What are good specifications for MacBook Pro which is fit with Matlab?

Hi,

Im going to buy Macbook pro so im looking for the best specifications to go through with Matlab?

Answer 1

[Walter Roberson]

Your choices at the moment:

• 13" MacBook Pro: has M2 chip
• 14" and 16" MacBook Pro: has M1 Pro chip or M1 Max chip

https://9to5mac.com/2022/06/27/m2-speed/

The benchmarks show that the M2 chip in the MacBook Pro clocks in at 3.49Hz compared to the M1’s speed of 3.2GHz. Single-core performance with the M2 is around 11.56% faster than the M1 chip, while multi-core performance is up by around 19.45%.

The page https://www.forbes.com/sites/ewanspence/2022/07/30/apple-m2-macbook-pro-discount-m2-macbook-air-comparison/ points out,

The M2 MacBook Pro remains a throwback to the Intel designs of 2016; you have a screen with expansive bezels, a lack of I/O ports, the technically impressive but almost dead-on-arrival Touch Bar, and more.

Thus the 13" M2 offers good performance per dollar, but it is not a good system to base a professional base around.

For example I am using an older iMac with 4 USB ports and 2 Thunderbolt ports, and I am constantly running out of USB, since I have multiple USB drives, and I have a USB keyboard (system cannot recognize the keyboard in Recovery Mode or at boot time if I hang it off of a USB hub.) I also have multiple mice (it loses track of my trackball every time I boot from a different partition); and a game controller; and a SuperSpeed DVD drive... and more external drives.

And remember that for that series you are going to need one of your USB ports for your wired ethernet...

If what you need is something you can carry back and forth to University and do assignments on, the 13" M2 might be fine. But if you are like me and you have enough different cables around that you have to have a permanent sorting method, then you should be reconsidering going for the lower end.

Note: MATLAB cannot take advantage of the Apple Silicon GPU for computations, and it is not known at the moment whether Mathworks will ever make that available. You should probably ignore the GPU capabilities in making your decision with respect to MATLAB.

[Mona Ahmed]

Thank you! thats really helpful and informative! My problem with M2 Macbook pro is the small screen as well So im thinking to get Macbook pro 16 inch with 1TB and 16 Ram is it good choice? and When i read about the bench marks i found that Windows with AMD Ryzen threaddipper 3970x is the best so Should i go for windows instead?

[Walter Roberson]

I do not know much about the threadripper series, and cannot advise on tradeoffs for it.

I have not happened to notice any systems that have the threadripper and Nvidia GPU. They might exist, but the threadripper systems that I glanced at had AMD GPUs. That is potentially important... or irrelevant, depending on what you want to do.

The 3970x is a premium CPU at present, with a premium cost, if I recall correctly. And needs more cooling.

When I glanced at benchmarks before, the single core performance of the threadripper was a little below the available Intel performance, but the multiple core performance of the threadripper was excellent. This leads to the question of whether your workload would tend to be bound by single-core performance, or bound by multi-core performance. There are very valid MATLAB programs on both sides of that, you can't just say "Oh, MATLAB, obviously you want multi-core performance!"

[Mona Ahmed]

Okay, i got it. Do you know if Macbook pro 16 inch with 16 Ram and 1Tb is good for long run simulations?

[Walter Roberson]

https://svalt.com/blogs/svalt/laptops has a description of the cooling system.

Note that they sell cooling systems so not necessarily unbiased

[Mona Ahmed]

Okay, Thank You!