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

MacBook (Late 2006)
Intel Core 2 Duo T7200 @ 2.00GHz		 2563
 
MacBook Air
Intel Core 2 Duo P7700 @ 1.80GHz		 2132
 
MacBook Air
Intel Core 2 Duo P7500 @ 1.60GHz		 2015
 

Integer Performance

MacBook (Late 2006)
Intel Core 2 Duo T7200 @ 2.00GHz		 2311
 
MacBook Air
Intel Core 2 Duo P7700 @ 1.80GHz		 1846
 
MacBook Air
Intel Core 2 Duo P7500 @ 1.60GHz		 1696
 

Floating Point Performance

MacBook (Late 2006)
Intel Core 2 Duo T7200 @ 2.00GHz		 3539
 
MacBook Air
Intel Core 2 Duo P7700 @ 1.80GHz		 2735
 
MacBook Air
Intel Core 2 Duo P7500 @ 1.60GHz		 2601
 

Memory Performance

MacBook (Late 2006)
Intel Core 2 Duo T7200 @ 2.00GHz		 1816
 
MacBook Air
Intel Core 2 Duo P7700 @ 1.80GHz		 1835
 
MacBook Air
Intel Core 2 Duo P7500 @ 1.60GHz		 1760
 

Stream Performance

MacBook (Late 2006)
Intel Core 2 Duo T7200 @ 2.00GHz		 1531
 
MacBook Air
Intel Core 2 Duo P7700 @ 1.80GHz		 1621
 
MacBook Air
Intel Core 2 Duo P7500 @ 1.60GHz		 1599
 

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).