Apple MacBook Pro 13 2020 has arrived: Ice Lake only improves GPU performance, would AMD's Ryzen be the better choice?

After Apple replaced the bigger MacBook Pro 15 with the MacBook Pro 16 (with some new features) in the end of last year, many users also hoped for a switch to a MacBook Pro 14 for the smaller model. However, this is not the case and the announcement of the 2020 MacBook Pro 13 was pretty sobering with limited upgrades: Yes, you get a new Ice-Lake processor from Intel, but the only major upgrade seems to the implementation of the new Magic Keyboard.

We now have the entry-level model of the MacBook Pro 14 (4x Thunderbolt 3) for 2129 Euros in our editorial office and we already ran some benchmarks, but the results are rather sobering. The new Ice Lake processor Core i5-1038NG7, which is exclusively available in Apple's subnotebook, should be more efficient than its predecessor, more precisely be faster at the same power consumption. However, this is not the case for our unit and we can see the clock disadvantages of Intel's 10 nm process, because the CPU clock is actually lower at a higher consumption compared to the old model (4x 3.2 GHz @~35W vs. 4x 3.4 GHz @~33W in the 2019 MBP 13). The per-MHz performance is a bit better though, so the final result is pretty much identical, which is also the case for the single-core performance. It is interesting that it takes a couple of runs before the performance levels off after the fans have reached their maximum speed.