Earlier this month Apple announced a lot of new hardware. While not all of it is available yet (in particular the Core i5 and Core i7 iMacs) most of it is and folks have been asking about how the new hardware performs compared to the old hardware. So, I’ve gathered Geekbench results for the new Mac models and compared them with results for the older Mac models (all results were gathered from the Geekbench Browser).
Geekbench is Primate Labs’ processor and memory benchmark where a score of 1000 means a system has the same performance as a PowerMac G5 @ 1.6GHz. Higher scores are better.
iMac Benchmarks
| iMac (Late 2009) Intel Core 2 Duo E7600 3.06 GHz (2 cores) |
4297 | |
| iMac (Early 2009) Intel Core 2 Duo E8435 3.06 GHz (2 cores) |
4131 | |
| iMac (Early 2009) Intel Core 2 Duo E8335 2.93 GHz (2 cores) |
3947 | |
| iMac (Early 2009) Intel Core 2 Duo E8135 2.66 GHz (2 cores) |
3628 |
MacBook Benchmarks
| MacBook (Late 2009) Intel Core 2 Duo P7550 @ 2.26 GHz (2 cores) |
3245 | |
| MacBook (Late 2008) Intel Core 2 Duo P8600 @ 2.40 GHz (2 cores) |
3184 | |
| MacBook (Early 2009) Intel Core 2 Duo P7450 @ 2.13 GHz (2 cores) |
2926 | |
| MacBook (Late 2008) Intel Core 2 Duo P7350 @ 2.0 GHz (2 cores) |
2738 | |
| MacBook (Early 2009) Intel Core 2 Duo P7350 @ 2.0 GHz (2 cores) |
2664 |
Mac mini Benchmarks
| Mac mini (Late 2009) Intel Core 2 Duo P8700 2.53 GHz (2 cores) |
3563 | |
| Mac mini (Early/Late 2009) Intel Core 2 Duo P8400 2.26 GHz (2 cores) |
3056 | |
| Mac mini (Early 2009) Intel Core 2 Duo P7350 2.0 GHz (2 cores) |
2783 | |
| Mac mini (Mid 2007) Intel Core 2 T7200 2.0 GHz (2 cores) |
2617 | |
| Mac mini (Mid 2007) Intel Core 2 T5600 1.83 GHz (2 cores) |
2400 |
Conclusions
The results are as expected; faster processors (of the same architecture) mean higher Geekbench scores. This shouldn’t be surprising since Geekbench is predominantly a CPU benchmark. What I’m interested in seeing, though, is how the Core i5 and Core i7 iMacs stack up; not only do they have a new processor architecture they also have double the number of cores. I wonder if the high-end iMac i7 will (finally!) be comparable to a low-end Mac Pro?