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2013 MacBook Air benchmarks from AnandTech

The new MacBook Air went on sale this week, and customers want to know how this year's Haswell models compare to last year's Ivy Bridge units. Yesterday, Engadget benchmarked the new MacBook Air looking primarily at the SSD drive performance and now AnandTech has published its own report that includes CPU performance.

The 2013 MacBook Air has a Core i5 CPU with a lower base clock speed than the comparable 2012 MacBook Air, but it has the same max turbo speed of 2.6GHz. Though the Haswell architecture improves the battery life in the 2013 MacBook Air, the CPU performance is generally the same between the two models.

SSD drive performance in the new MacBook Air is boosted significantly by the adoption of PCIe-based SSDs. Hardware specs show that the PCIe 2.0 x2 interface is capable of 1 GB/s in each direction, and AnandTech recorded a respectable peak sequential read/write performance of almost 800 MB/s.

There are a lot of other goodies in the AnandTech article for hardware fans to geek out on, so head on over and check it out.