Primate Labs Blog

Yesterday Apple released updated MacBooks and MacBook Pros both of which feature (among other things) new processors. While I don’t have Geekbench results for the new MacBooks, I wanted to compare Geekbench results for some of the new MacBook Pros against results for older MacBook Pros.

Setup

Here is the configuration of the test machines:

• MacBook Pro (Early 2008)

  • Intel Core 2 Duo T9300 @ 2.50GHz
  • 2.00 GB 667 MHz DDR2 SDRAM
  • Mac OS X 10.5.2 (Build 9C2018)

• MacBook Pro (Early 2008)

  • Intel Core 2 Duo T8300 @ 2.40GHz
  • 2.00 GB 667 MHz DDR2 SDRAM
  • Mac OS X 10.5.2 (Build 9C2018)

• MacBook Pro (Mid 2007)

  • Intel Core 2 Duo T7800 @ 2.60GHz
  • 2.00 GB 667 MHz DDR2 SDRAM
  • Mac OS X 10.5.2 (Build 9C31)

• MacBook Pro (Mid 2007)

  • Intel Core 2 Duo T7700 @ 2.40GHz
  • 2.00 GB 667 MHz DDR2 SDRAM
  • Mac OS X 10.5.2 (Build 9C31)

If you’re not familiar with Geekbench 2, benchmarks are scored against a baseline, where a score of 1000 represents the performance of a Power Mac G5 @ 1.6GHz. Higher is better.

Results

Overall Performance

Integer Performance

Floating Point Performance

Memory Performance

Stream Performance

Conclusions

At first glance the results seems counter-intuitive; shouldn’t the new MacBook Pro @ 2.4GHz be faster than the old MacBook Pro @ 2.4GHz? Isn’t the Penryn better than the Merom? It turns out the answer is, “not necessarily”.

The processor in the new MacBook Pro @ 2.4GHz (T8300) has less L2 cache than processor in the old MacBook Pro @ 2.4GHz (T7700) which explains the slight drop in performance.

However, when you consider the new MacBook Pro 2.4GHz is the base model, while the old MacBook Pro 2.4GHz was the mid-range model, the small drop in performance comes with a significant reduction in price. Plus, the new Penryn processor uses less energy than the old Merom processor, which means a cooler laptop with increased battery life.

Since Apple released new Macs last month (both the updated Mac Pro and the all-new MacBook Air) it’s time to update the Mac performance chart.

Setup

Results were collected from the Geekbench Result Browser for Macs with standard processors (i.e., no processor upgrades, overclocked processors, or Hackintoshes) with at least 512MB of RAM running Leopard.

I’ve reported the average overall score for each model and processor combination, where 1000 is the score a Power Mac G5 @ 1.6GHz would receive. Higher scores are better. Keep in mind that Geekbench 2 only measures processor and memory performance which is why, for example, MacBook and MacBook Pro scores are so similar, despite both having radically different graphics adapters.

Results

I forgot to mention this, but Geekbench 2.0.11 was released last week. Geekbench 2.0.11 adds support for the MacBook Air and the Xserve (Early 2008), fixes performance problems on PowerPC-based Macs, and fixes a crash on PowerPC-based systems running Mac OS X 10.4.

Geekbench 2.0.11 is a free upgrade for all registered Geekbench 2 users.

One of the big concerns surrounding the MacBook Air is just how much will you give up if you switch from a MacBook (or MacBook Pro) to a MacBook Air. Some things, like the optical drive and FireWire ports, are obvious while others, like processor performance, are harder to measure.

Of course, now that the MacBook Air is shipping we can take a look at their processor performance with Geekbench 2 and find out just how fast (or slow) the processor in the MacBook Air is.

For context, I’m comparing the performance of the new MacBook Airs against a slightly older MacBook. This does give the MacBook Air a slight advantage (since the MacBook Airs use the new Santa Rosa chipset) but I think it’s still useful since people are more likely to upgrade an older laptop than a newer machine. If you’re interested in how more recent MacBooks perform, you can take a look at our Santa Rosa MacBook benchmarks, or our Mac performance chart.

Setup

• MacBook (Late 2006)

  • Intel Core 2 Duo T7200 @ 2.00GHz
  • 2.00 GB 667 MHz DDR2 SDRAM
  • Mac OS X 10.5.1 (Build 9B18)

• MacBook Air

  • Intel Core 2 Duo P7700 @ 1.80GHz
  • 2.00 GB 667 MHz DDR2 SDRAM
  • Mac OS X 10.5.1 (Build 9B2324)

• MacBook Air

  • Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU P7500 @ 1.60GHz
  • 2.00 GB 667 MHz DDR2 SDRAM
  • Mac OS X 10.5.1 (Build 9B2324)

If you’re not familiar with Geekbench 2, benchmarks are scored against a baseline, where a score of 1000 represents the performance of a Power Mac G5 @ 1.6GHz. Higher is better.

Results

Overall Performance

Integer Performance

Floating Point Performance

Memory Performance

Stream Performance

Conclusions

The MacBook Air is slower than the MacBook, when it comes to overall performance and processor performance, which isn’t surprising considering the MacBook Air uses slower processors (1.6GHz and 1.8GHz versus 2.0GHz). Even if Apple released a MacBook Air with a 2.0GHz processor it’s obvious from the results it wouldn’t be as fast as a MacBook with a 2.0GHz processor.

That said, the MacBook Air isn’t really that slow; at 80-85% of the performance of the MacBook, you probably won’t notice much of a difference if you switch from a Mac laptop with Core Duo or a “slower” Core 2 Duo . And if you switch from a PowerPC-based Mac laptop the MacBook Air will feel a lot faster (and lighter, too).

The Geekbench Result Browser was down for several hours this morning. I’m not exactly sure what the cause was, but the evidence points to a memory leak (probably in the Browser code itself) that caused Rails to consume all available memory and then fall down go boom.

While the Result Browser is back online and looks like it’s behaving, I haven’t been able to determine what the problem actually is, so there might be more downtime in the near future. If that does happen, let me apologize in advance and assure you that I’m working on the problem.