We are already reviewing Apple's new MacBook Pro model and the CPU performance in particular is not very good. Especially sustained workloads suffer from performance drops. We recommend our reviews of the MacBook Pro 13 2018 and MacBook Pro 15 2018 for an in-depth analysis, but we want to summarize the situation: Apple removes all consumption limitations and the temperature is the only limiting factor for the CPU performance. The new processors add two more cores, so there is a lot of heat at high clocks, which cannot be dissipated effectively by the cooling solution. The clock has to be reduced as a result, and we start to see massive fluctuations after a few seconds of load. The clock will rise as soon as there is some thermal headroom, which results in high temperatures and so on.

Almost every other laptop manufacturer limits the power consumption of the CPU after a while (usually 28 seconds), and we tried just that with the new MacBooks as well. We use the Windows tool Intel XTU (freeware), where you can adjust the short-term maximum consumption as well as the long-term figure. There is also a tool for macOS called Volta (7-day trial), but the settings are much more limited. You can only deactivate the Turbo Boost completely or adjust the TDP, for example. The latter, however, is limited to the official TDP specification like 45 Watts on the 15-inch model, for instance. This is not ideal, but will suffice for our tests. We saw that the processor behavior is almost identical in macOS and Windows 10, so the results apply for both operating systems.

