Reason Behind Apple Sticking with C2D in 13″ MacBook Pro

Apple last week updated its MacBook Pro line-up, and for the most part, there were few complaints. The overall feature-set didn’t change too much, but components were upgraded, and overall the latest models are faster than the previous, which is to be expected. But one feature that did strike some people as odd was that the 13″ model was sticking with Intel’s Core 2 Duo processor, rather than moving on up to the Core i5 / i7 ranks, as the larger models were.

I also thought this was a bit bizarre, but reasoning given at Ars Technica does shed some light on the decision and it makes sense for the most part. The bulk of the problem lies with the fact that the actual mainboard for the 13″ model lacks space, as you’d expect, and as a result, the CPU, GPU and chipset just couldn’t be paired up together. The reason this was possible in the last generation is because the notebooks used NVIDIA’s 9400M chipset, which included the GPU. Instead of three chips, there were two.

It can be argued that Intel’s Core i5 / i7 chips have integrated graphics, but I think the problem there is obvious. Intel has never been on top of the GPU game, and to make things worse, the company’s current solutions don’t support OpenCL (they will in the future). Given that OpenCL is something Apple is heavily investing in, it’s easy to understand why it would rather stick with NVIDIA.

There are other 13″ Core i5 notebooks with discrete GPU’s around though, so in some regards Apple’s decision still seems a bit strange. But what I can figure there is that in order to squeeze that much into the notebook, battery-life is going to suffer, and since Apple touts the industry’s best battery-life ratings, it becomes a little easier to understand why it preferred to favor battery over raw CPU performance.

If only Intel developed class-leading graphics chips…

It doesn’t take a computer or electrical engineer to see there’s just no room on the 13″ MacBook Pro logic board for a discrete GPU in addition to a Core i3 and HM55. If Apple wanted to modify the logic board to include one, it would have meant carving out space used by the battery, both for the GPU and possibly additional thermal routing to keep the machine from bursting into flames.