Holy smoke! The new MacBook Pro literally is twice as fast

When Apple launched the new MacBook Pro earlier this month, the company claimed its performance would be double that of the previous model.

As it turns out, that wasn’t an exaggeration.

Benchmark tests with Blackmagic software on a new 13-in. MacBook Pro with Retina display revealed it can pin the needle at more than 1,400MBps for writes and more than 1,300MBps for reads.

The machine that Computerworld tested had a 512GB PCIe M.2 form-factor flash module ($1,799) and an Intel dual-core i5 2.9GHz processor, 8GB of (1866MHz LPDDR3) RAM, and was running OS X 10.10.2 (Yosemite).

That performance compares to the previous model MacBook Pro (mid-2014), which had industry-leading performance of nearly 650MBps write speeds and over 700MBps read speeds.

That machine also had a 512GB PCIe M.2 flash module, a 2.6GHz Intel Core i5 processor, 16GB of 1600 MHz DDR3 RAM, and was also running OS X 10.10.2.

So what did Apple do to the new 2015 MacBook Pro?

The new machine gained some typical upgrades: a larger battery, faster memory and a faster processer — either a 2.7 GHz dual core i5 or 2.9GHz i5 Intel Broadwell processer. (A 3.1GHz dual core i7 processor is a build-to-order upgrade.)

While both the previous model MacBook Pro and the latest model sport leading-edge PCIe flash memory cards, versus 2.5-in SATA drives used in most other laptops today, the 2015 MacBook Pro’s mass storage device doubles bandwidth.

Apple’s Samsung-made PCIe 3.0 flash card in the 2015 MacBook Pro, which comes with 128GB, 256GB and 512GB and 1TB capacities, went from a PCIe 2.0 x2 (or two I/O lanes) in the previous model to a PCIe 3.0 x4 (four I/O lanes).

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“Double the lanes, double the speed,” said Gregory Wong, an analyst with Forward Insights.

In January, Samsung announced it had moved into full production of its new SM951 laptop SSD, its first mass produced expansion card using the PCIe 3.0 x4 slot SSD specification. The SM951 SSD uses 14-nanometer class multi-level cell (MLC) NAND flash. Along with PCIe 3.0, the gumstick-sized SSD also supports the PCIe 2.0 specification, making it backward compatible for many of today’s ultraslim laptops.