[UPDATE*] This year new MacBook Pros will almost certainly see watershed chip upgrades.
Here's what probable and possible.
MacBook Pro 13: in case you haven't noticed the 13-inch laptop world has moved to quad-core. This is the first doubling of Intel mobile cores since the switch from single- to dual-core more than a decade ago.
I've been using four new 13-inch Windows 10 laptops with Intel's 8th generation quad core over the past six months. All laptops were upgrades from the 7th gen dual-core. Most benchmarks show a jump over that processor -- what the 13-inch MBP now uses -- of 40 percent. Or higher. It comes pretty close to squeezing today's 7th gen quad-core (e.g., used in the mid-2017 MBP 15) into a MBP 13. And to me the speed delta is palpable: no benchmarks necessary to show me that these systems are faster.
"As much hate¹ as the Internet wants to throw at Intel for plodding along, the 8th gen Core chips have been universally great CPUs offering markedly better performance over the 7th generation CPUs," Gordon Mah Ung, Executive Editor at PC World, told me in an email.
(See this post by Ung: "HP Spectre x360 15 review: With Kaby Lake-G, this laptop can do almost anything")
And let me insert: the other thing that has been really surprising for me is that battery life doesn't take a hit. I see battery life (based on my workload) on the quad-core Dell XPS 13 (4K display) of between 6 and 8 hours, the same if not a little better than the prior-generation 7th gen Intel dual-core XPS 13.
But how certain is the move to quad-core in the 2018 MBP 13? "I’d hope Apple would adopt an 8th gen Core in its MBP 13. That’s kind of a given but this is Apple," Ung said, adding that you never know with Apple since it is cautious and its cadence lags PC makers like Hewlett-Packard and Dell (who have been offering quad-core 13-inch laptops since last year).
I'll add that the quad-core Intel 8th gen has been available in volume long enough for Apple to do plenty of testing, so I'll venture that it's almost a given that MBP 13 will go quad.
MacBook Pro 15: this is where the possibilities get less certain but more interesting.
We're looking at two scenarios: Intel Kaby Lake G and/or Coffee Lake H. PC World's Ung has "kicked the tires" on both processors. He breaks it down as:
--Kaby Lake G (quad+Radeon RX Radeon M GL)
--Coffee Lake H (six-core + existing discrete option)
"Of those two, it feels like Kaby Lake G makes the most sense because it saves so much board space," Ung said. "I’ve tested both and both are legitimately fast CPUs and offer performance improvements over 7th Kaby Lake 'H' parts across the board," he said.
Ung continued: "Kaby Lake G gets you better battery life, maybe [Nvidia] GTX 1050ish performance, and reduces thickness and/or lets you add additional batteries or features."
"Coffee Lake H though gives you two more cores and it just screams when properly cooled."
Let me insert here that 6-core Coffee Lake H (another mobile first for Intel, by the way) would be dicey for Apple. Even though Intel told me this week that there is volume availability of the Coffee Lake H mobile now, I don't know if Apple would risk shoehorning this beast into a 0.6-inch-thick MBP².
Ung continued: "CFL-H [Coffee Lake 6-core] is actually fairly available now so supply is not the issue for Apple. I can almost see Apple offering both options but it would be a little weird."
Ung points to other possibilities too such as Kaby Lake G “H” "tuned down" to run in the MBP 15. "That gets you a quad core with GTX 1060 Max-Q performance," he said.
And then there's Cannonlake -- LPDDR4 and 32GB max memory: Cannonlake means Intel has finally moved to 10 nanometer. Intel recently revealed this fact on the ARK site here (all the processors listed above in this post are 14 nanometer).
"One thing Cannonlake is confirmed to bring to the table is support for LPDDR4," Ung said. "One reason Apple has been reluctant to offer more than 16GB of RAM in the MBP15 is that it requires the use of DDR4 instead of LPDDR3. DDR4 uses more power in standby than LPDDR3 so Apple goes with battery life. But that means the maximum is 16GB. With Cannon Lake and LPDDR4 support, the MacBook Pro 15 may finally offer a 32GB option so people can stop the complaining."
Let's hope Apple goes with a tiered approach for the MBP 15, with discrete models with distinctly different processors. Now that would give the big Windows 10 laptop OEMs something to think about.
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*Updates a previous post here.
¹I agree. Intel is not dropping the ball on processor progress. How is going from dual-core to quad-core not a huge leap? Or integrating AMD graphics not huge? Or adding a six-core mobile processor to the mix not big?
²Though Intel does say in its ARK database that the TDP for the 6-core Coffee Lake H mobile is 45 W (watts), "Configurable TDP-down 35 W" which implies that it is a manageable thermal envelope.
