thing they could do is to use higher quality thermal paste or thermal
adhesive material or whatever they use in between deer they're cooler and the
CPU go to a higher level on that there are things that definitely do help yeah
but that's about it besides redesign and I don't you know fans louder not sell
the 4:9 version maybe but you know I got to say you know to be fair to Apple
there was a high-end version of the same overclockable CPU available which today
would be a kora 9 in the previous version laptop 2 because people wanted
that CPU and I I have my doubts of whether they could have kept that as
cool as they did so so we need to do a little bit more testing but because it's
such a hot topic we wanted to chime in and let you guys know what we were
thinking and what we're doing so hopefully we'll have some more results
for you guys to look at and we'll have an update to our core I 9 review right
but you're in no way saying this ain't no problem sweeping on the rug design
you're saying this is this definitely something we should investigate it's
definitely not something we're ignoring we're taking a look at it
we're going to take a look at it and take a look at the numbers and go from
there so so stay tuned to Macworld comm for more