new MacBook pro's 13 dual core or 15 inch quad?

[enthawizeguy]

Can i get away with the 13 inch dual core 6th generation sky lake chips for ableton? I kind of want a smaller computer. I already ordered the 15 inch quad core but was thinking of canceling it and going with the 13. My current computer for ableton is a 2011 mbp 2.0ghz quad core i7 with 16gb ram and an ssd. I would think after a few years even the dual cores would out do the old quads? I haven't been making music lately what kind of power are the vst's taking lately?

[Stromkraft]

Can i get away with the 13 inch dual core 6th generation sky lake chips for ableton? I kind of want a smaller computer. I already ordered the 15 inch quad core but was thinking of canceling it and going with the 13. My current computer for ableton is a 2011 mbp 2.0ghz quad core i7 with 16gb ram and an ssd. I would think after a few years even the dual cores would out do the old quads? I haven't been making music lately what kind of power are the vst's taking lately?

A lot. Quadcores will in many cases be preferable for music production in Live for the simple reason that Live uses one core per track. If you have four tracks working they are distributed to the number of available cores, in your case 4 or 2.

So

• 8 tracks > 2 per core vs 4 per core
• 16 tracks > 4 per core vs 8 per core
• 32 tracks > 8 per core vs 16 per core
• 48 tracks > 12 per core vs 24 per core

That's without concern for overhead, any OS processes and other apps you might have running. It's obvious that when you hit the upper limit, which can vary, for one core you will run into problems. If and when you do will depend on many things, quite a lot on specific instrument plug-ins you'd like to use, at what quality you want them, how many voices of these you need at a time as well as any processing you want to do and how you distribute that in your sets (on each track, returns, recorded effects and so on).

As you're now comparing processors in the same generation, for the 15" MBPs, as well as the 13" duocore i7 MBPs, those are likely within the 6th Generation Intel® Core™ i7 (Mobile), you need to look at how good each model is at crunching data. Personally I don't think a quadcore i7 is overkill at all.

Unfortunately, I haven't been able to deduct exactly which 6th gen CPUs are in these new MacBook Pros and it's too early for benchmarks.

I'm not bothered to look at the MacBooks (non pro) myself, as they are not quads, but I assume the i5s should be among these 6th Generation Intel® Core™ i5 Processors (Mobile) as is the i5 MBPs.

Why Apple can't just state what each model contains is just…

Anyway, The MacBook Pro 2.9gHz 13" likely has the i5-6267U based on mere numbers. You need to compare that to maybe the i7-6920HQ which, again based on the declared specs, likely is what's in the MacBook Pro 2.9gHz 15".

If you can find some multicore benchmarks on these two you could at least get an idea on how they compare.

You also need to consider ports and what can be run on them, but only the smallest i5 MBP seem to have less than four Thunderbolt 3.

[graphixsounds]

im also curious about this,

dual core 3.3 ghz i7 on the 13" vs quad core 2.9 ghz

If only they allowed 32 GB ram configs

[Tarekith]

Quad core all the way, no doubt.

[Stromkraft]

dual core 3.3 ghz i7 on the 13"

That's likely this then: i7-6567U

Also, that processor with 16gb/1tb, which is recommended, would be something like $2,899.00 whereas the 15" would be $3,399.00. 13" would have to be really important, or funds limited to the previous, to not warrant $500 more for 4 cores and a better graphics card.

That's not to say a 13" MBP with even an i5 couldn't be a productive music computer.