What's Under the Hood of Apple's New MacBook Pros?

So what's inside Apple's with super-duper Retina display?

Unsurprisingly, Intel is very much in there with its new 22-nanometer Ivy Bridge-generation mobile processors. What's more, Nvidia won the discrete graphics battle with Advanced Micro Devices this time around, probably because the former's new Kepler architecture is pretty smoking hot and that famous Retina display demands nothing less than the best current GPU in the biz, naturally.

We'll probably have to wait until the iFixit gang does one of its patented teardowns of the new MacBook Pro to find out who's supplying the 802.11n Wi-Fi radios, Bluetooth 4.0 controllers, thermal paste, and Tri-Wing screws. But for now, we can use some simple deduction to figure out the identities of the marquee chips in these next-generation Apple clamshells.

The easy one is the Nvidia chip. It's listed right there in the tech specs for Apple's new MacBook Pro lineup. Buyers of a 15-inch MacBook Pro with Retina display are getting Nvidia's GeForce GT 650M GPU with 1GB of GDDR5 memory and automatic graphics switching from discrete graphics to Intel's HD Graphics 4000 integrated graphics solution as a handy way to save on battery power.

That's a ton of graphics horsepower—enough to support full native resolution on the MacBook Pro's own built-in 2880-by-1800 resolution display plus two more 2560-by-1600 resolution external displays—so much so, that Nvidia kind of went on tilt boasting about its design win on Monday.

"Apple has raised the bar dramatically in notebook graphics with their amazing Retina display and has once again demonstrated that the world's best notebooks have Nvidia GPUs. That combination will bring unprecedented image clarity to MacBook Pro users everywhere," wrote Rene Haas, general manager of Nvidia Notebook Products, in a blog post.

"Based on the next-generation Nvidia Kepler graphics architecture, the GeForce GT 650M offers unprecedented performance and extreme energy efficiency, giving it the muscle to process the 5,184,000 pixels in the next-gen MacBook Pro's ultra high-resolution display. The GeForce GT 650M is not only up to the task, it maximizes power efficiency along the way," he added.

Intel Inside, But Which Chip?

It's a little trickier trying to guess at the Intel Core-i7 chips under the hood of the new MacBook Pros. Apple doesn't name the models its using but does provide the speeds and feeds for three 22nm Ivy Bridge mobile processors available for different configurations of the 15-inch laptops.

With clock speeds, core counts, and cache figures in hand, it's a simple matter to visit Intel's own processor price list and deduce that the $2,799 version is sporting Intel's Core i7-3720QM, a quad-core chip with hyper-threading, 6MB of L3 cache priced at $378 in 1,000-unit quantities. Running all four cores, this chip has a base clock of 2.6GHz and Intel's Turbo Boost technology can dial up a single core to as high as 3.6GHz in certain scenarios.

The pricier MacBook Pro can also be configured with a $568, quad-core Core i7-3820QM, which is probably makes it pricier still. The extra bucks get you 8MB of L3 cache and a 2.7GHz base clock that revs up to 3.7GHz with Turbo Boost.

More mysterious is the processor at the heart of the $2,199 MacBook Pro. We know it's a 2.3GHz quad-core Intel Core i7 chip that can hit 3.3GHz with Turbo Boost and it's got 6MB of L3 cache (we know this because Apple says so).

The trouble is, there are two Ivy Bridge processors that fit that description, the Core i7-3615QM and the Core i7-3610QM. Both are priced at $378 and there just isn't a heck of a lot of difference between them.

But there are a couple of little things that help you to tell these two parts from one another. The Core i7-3615QM's graphics have a maximum dynamic frequency of 1.2GHz, slightly higher than the 1.1GHz for the Core i7-3610QM. The Core i7-3615QM also features Intel Virtualization Technology for Directed I/O (VT-d) while the Core i7-3610QM does not, which may give us a clue that it's the former chip in the $2199 MacBook Pro with Retina display, because the 2.6GHz Core i7-3720QM in the $2,799 version also has VT-d technology.

For more, see , the new MacBook Pro unboxing slideshow above, and the slideshow from WWDC below.