one two three four that's what I do those kids those explosions running
Hollywood hi I'm Roman Loyola with Macworld
I'm here with Gordon MA um PC world editor and until good Intel CPU guru
host of the full nerd we were here last week to talk about the 2018 MacBook Pro
which is in front of me there were some issues in regards to the throttling of
its performance huge hubbub about it but Apple apparently has addressed these
problems with an update that came out today the Mac OS 10 dot 13.6
supplemental update was issued today through software update and we installed
it and we ran a bunch of preliminary benchmarks and we're here to share what
we found so far with this new update so did they fix it so it looks like from
what we've seen so far that the performance has improved on the 2018
MacBook Pro so we ran a bunch of benchmarks initially we ran a Adobe
Premiere CPU test we found a 10% improvement over the unfixed
2018 matter what connection I call it unfixed unfixed so original there were
you know the launch firmware that was in place yeah but it's also results in a
20% improvement over last year's lapped you can hear the fans yeah going down I
mean I'm not sure did they actually say they changed that it's called the fan
curve which when they turn the fans up did they say they changed that I don't
think they did I don't think they did or they wouldn't comment on that I raised
so we did talk to Apple about the update so and there's an explanation of the
update in an article on the website so as you can see here we're running a
bench of v-ray benchmark this is a 3d rendering benchmark right we saw some
improvement in this as well there's a seven percent improvement in this
benchmark on the machine updated over the 2018 unfixed
unfit original original Raj firm yeah so there's a 7% the latest armories how
much 10% yeah so now the improvement of the new improved one over the old one is
18% so that's a pretty sizable improvement so we also ran a blender
test blender has a CPU benchmark and we found a similar result the updated
MacBook Pro has a six percent improvement over the UH the broken the
original ah yeah I think it's fair to say broken but yeah they were problem
they were real issues with that original firmware yeah and as of now an overall
seventeen percent increase over last year's model so we're seeing a you know
pretty good boost than before so it's an improvement but I mean you can see this
should we go ahead and run it again but you should have seen in the actual
close-ups we could see that right the were the
clock speed it was holding with premiere and a lot of applications where it was
doing horribly it was just sort of this up and down up and down and after the
latest home firmware update it actually holds pretty steady at the base clock
right so you're watching you're seeing your 2.9 gigahertz and you saw that in
the premiere one of the some of the lows right yeah I saw that in our premiere
test I saw that I saw that pretty consistently on the benchmarks that were
here and so there was one benchmark that we ran
that's another preliminary benchmark where we saw some throttling happening
but was also a premiere test that was very heavy on the CPU there was more
heavy than probably usual we didn't use the GPU in that particular test right so
I need to go back and look at that a little more so but we did so in that
particular instance we saw some throttling but it was also a different
instance that right it was a different project we picked
specifically I think because it's harder and also we selected and rather than
using the GPU to render down the CPU and also we selected the max render quality
option right which anybody who's used premier knows when you select that it
really is just really tough on the on the CPU yeah it's a pure CP load harsher
so it does I gotta say that sort of indicates there could be even more
tuning to come out of yeah out of this yeah so interestingly enough so there
probably is more we could probably see another update but I mean this is this
addresses the initial issue that everyone had in terms of the throttling
on the MacBook Pro right and I mean would you I mean cuz there's some people
who are still in denial about it it was seriously it was not made up it was not
people imagining things and in certain cases it was negative Dave Lee who
originally pointed this out he saw a worse performance I'm sure I'm sure he
has the update now he's working on it I'm insured to see what he gets on his
projects yeah that's a seeing depressed scores right is 15 with his his video
loads yeah so keep an eye on that so I'm sure he's working on that now so but
whatever the fix was it definitely is real it wasn't a panacea we're
definitely seeing more city clocks no the bouncing all over the place
yes general performance increase across the board I mean some smaller where it
was pretty good before some you know yeah
and then some pretty decent right what did you see in the GPU run in premiere
I'm sorry yeah so the GPU run in premiere
oh I haven't gotten around to testing I can't so I definitely I mean definitely
the clocks are holding to base a lot more most of the time in fact right yeah
yeah so yeah what we've done what I've been doing during testing is we run the
Intel power gadget and it shows it shows performance temperature a couple other
things and as yeah like as you mentioned before we were seeing erratic right now
it's just like almost a flatline like you with
on an EKG when someone's dead not that this is dead but and then one thing I
want to point out this is power gadget until power gadget there at one point
during on Saturday this is how fast this entire story is moving right it vanished
from Intel's website and then everybody said this is a cover-up and then a few
hours later it actually came back and the updated version came out yeah right
yeah an updated version came out and we've been using that updated version so
I'm sure there are people people thinking of conspiracies about that one
yeah so yeah the other thing is I'd like to go so this is a 2017 7 gen KB like H
quad-core this is the brand-new coffee-like h6 core CPU a lot of people
going why not do i seven this versus the next one yeah I mean the i7 current
generation versus the i9 current generation and I gotta say I think
that's a valid concern yeah but the issue really is that the new 2018
MacBook Pro was actually going backwards in performance for some people for some
loads yeah and that's really not good so I think what we want to settle now is
that it is not slower than this previous generation MacBook it looks like yeah so
we have some more testing to do but so far it's looking good or it's looking
better than before yeah so and we'll have a more complete report coming up
yeah the other thing is this it's not confined just to the 15-inch right this
is everything right so the update is for all 2018 MacBooks so the 13-inch MacBook
Pro with V without the touch bar did not really get updated so it's really the
MacBook Pros that were updated this past couple weeks yeah so it's the two
13-inch models and yeah to 13 inch models under 215 inch models all right
because the base one did not get a cable a car version right base so the basic
line yeah but all but basically a lot of people were wondering it whether this
affects the core i7 eighth gens and it does as well according to Apple because
this is across yeah all of them yeah so you can get the
update through the app store it's a look under the updates it takes
about 20 minutes to run your Mac will have to restart it's gonna be a
different kind of installation than maybe you're used to because it is
updating firmware so you'll actually see a different screen that that comes up
that you may not have recognized before if you're been updating your Mac and
doing software updates it's a little bit different but don't be alarmed it tells
you what's going on the screen actually goes black for a little bit okay yeah
yeah cuz it's updating forever yeah so so the other thing is because I
know people just have a lot of questions I saw a lot of questions the big one to
me is like how in the world of the Supan happen there are some terries I don't
think we should get into that now but we are gonna do a podcast tomorrow I think
Mac world's podcast live yes tomorrow so tune into the Mac world podcast live on
YouTube on YouTube and on Twitter on the Mac world Twitter feed the Macworld
YouTube channel it will going live tomorrow at 10 a.m. Pacific time so
adjust your clocks accordingly for whatever region you live in and it'll be
me and Gordon and Jason cross from Mac world we're pretty much dedicating that
whole podcast to the 2018 MacBook Pro if you have any comments or questions about
that let us know and actually come in and drop a live question in during the
podcast yeah yeah we definitely want to hear from you so so we've got I've got
more testing to do and so we'll get back to you tomorrow on the podcast so you
know it does about just about does it for right now
so I'm Roman Loyola Gordon um check me out tomorrow
check you out tomorrow