Earlier this week Apple released updated Mac Pros that use Intel’s new Penryn processors. Also new is the fact that the standard Mac Pro configuration now comes with eight (instead of four) cores.

Of course, what I’ve been wondering (as I sit here and think about getting a new Mac Pro) is how does the new standard eight-core Mac Pro perform compare to the old high-end Mac Pro? I’ve gathered Geekbench 2 results for both Mac Pros to find out.

Setup

  • Mac Pro (Early 2008)
    • Intel Xeon E5462 @ 2.80GHz (Eight cores)
    • 2.00 GB 800 MHz DDR2 FB-DIMM
    • Mac OS X 10.5.1 (Build 9B18)
  • Mac Pro (8-core)
    • Intel Xeon X5365 @ 3.00GHz (Eight cores)
    • 1.00 GB 667 MHz DDR2 FB-DIMM
    • Mac OS X 10.5.1 (Build 9B18)

It might seem unfair to compare a new Mac Pro with more RAM against an old Mac Pro with less RAM. However, both Mac Pros have two FB-DIMMs installed. Since Mac Pro performance increases dramatically when it’s configured with four FB-DIMMs sticks, I figure it’s more important to make sure the two Mac Pros have the same number of FB-DIMMs installed rather than the same amount of memory installed.

Also, Geekbench itself isn’t incredibly memory hungry (Geekbench prefers faster RAM instead of more RAM) so I doubt the performance of the old Mac Pro will suffer from having less memory installed.

As always, 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

Mac Pro (Early 2008)
Intel Xeon E5462 @ 2.8GHz		 7598
 
2 Mac Pro (8-core)
Intel Xeon X5365 @ 3.0GHz		 7680
 

Integer Performance

Mac Pro (Early 2008)
Intel Xeon E5462 @ 2.8GHz		 8227
 
2 Mac Pro (8-core)
Intel Xeon X5365 @ 3.0GHz		 7589
 

Floating Point Performance

Mac Pro (Early 2008)
Intel Xeon E5462 @ 2.8GHz		 11470
 
2 Mac Pro (8-core)
Intel Xeon X5365 @ 3.0GHz		 12886
 

As you can see, floating point performance is off the charts!

Memory Performance

Mac Pro (Early 2008)
Intel Xeon E5462 @ 2.8GHz		 2503
 
2 Mac Pro (8-core)
Intel Xeon X5365 @ 3.0GHz		 1899
 

Stream Performance

Mac Pro (Early 2008)
Intel Xeon E5462 @ 2.8GHz		 2040
 
2 Mac Pro (8-core)
Intel Xeon X5365 @ 3.0GHz		 1345
 

Conclusions

I’d expected that the new Mac Pro would make a respectable showing, but would still be slightly slower than the old Mac Pro, since the new Mac Pro’s processors run at a lower clock frequency. So I’m surprised that the new Mac Pro is faster in almost every area (floating point performance being the exception) than the old Mac Pro. Of course, the new Mac Pro does have faster memory along with the new Penryn processors (which have a lot of architectural improvements, like more L2 cache) so maybe I shouldn’t be surprised after all.

Plus, when you consider the fact that the new Mac Pro is so much more affordable than the old Mac Pro and it’s hard to call this upgrade anything less than impressive.