Apple quietly released new MacBooks last week which feature (among other things) the Santa Rosa chipset and, for some models, a slightly faster processor. I thought it’d be interesting to compare two black MacBooks, the new model against the previous model, to see how performance has changed.

Setup

  • MacBook (Late 2007)
    • Intel Core 2 Duo @ 2.20GHz
    • 1.00 GB 667 MHz DDR2 SDRAM
    • Mac OS X 10.5 (Build 9A3110)
  • MacBook (Mid 2007)
    • Intel Core 2 Duo @ 2.00GHz
    • 1.00 GB 667 MHz DDR2 SDRAM
    • Mac OS X 10.5 (Build 9A581)

I’m reporting the baseline score, rather than the raw score, for each benchmark (where a score of 1000 is the score a Power Mac G5 1.6GHz would receive). Higher is better.

Results

Overall Performance

MacBook (Late 2007)
Intel Core 2 Duo @ 2.20GHz		 2908
 
MacBook (Mid 2007)
Intel Core 2 Duo @ 2.16GHz		 2760
 

Integer Performance

MacBook (Late 2007)
Intel Core 2 Duo @ 2.20GHz		 2580
 
MacBook (Mid 2007)
Intel Core 2 Duo @ 2.16GHz		 2511
 

Floating Point Performance

MacBook (Late 2007)
Intel Core 2 Duo @ 2.20GHz		 3988
 
MacBook (Mid 2007)
Intel Core 2 Duo @ 2.16GHz		 3890
 

Memory Performance

MacBook (Late 2007)
Intel Core 2 Duo @ 2.20GHz		 2153
 
MacBook (Mid 2007)
Intel Core 2 Duo @ 2.16GHz		 1878
 

Stream Performance

MacBook (Late 2007)
Intel Core 2 Duo @ 2.20GHz		 1789
 
MacBook (Mid 2007)
Intel Core 2 Duo @ 2.16GHz		 1449
 

Conclusions

While the new MacBooks have only modest processor performance gains over the previous MacBooks, the Santa Rosa chipset helps the new MacBooks achieve much more impressive performance gains over the previous MacBooks; memory performance is up almost 15% while stream performance (which relies heavily on memory) is up almost 25%.

When you consider the fact that the new MacBooks also support 4GB of RAM (the previous MacBooks only “officially” supported 2GB of RAM) the new MacBooks are a treat for anyone who runs memory-intensive applications but doesn’t want to pay the premium for a MacBook Pro.