Snow Leopard is out today! While I’ve been running the developer versions for a while now, I went out and picked up a retail copy at my friendly neighborhood Apple store and installed it on my MacBook Pro (the laptop where I do most of my Mac development).

Now, what’s interesting about Snow Leopard is that unlike most new versions of operating systems (or most new versions of software in general) Apple didn’t add a lot of new features to Snow Leopard. Instead, Apple focused on making Snow Leopard faster and more stable than Leopard.

While some of the improvements, like Grand Central Dispatch and OpenCL, will only benefit new (or rewritten) applications, do the other improvements help existing applications run faster?

To find out just how much faster existing applications run under Snow Leopard, I ran Geekbench on my MacBook Pro under Leopard and Snow Leopard. Geekbench doesn’t take advantage of Grand Central Dispatch or OpenCL so it’s a good way to determine how much of a performance boost existing applications will receive under Snow Leopard.

Setup

Here’s the configuration of the MacBook Pro I used:

  • MacBook Pro (Late 2008)
    • Intel Core 2 Duo P8600 @ 2.40GHz
    • 2.00 GB 1067 MHz DDR3
    • Mac OS X 10.5.8 or
    • Mac OS X 10.6

If you’re not familiar with Geekbench, higher scores are better.

Results

Overall Performance

Snow Leopard
64-bit		 3725
 
Leopard
64-bit		 3637
 
Snow Leopard
32-bit		 3410
 
Leopard
32-bit		 3310
 

Integer Performance

Snow Leopard
64-bit		 3357
 
Leopard
64-bit		 3230
 
Snow Leopard
32-bit		 2768
 
Leopard
32-bit		 2677
 

Floating Point Performance

Snow Leopard
64-bit		 5199
 
Leopard
64-bit		 5099
 
Snow Leopard
32-bit		 4950
 
Leopard
32-bit		 4773
 

Memory Performance

Snow Leopard
64-bit		 2681
 
Leopard
64-bit		 2630
 
Snow Leopard
32-bit		 2594
 
Leopard
32-bit		 2568
 

Stream Performance

Snow Leopard
64-bit		 1943
 
Leopard
64-bit		 1960
 
Snow Leopard
32-bit		 1907
 
Leopard
32-bit		 1893
 

Conclusions

While the performance improvement is small, it is there – Geekbench runs between 2% and 3% faster under Snow Leopard than under Leopard. While this might not seem impressive at first keep in mind that Geekbench was slower under Leopard than Tiger. Having a new operating system improve performance, even if it’s a small improvement, is still something to get excited about.

One thing worth mentioning that isn’t captured in the Geekbench results above is that Snow Leopard feels faster and smoother than Leopard; the increased responsiveness of Snow Leopard makes it a joy to use.