Is the 2019 1.4ghz MacBook Pro suitable for music recording?

Eden1565 wrote:

Thank you,

you have been incredibly helpful and generous with your time and expert insight. You have made my choice a lot easier, and it makes sense of why the baseline mac has a slower clock speed than my 10 year old baseline MacBook!...

Thanks again.

Again, I'm not a processor expert, but I have an understanding of digital design. Right now we're running into a wall with Moore's Law, which was the claim by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore that semiconductor feature size would shrink by half and computing would double in performance every 2 years. The basic problem is that we're getting almost to the limit of the width of an atom. So they're not trying to speed things up by building a much faster process but rather trying to get more done per clock cycle. That these newer processors use less power is a bonus.

And yeah I guess benchmarks are kind of a blunt tool because there's just so much that they don't necessarily account for. Performance tests on tools are also a blunt tool because there are so many variables including things that might be different when run at a different time.

I know one of these is probably faster in single-core performance than my mid-2012 MBP with an i5-3210M running at 2.5 GHz. I could be a lot of things including the faster memory, faster process, and possibly that they pack more performance per cycle.

Eden1565 wrote:

Thank you again for the informative response, that’s very helpful and convincing. Excuse my lack of knowledge, but the one last point to question is that i read benchmark stats reflect only short length applications and that applications such as live recording for a longer period of time (which is demanding on the cpu) could give much weaker results than the benchmark results suggests...is that true? Or only for extreme examples? Thank you

I come from a chip design background so I might think of these things in a way that an engineer thinks of them. I'm not an expert on processor performance, but there's lots of things that improve performance with a lower clock frequency including more pipelining, out of order execution, speculative execution, more L1/L2 cache, etc. Slower clocks can help a lot with routine power consumption, and some complex operations can then do more work for each clock cycle.

Honestly I'm not sure why audio performance would be so reliant on clock speed. Benchmarks are kind of a blunt tool for measuring processor performance. I still wouldn't worry too much about any of the current MacBook Pros being adequate for recording purposes.

They’re all quad cores now.

Clock frequency is overrated. Overall performance doesn’t necessarily go down with clock frequency. You can check benchmarks like Geekbench to see what the scores are.

Eden1565 wrote:

Thanks for your response.

What I read online is that for applications suck as photo editing clock speed doesn’t matter much as it spreads the workload over the cores. But for audio recording in real time, the workload cannot be spread and demands the best performance from a single core at a time. So online most people seem to say that clock speed in this scenario is more important than the amount of cores. On videos it seems the benchmark results are great for the baseline mac, but what I can’t find are results that specify music recording results as opposed to photo, video editing and gaming.

Still - clock frequency alone doesn't determine the performance of a single core. Complex instructions take several clock cycles to process and there can be more instructions being run in parallel.

Here's a Geekbench 4 single core comparison between a current 1.4 GHz Core i5 quad core and a previous 2.3 GHz Core i5 dual core.

https://browser.geekbench.com/macs/448

CPU Benchmark Scores

4650 Single-Core Score

16684 Multi-Core Score

Device Information

Name MacBook Pro (13-inch Mid 2019)

Model Identifier MacBookPro15,4

Processor Intel Core i5-8257U

Processor Frequency 1400 MHz

Processors 1

Processor Cores 4

Processor Threads 8

https://browser.geekbench.com/macs/414

CPU Benchmark Scores

4342 Single-Core Score

9081 Multi-Core Score

Device Information

Name MacBook Pro (13-inch Mid 2017)

Model Identifier MacBookPro14,1

Processor Intel Core i5-7360U

Processor Frequency 2300 MHz

Processors 1

Processor Cores 2

Processor Threads 4