But look at what happens to the chips after a minute at that load: Both CPUs hit roughly 84C (183F) under full load. Maximum temperature, at least reported by the MBA’s sensors, isn’t any lower on the new 13-inch than the 2008 I compared it to. The peak thermal specs themselves haven’t changed, but the actual power characteristics have. I’m guessing yield on these parts is as high as can be and as a result, power consumption is probably consistently lower than the original 1.86GHz parts Apple shipped back in 2008. The 45nm process these Core 2s are built on is as mature as it’s going to get. It looks like what we’ve stumbled upon is a combination of Apple aggressively throttling the clock speed of the older MacBook Air CPUs to meet thermal requirements, and the CPUs used in the new MacBook Airs being far better behaved from a voltage/power consumption standpoint. The old MBA is actually slower than the new 11-inch, despite the advantage in CPU speed. Handbrake 0.94 - H.264 High Profile TranscodeĪverage Frames per Second (Higher is Better) I turned to our Handbrake H.264 encode test to verify my sanity: Not only is the 2008 13-inch MBA slower than the new 13-inch model, it’s actually slower than the 11-inch model running at 1.4GHz. Take a look at Cinebench 11 comparing the 2008 13-inch MacBook Air to the two 2010 models:Ĭinebench 11 - Multithreaded CPU Benchmarkġ1-inch MacBook Air (2010) - 1.4GHz Core 2 Duoġ3-inch MacBook Air (2010) - 1.86GHz Core 2 Duoġ3-inch MacBook Air (2008) - 1.86GHz Core 2 Duo If you assumed the same thing I did, you’d be very wrong. While the SSD is faster, if you’re running a CPU bound benchmark there shouldn’t be any performance difference. Memory sizes and speeds haven’t changed either. The 2010 model gets a faster GPU but the CPU is literally the same 1.86GHz Core 2 Duo. On paper, the new 13-inch MacBook Air shouldn’t be any faster than the old 2008 MacBook Air - at least in CPU bound tasks. The 11-inch MacBook Air: Faster than the old 13-inch MacBook Air
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