Earlier this month I bought a 2017 MacBook Pro 13″ since my old MacBook Air was frustratingly slow with even minimal multi-tasking. I opted not to buy the MacBook Pro with touch bar since I think this feature is rather distracting and in its infancy. It’ll probably be the next notebook I buy in a few years.
I decided to do an objective comparison with my new MacBook Pro (dubbed “Fenix”), my old MacBook Air, and the computer I built for fellowship (dubbed “Zeratul“). All three devices are running Mac OS High Sierra 10.13.1 at the time of this writing. I used GeekBench 4.2 to run the following CPU benchmarks:
2015 MacBook Air: 3131 (single-core) and 5960 (multi-core)
2017 MacBook Pro “Fenix”: 4394 (single-core) and 9390 (multi-core)
Custom Build “Zeratul”: 5243 (single-core) and 18378 (multi-core)
I then ran GPU benchmarks on both Metal and OpenCL:
2015 MacBook Air (Intel Iris 6000): 16074 (Metal) and 16070 (OpenCL)
2017 MacBook Pro “Fenix” (Intel Iris+ 640): 27495 (Metal) and 29040 (OpenCL)
Custom Build “Zeratul” (NVIDIA GTX 980 Ti): 136822 (Metal) and 133073 (OpenCL)
Fenix represents a significant boost to my mobile computing needs. I’ve already been using it on rounds in the ICU, video/audio editing, programming, general purpose computing, and some light gaming! 😉 It’s definitely no slouch!
