The 2013 MacBook Air: Core i5-4250U vs. Core i7-4650U
by Anand Lal Shimpi on July 4, 2013 8:00 AM ESTBoot Performance
Although boot performance doesn't change substantially with the faster CPU, I did notice that the new system was posting better boot times than what I had previously recorded. My guess is all of my SSD torturing hadn't been TRIMed away before I presented the previous results. Either way the new MBA seems capable of a sub-12 second boot time. I even recorded some boots as low as 10.8 seconds. That PCIe SSD comes in handy for sure.
Single Threaded FP & 3D Rendering Performance
These next two charts look at single and multithreaded floating point performance using Cinebench 11.5. This test also gives us the rare opportunity of comparing to some older Mac Pro hardware as well from 2008 - 2010. Single threaded performance remains extremely important to overall system responsiveness, so it's always good to look at.
Oh man, the Core i7 upgraded seriously fixes everything. We get near perfect scaling here, showing a massive 27% increase in performance over the default Core i5 1.3GHz setup. The single threaded performance of the upgraded 13-inch MacBook Air is almost able to equal that of the 15-inch MacBook Pro with Retina Display. Anyone underwhelmed by Haswell should keep this in mind. What we're seeing here is a combination of IPC improvements and awesomely aggressive turbo, all within a 15W TDP.
The multithreaded story is a bit less impressive, but still quite good. Showing a 17% increase in performance, the 1.7GHz Core i7 delivers nearly the same performance as the 2GHz Core i7 upgrade from last year's MBA. The rMBP15 distances itself from the MacBook Air though - there's no replacement for more cores.
Video Transcoding Performance
Video transcoding is really best suited for the higher end machines, but that doesn't change the fact that it's done on MacBook Airs as well. We'll start by looking at performance under iMovie. Here we're importing 1080p video from a Nikon D7000 and optimizing it during import.
We're showing ~25% reductions in import and export time here over the base configuration. In both cases, performance equivalency with last year's upgraded configuration seems restored.
Final Cut Pro X falls on the professional end of the video production spectrum. The test file is the same here, but the workload is far more strenuous.
The same is true for our FCPX test. Last year's 2.0GHz model is about 5% quicker than this year's 1.7GHz Haswell ULT system, but obviously with the newer machine you get much better battery life. The improvement over the base CPU configuration is over 20% again.
Photo Editing & Export Performance
Our photo editing & export tests agree with what we've seen elsewhere. The gains here are north of 20% and put the i7 system within range of last year's 2GHz model.
Xcode Performance
In our desktop review of Haswell I noted that performance in our compile test improved tremendously with the new architecture. As it's quite obvious that Haswell's IPC advantages don't surface all that much in our traditional suite, I wanted to see if perhaps things would be different in something that might lend itself better to Haswell's IPC improvements. I repeated our Firefox build test but under OS X. It's a multithreaded compile, with the number of threads set to 2x the number of cores (not threads) in a system.
When Haswell's IPC advantage can shine, the higher clocked configuration does even more so. Here the 1.7GHz Core i7-4650U is over 20% faster than the fastest MacBook Air you could build last year. Serious developers will still want more cores but if you need ultimate portability, Haswell ULT really can shine.
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lilo777 - Saturday, July 6, 2013 - link
MBA will soon be the only laptop in its class that still uses TN panel. And for a "best computer" it has a lauphably low resolution. Lack of 4G is annoying. Lack of touch screen option is inexcusable. In short, MBA is a solid mid-range laptop. More importantly OP made a very valid observation that lately AT stated giving Apple products way more credit than they deserve.vFunct - Sunday, July 7, 2013 - link
No the MBA is perfect. Nobody wants a retina screen at that size, since the only people that use them are photographers and they have MBPros. No one wants 4g either since they tether anyways. And touch-screens are completely useless, so no one wants them either.Again, Apple makes the best laptops in the industry. They are perfect for their target audiences.
lilo777 - Sunday, July 7, 2013 - link
So the photographers want "retina" displays on the phones , iPads and MBPs but not MBAs. interesting. Also, what kind of photographers prefer TN panels to IPS panels?vFunct - Monday, July 8, 2013 - link
Photographers use iPhones, iPads, and MacBook Pros. They DON'T use MacBook Airs.The people that buy MacBook Airs use them for email, office apps, and surfing the web. Those users have never wanted or cared about retina displays.
So, this Retina display complaint is a non-complaint, since no one that would want a MacBook Air is going to complain about it.
You guys need to learn the purpose of what you use a computer for.
You don't buy a computer to own tech specs. You buy a computer as a tool to do what you want, and the people that want the MacBook Airs do not want a Retina display.
icoltsfan94 - Tuesday, August 13, 2013 - link
I disagree in the fact that MacBook Air potential buyers would not want a retina display. I personally have considered a MBA and one of the biggest turn-offs has been its 1366x768 display, even an upgrade to a 1920x1080 display would be an amazing upgrade, after all, the prevalence of HD content on the internet has significantly increased since the incarnation of the MBA, which has that same 1366x768 resolution at its release. Not to mention the ability to have multiple web pages open at the same time on one screen. Even then, if you have no desire for any of these items, having a higher resolution in the same screen size would allow for better rendered fonts and images in web pages even in just general web browsing. I would love to see an honest argument against having a higher resolution display in the MBA.bji - Sunday, July 7, 2013 - link
Is "no touch screen option" actually a valid complaint about any laptop?gentux - Friday, July 26, 2013 - link
Well the best display is useless if it has no juice left. Even Sony Vaio Pro has not that much battery power in it yet it's more expensive. Speaking of 4G you know how many different bands and providers there are in the world? And how that changes in the next 3 years a typical notebook is supposed to be used? It's better to keep that separate so you can use some tethering solutions abroad.GotThumbs - Monday, July 8, 2013 - link
It's not hard when you (Apple) controls every aspect of its ecosystem. Software, OS, Hardware and marketplace are owned and controlled by Apple. You cannot load Apples OS onto any other hardware (Legally anyway), so they control/limit the hardware configuration and thus the number of drivers you need to have a stable system. Google Chrome Books actually are a similar option (IMO) and with more companies moving to cloud based software.....there is less need to actually install programs on your desktop/laptop.If MS decided to regulate Windows on systems of thier own design, you would have very stable systems from MS as well. Just simply think of the number of combinations of PC systems /components currently available. It's in the millions. How many models does Apple have? What are the differences between each one?
Jobs was very smart, but I have as much respect for him as I do a sleazy car salesmen IMO. (Google: Steve Jobs, Wozniak, Breakout) . While I will never own an IProduct, I give the company credit for how much money they have raked in while offering very limited product lines and controlling the content market where the REAL money is to be made. Apple has made billions selling one phone with incremental improvements to its fan base. What other company wouldn't want to follow that kind of success? Thats why I believe MS has initiated mandatory accounts to load apps onto Win8. All businesses exist to make money for the investors/owners. Apple is NOT any different IMO.
Best wishes,
gentux - Friday, July 26, 2013 - link
Actually Microsoft has a logo program that doesn't help make PCs any more stable. Just as PlaysForSure stood for something that's a joke since the failed Zune. Sorry but Microsoft wasn't good at anything. Nobody really cared about Windows until they forced you to buy it. Then everyone hated it until Apple had their systems and except for bigger companies and people who think they need to be other than everyone else are moving to OS X.If you ask people who used both they will stay with OS X that's the success Apple did.
If that's not a big of a point why there's no one else?
ESC2000 - Monday, August 12, 2013 - link
If that was true - that people who have used both windows and OSX always stick with apple - apple's marketshare would be way higher. In the computer space its marketshare is puny even though it offers lower cost laptops than it used to. I count myself as one of the people who stuck with Windows. I had to use my sister's macbook pro for a semester in college after I spilled on my VAIO. That was a miserable semester for me computer-wise... couldn't wait to get back to windows. I am far from the only person who prefers windows. I see it when i look around the classroom and see way more windows computers (mostly high-end so people who could have bought the air at least) and I see it in every company/firm that I have ever worked for or even visited -literally none used OSX. So good try there.I get this shtick all the time on these tech sites: 'anybody who has ever used [insert iproduct here] will prefer it over other options and never go back to anything else.' We all know logically that absolutist statements like that cannot be true (saw another one a page back claiming that apple makes the best computers period). All one need do to disprove it is if course provide one example to the contrary.
I know most of these statements are meant somewhat hyperbolically (although I also think people are apt to project their own experience onto every other person in the world). to the extent that they merely mean the trend is toward people abandoning windows for OSX, all I can say is it is not what I observe - whether computers, tablets (v. Android), or phones (again v. Android). But of course we see what we want to see and what we are looking for, so without hard numbers it is hard to know.