Preliminary Performance Analysis:

2018 MacBook Pro 15 inch

July 13th, 2018, by rob-ART morgan, mad scientist

July 14th - UPDATE: actual results for 2018 MacBook Pro 6-core with Pro 560X GPU

Let's analyze the subsystems of the 2018 MacBook Pro 15 inch that are supposed to raise the performance above the 2017 version.

MEMORY

The option to go up to 32GB of RAM is important to professional users. For example, if you launch Motion, open a 600 frame project, and do a RAM Preview, you just consumed 13G of RAM. The total system use is at 19G. Open a second 600 frame project and do a RAM preview, now the total consumption of Motion is up to 24G of RAM. Total System consumption is 31G.

Another example is After Effects CC. We opened a sample project and rendered it. AE consumed 22G of RAM. Total system usage was 30G. And in both examples, no other pro apps were running.

One more thing: According to Apple, the 2018 MacBook Pro's 32GB of DDR4 2400MHz DDR4 memory is up to 2.8 times faster than the 2017 MacBook Pro's 16GB of 2133MHz LPDDR3 memory.

CPU

UPDATE: Six cores are better than four. Geekbench Multi-Core Score for the 2018 MacBook Pro (Intel Core i9-8950HK 2.9GHz 6-core) is now available: 24957. The fastest CPU in the 2017 MacBook Pro (Intel Core i7-7920HQ 3.1GHz 4-core) scored 16999. So if you are running a pro app that uses all cores, the 2018 top model has a 47% advantage.

And note to those trying to decide between the fastest 2018 MacBook Pro 6-core and slowest 2017 iMac Pro 8-core: The iMac Pro with a Geekbench Multi-Core Score of 33688 is 29% faster.

GPU