Apple MacBook Pro 13 2020 has arrived: Ice Lake only improves GPU performance, would AMD's Ryzen be the better choice?

[Redaktion]

The new MacBook Pro 13 has arrived in our office. The new Ice Lake processor is pretty much identical to the predecessor in term of performance, only the integrated GPU is a bit faster. Is the switch to AMD long overdue?

https://www.notebookcheck.net/Apple-MacBook-Pro-13-2020-has-arrived-Ice-Lake-only-improves-GPU-performance-would-AMD-s-Ryzen-be-the-better-choice.466286.0.html

[Rick]

Best service you can do is compare the performance of this Macbook with the performance of the most similar (weight / dimension / battery / screen) notebook you can find with a 15W Renoir CPU.

[dfsjadjiasiod]

Moving to another platform is not just changing a mb and a cpu. It is design, cooling, software, etc, etc. And it costs money.

[vlahone]

No Renoir? No thanks

[ExcessiveDouching]

It took them 7 months to achieve this meager and uninspiring upgrade. They only make 4 laptop models. Perhaps if they focused less on the iPad, which no one who actually needs a computer considers to be a laptop replacement, they would have made the 14 inch happen by now.

[DrTung2708]

I think Thunderbolt and Intel Quick Sync does play a role here for why no AMD on Mac yet.

[ariliquin]

Apple missed the boat here, like most laptop manufacturers. Thunderbolt and perception that Intel = high end laptop is still playing a part in the slow adoption, however consumers want the better performance that AMD offers and this will lead to adoption eventually. Just sucks having to wait for them to adopt AMD for high end laptops, however I will wait, not buying another Intel with throttled anaemic performance.

[danwat1234]

Intel 10nm is less efficient than Intel 14mm? That is very odd. Hopefully Tiger Lake will be a different story.
Your article about tiger lake shows that it is more efficient than 14mm so conclusion is ice lake 10nm sucks.

[ncfan]

"We will have to wait for more test results in our final review to see how the lack of eDRAM cache of the Iris Plus Graphics 655 affects the performance in real-world applications." - what? 655 has got eDRAM of 128MB - look at ark.intel.com for cpu i5-8279u.
At the same time, there's no eDRAM on new G7 graphics.

[The Scott]

I think Thunderbolt and Intel Quick Sync does play a role here for why no AMD on Mac yet.

I agree, but ...
ThunderBolt is tricky because OEMs still need Intel to approve their design for certification and Intel has no motivation to do so; however, Apple should be able to use a design which includes a TB3 controller thatIntel would approve.

TB4 / USB 4 allows TB to be integrated with USB 4 via the USB-C port. So this issue will be moot in a year--sort of. OEMs will still need to pay Intel to get certified if they want to use the TB moniker. An OEM could integrate TB4 functionality without the label and so bi-pass Intel, but I doubt any would choose to do so.

QuickSync is an Adobe issue. Adobe is fully capable of writing its software to take better advantage of multiple cores, but chooses to use QuickSync, because Intel ?... For this reason, AMD does offer more cores as a way to offset the lack of QuickSync technology. Realistically, Apple could put pressure on Adobe to change its code, but they won't, at least not under the helm of Tim C(r)ook.

[Toby321yay]

Could you explain as to why some of the MacBooks Pros have pwm whilst some don't? For example, for 2019 the 2 port MacBook Pro has pwm whilst the 4 port MacBook Pro doesn't despite using the same panel.