i7-4770HQ vs. i7-4870HQ

[Gee]

I'm looking to buy a Macbook Pro 15" Retina and I'm torn between the following CPUs:

• i7-4770HQ @ 2.2GHz [default]
• i7-4870HQ @ 2.5GHz [+ £68.40]

The 4870HQ is on the benchmark list (9549 rating, 72 rank) but the 4770HQ is not. What's up with that? How would the 4770HQ score?

Thanks for any help

[David (PassMark)]

It isn't in the charts as yet, but it would probably have a score of around 8500.
My guess would be that in day to day usage, you wouldn't notice a great deal of difference.

[Gee]

It isn't in the charts as yet, but it would probably have a score of around 8500.
My guess would be that in day to day usage, you wouldn't notice a great deal of difference.

Thanks for the reply

I know it's just your guess but do you think it'd be that much lower? There's three choices of CPU with the Macbook Pro 15":

• i7-4770HQ @ 2.2GHz (no rating)
• i7-4870HQ @ 2.5GHz (9549 rating)
• i7-4980HQ @ 2.8GHz (9654 rating)

Given that the 300MHz clock speed difference between the 4870 and 4980 only give a very minor (104) increase in rating, do you think the 4770 would score that much less? I don't know much about CPUs but it looks like they're almost identical except for their clock speeds.

[chess]

The maximum clock speed is a small part of the overall performance

On the i7-4980HQ it seems that the monothread maximum clock speed (2.8 GHz) is hardly restrained by the TDP when the 8 cores run together (typically to obtain the 9654 rating).
I would bet that the i7-4770 is not so far because of the same 47 watt limitation.
But the theorical rating is not all.
The i7-4870 is still interesting for old monothread applications.
Note that monothread applications becomes very rare on linux, but not yet on mac and windows.

Of course the software is the main part of the performance when it perfectly uses every cores together...
... and 64 bits : - )

[nikokazaa]

Hi guys,

I'm going to buy a Macbook Pro 15 retina, i've the same question (like a thred title): i'm a biomedical engineering and i will use a Mac with MATLAB, ECLIPSE, etc. therefore i don't nedd a graphic card like 750M and a don't need large hard disk, i will buy the basic version; but i'm undecided on which processor version to choose between i7-4770HQ and i7-4870HQ, the only different spec is frequency.
In the passmark benchmark:
-4770HQ scores 9,433.
-4870HQ scores 9,182.
Result is odd, theocally 4870HQ should have better score than 4770HQ, anyway my question is the same, which one to choose between the two?

Thaks in advance!

[David (PassMark)]

As noted above the 4770HQ is now in the CPU charts and scores 9,433 at the moment.

Neither of the CPUs have many samples in our database however. Probably because they are only used in the Mac machines, and not many people run Windows on the Mac. Due to the low number of samples the average will have a higher margin of error than usual. The CPUs seem close enough in performance that the margin of error in the average measurement is greater than the difference in performance. (Just a 5% error margin is almost 500 points).

Over time as the samples increase, the error margin will decrease.

As of this morning the numbers are,
4770HQ scores 9,433.
4870HQ scores 9,326
(which the reverse of what it should be based on the paper specs).