Mac Pro Benchmarks (Early 2009)
Apple released a lot of new hardware this month, and while I was able to post Geekbench results for the new iMac and Mac mini fairly quickly, it took a little while longer to get Geekbench results for the new Mac Pro.
While other folks, such as Rob-ART over at BareFeats, have done an excellent job compiling benchmark results for the latest Mac Pros, I still wanted to post Geekbench results for not just the latest Mac Pros, but all of the Mac Pros that Apple has produced.
Setup
I’ve gathered Geekbench scores for the all of the Mac Pros that Apple has released. Scores were collected from the Geekbench Result Browser for Mac Pros with standard processors (i.e., no processor upgrades, overclocked processors, or Hackintoshes).
I’ve reported the average overall score for each model and processor combination.
If you haven’t used Geekbench before here’s how it measures performance. Geekbench compares a computer’s performance against a “baseline system” (currently a Power Mac G5 @ 1.6GHz in Geekbench 2). A computer that has the same performance as the baseline system scores 1000 in Geekbench. A computer that’s twice as fast as the baseline scores 2000 while a computer that’s twice as slow scores 500.
Finally, Geekbench 2 only measures processor and memory performance which is why models with the same processors but different video cards have roughly the same score.
Mac Pro Benchmarks
| Mac Pro (Early 2009) Intel Xeon X5570 2.93 GHz (8 cores) |
14904 | |
| Mac Pro (Early 2009) Intel Xeon X5550 2.67 GHz (8 cores) |
14458 | |
| Mac Pro (Early 2009) Intel Xeon E5520 2.27 GHz (8 cores) |
11803 | |
| Mac Pro (Early 2009) Intel Xeon W3540 2.93 GHz (4 cores) |
9112 | |
| Mac Pro (Early 2008) Intel Xeon X5482 3.2 GHz (8 cores) |
9039 | |
| Mac Pro (Early 2008) Intel Xeon X5472 3.0 GHz (8 cores) |
8737 | |
| Mac Pro (8-core) Intel Xeon X5365 3.0 GHz (8 cores) |
8629 | |
| Mac Pro (Early 2008) Intel Xeon E5462 2.8 GHz (8 cores) |
8319 | |
| Mac Pro (Early 2009) Intel Xeon W3520 2.67 GHz (4 cores) |
8144 | |
| Mac Pro Intel Xeon 5160 3.0 GHz (4 cores) |
5538 | |
| Mac Pro (Early 2008) Intel Xeon E5462 2.8 GHz (4 cores) |
5438 | |
| Mac Pro Intel Xeon 5150 2.66 GHz (4 cores) |
4975 | |
| Mac Pro Intel Xeon 5130 2.0 GHz (4 cores) |
3884 |
Conclusions
What’s interesting is the performance of the 2008 and 2009 entry-level Mac Pro; both Macs have roughly the same performance, but the newer Mac Pro has a lower processor frequency and fewer cores. The new Nehalem architecture is clearly better than the older Core architecture. While it would be nice if the new entry-level Mac Pro was faster than the old entry-level Mac Pro, the new Mac Pro is cheaper, a change that makes more sense given the state of the economy.
The new mid- and high-end Mac Pros, on the other hand, are insanely fast (and insanely expensive). Currently it’s these models that are dominating most of the top spots in the Geekbench Result Browser. The only computer that can beat the Mac Pros’ score is a 32-core server from IBM.