MacBook – Finding Peak Memory Bandwidth on MacBook Pro

macbook promemoryperformance

I am required to find the peak memory bandwidth for a 2016 MacBook Pro. Where can I find this information?

Best Answer

Your 2016 MacBook, depending on the model, uses either 1866 or 2133 DDR3 memory (1866 is used by the non-touchbar model, the others use 2133.)

This number refers to the data rate of the memory, in MT/s (millions of transfers per second) per channel. DDR3 specifies a 64 bit wide bus, and MacBooks utilize dual channel memory: thus, the total memory bandwidths are 238.848 Gb/s (29.856 GB/s) and 273.024 Gb/s (34.128 GB/s.) Note however that all of these computers use LPDDR3, which may result in lower than advertised bandwidth. In practice, you probably won't seem these speeds, but it provides an upper limit.

If you'd like to test the bandwidth, Novabench offers features to test the actual bandwidth of your machine, though there seem to be mixed results based on reviews (Novabench reported 15.6% of my theoretical speed, which seems suspiciously low.) You may have better luck with Bandwidth, though you'll have to install dependencies and compile it yourself.

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