My Late-2013 MacBook Pro I sold in July of 2018 scored 4210 Single & 14194 Multi-Core on Geekbench.
My 2015 iMac I sold last week scored 5282 Single and 17575 Multi-Core on Geekbench.
The 2018 MacBook Pro I acquired Augst of 2018 scored 5345 Single and 22606 Multi-Core which is not a huge bump over my iMac at the time (which is why I continued doing all of my media / content creation work on the iMac despite the Fusion Drive over SSD which did make working with 4K footage a tedious task but the performance of the machine made up for that I/O slowness.
The 2019 iMac arriving tomorrow scored 6157 Single and 32293 Multi-Core blowing away all of my previous Macs in a massive way! Now that it is 100% SSD, the difference in performance with the new iMac and the top of the line MacBook Pro is enough that I’ll continue running a two machine setup for the foreseeable future. No reason to work on only one machine and while I require the portability of a MacBook, I love and would hate to give up the flexibility of also having a desktop that is many double-digit more powerful.
This is only a comparison of CPUs. The gains in I/O performance from my 2013 MBP to 2018 was pretty big. The SSDs are also much faster now than they were 5 years ago. When I purchased my MacBook Pro, the 560X was the only option for GPU. Now you can get a Vega 20 which would use less power and have a much faster memory speed at a $350 upgrade. Given how little I use the maxed out MacBook Pro for video work, I’m not missing much and was able to defer some of that savings into upgrading the iMac’s GPU for $450 from the 580X to the Vega 48 which is a superior card to the BTO Vega 20 (precisely 28 more cores) but also with the added thermals in the iMac, the risk of having the computer down clock the GPU & CPU on the iMac is less of an issue. My MacBook Pro’s fan runs when doing a Time Machine backup and it’s horrendous when editing 4K video. Apple is at a thermal ceiling with the MacBook Pro and I wish they had made decisions to keep the thickness of the MacBook Pro to allow these high-heat chips to truly shine like other manufacturers.
To the GPU speeds in OpenCL benchmarks:
- 2015 iMac had M395X: 86400
- 2013 MacBook Pro had GT750: 15086
- 2018 MacBook Pro has 560X: 58107
- 2019 iMac has Vega 48: 141918
This goes to show that my 2015 iMac has a higher computer cycle than the top of the line 2018 MacKBook Pro (for which the 560X was a BTO extra charge). This goes to show how this computer is still struggling even if you pay good money to add the Vega 20 to your MacBook Pro. Video editors are still better off with a professional desktop like the iMac Pro or iMac with a very high-end GPU which honestly the Mac still doesn’t get the best GPUs. We are always getting last year’s tech for double the price. That’s the price of being a Mac User.
But wow! Look at that Vega 48 in the new iMac. From 86,400 on my old computer to 141,918 on the new one which is going to be a full 3X over my 2018 MacBook Pro. WOW!
The iMac’s RAM is a bit faster than the MacBook Pro’s, I imagine the SSD Will be almost the same.
When ordering the iMac, I did consider an iMac Pro. I was within $750 of a base iMac Pro but I’m glad I didn’t. Looking at this Geek Bench blog post, it’s clear I made the right decision. https://www.geekbench.com/blog/2019/03/imac-performance-march-2019/
