Are Intel’s Coffee Lake Microprocessors Set to Power Cupertino’s New MacBook Pro Models?

Apple’s engineers are apparently planning on upgrading their MacBook Pro line of portable computers by shipping them with Intel’s Coffee Lake CPU installed by default. Benchmarks shared among users on several Apple fan sites illustrated that these i7-8559U chips could offer maximum turbo speeds somewhere around 4.5GHz when running on the motherboard used with macOS laptops.

Each chip has four separate cores and supports eight threads at a time. This was possible because Intel has phased in a new 14nm manufacturing process that gives them the ability to shove even more transistors onto each square µm of space.

Current speeds on 13-inch MacBook Pro models with multiple CPU cores are considerably slower, which means that the new chips should provide a serious boost. However, critics are saying that there are some questions regarding the validity of these tests. Some are even saying that the entire announcement may be something of a ruse or exaggeration.

A MacBook Pro with the 28 watt Coffee Lake chip was seen on Geekbench, which has lead some to say that the testings are faked. Skilled technicians could have easily done so. Others have insinuated that someone installed a microchip into a laptop that it wasn’t originally designed to host.

What’s interesting about this is even if it turns out that Apple’s engineers do indeed decide to move in a different direction, they could very easily still increase the power of existing designs by making use of i5 and i7 microprocessors from Intel that feature integrated Vega CPU technology.

These CPUs were first introduced at CES 2018, so they’re still quite new, but Apple tends to be an early adopter of an overwhelming majority of PC technologies regardless of the anything else critics might say about them. If there was a company to adopt this technology early on, then it would probably be Apple.

Either case might ultimately be good for Cupertino’s design team, however, as it would make more of a case for their beleaguered MacBook Pro line to be again considered a serious contender in the world of graphic design and gaming.

It would also lend some needed power to manage the growing list of macOS system processes.