Performance
In our 2011 MacBook Air review I presented a couple of numbers that showed up to a 27% increase in performance from the i7 over the stock i5 in the 11. I ran the upgraded 11 through our complete performance suite and came up with an average increase in performance of about 22%. Given the increase in base clock speed is only 12.5% for the i7, the rest of the performance improvement had to have come from the higher turbo ratios and larger L3 cache.
I tend to follow the 10% rule: performance improvements greater than 10% are noticeable. In the case of the 11-inch MacBook Air, the upgraded i7 delivers a noticeable increase in performance.
Note that due to the smaller chassis, the upgraded 11 isn't always as fast as the 13-inch MacBook Air with the same CPU. Maximum single threaded performance looks pretty similar but under a prolonged heavily threaded workload the upgraded 13 is actually a bit faster:
| Core i7 1.8GHz Comparison: 13-inch vs 11-inch MacBook Air | ||||||
| Cinebench R10 (1 thread) | Cinebench R10 (4 threads) | Cinebench 11.5 (4 threads) | ||||
| Core i7 1.8GHz (13-inch MBA) | 4083 | 8234 | 2.46 | |||
| Core i7 1.8GHz (11-inch MBA) | 4087 | 7785 | 2.36 | |||
The advantage is around 5% in Cinebench so I doubt it's anything noticeable.
ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7orrAp5utnZOde6S7zGiqoaenZIF2gZNomKmonJrAbn2QoqWcoF2irqSuzqiiZpmZp3qku9GeZKJvXWaFqLTZZqmerpmaxG7Bz52YrZ1fZw%3D%3D