Primate Labs Blog

When Apple released the new MacBooks and MacBook Pros last month, Apple also updated the MacBook Air. While the changes for the MacBook Air weren’t as radical, there were still a number of improvements made such as a new chipset, faster RAM, better graphics cards, and faster processors (at least for the high-end model).

What do these improvements mean for processor performance? My initial guess is that, like the new MacBooks and MacBook Pros, it doesn’t mean much, but let’s look at some Geekbench results to see if that’s the case.

Setup

I used Geekbench 2, our cross-platform benchmark, to measure the processor and memory performance of the new MacBooks and MacBook Pros. Here is the configuration of the four test machines.

• MacBook Air (Late 2008)

  • Intel Core 2 Duo @ 1.86GHz or
  • Intel Core 2 Duo @ 1.60GHz
  • 2.00 GB 1067 MHz DDR3
  • Mac OS X 10.5.5 (Build 9F2523)

• MacBook Air

  • Intel Core 2 Duo @ 1.80GHz or
  • Intel Core 2 Duo @ 1.60GHz
  • 2.00 GB 667 MHz DDR2 SDRAM
  • Mac OS X 10.5.5 (Build 9F33)

Geekbench 2 scores are calibrated against a baseline score of 1000 (which is the score a Power Mac G5 @ 1.6GHz would receive). Higher scores are better.

Results

Overall Performance

Integer Performance

Floating Point Performance

Memory Performance

Stream Performance

Conclusions

I thought the new MacBook Air wouldn’t be that much faster than the old MacBook Air, and it turns out I’m partly right (or partly wrong, depending on how you look at it). While the high-end MacBook Air is only slightly faster, the low-end MacBook Air is almost 10% faster (a dramatic improvement).

Keep in mind, too, these benchmarks ignore one of the big improvements to the MacBook Air — the new graphics chipset. While Geekbench isn’t able to measure graphics performance (an unfortunate limitation) benchmarks elsewhere show the huge gains NVIDIA’s integrated graphics have over Intel’s integrated graphics.

So if you’re thinking about buying a MacBook Air, don’t be too concerned that processor performance hasn’t improved for the high-end MacBook Air; the new graphics cards will certainly make up for it. Plus, while many complain about the low performance of the MacBook Air, remember it’s faster than the first round of Intel-based laptops and all of the dual-processor PowerMac G5s.

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).