Of course all of this is in part dependent on how OEMs go and design their laptops – go stuff a Core i5 in a Surface Pro 3 and watch it throttle – but at the end of the day the point is that Core M is not designed to offer the same kind of high performance under sustained workloads that Intel’s more powerful processors do.Ĭore M is at its heart still a power optimized Intel Broadwell design, so despite the different Core M branding it’s not all that far removed from the dual-core Broadwell-U processors in the MacBook Air and 13” Retina MacBook Pro. Which is to say that its performance is heavily tuned around performance bursting and racing back to idle, as opposed to more traditional Intel processors which turbo as well, but overall are also designed to hold at relatively high clockspeeds under sustained workloads.

But briefly, from a performance standpoint Core M behaves a lot more like a modern tablet processor than it does a traditional Intel x86 processor. Now that we’ve had a chance to take a look at the construction and component selection of the MacBook, it’s time to get down the business end of the review: performance.įor the sake of brevity I’m not going to completely rehash how Core M works, especially since we just did an in-depth look at the CPU last week.

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