Geekbench
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Rumor: Geekbench hints at a Core i7 MacBook Pro
A quick couple of tips from readers Ken and Jack, and this thread over at the MacRumors forums, point us towards an interesting results page at the Geekbench site (Google cached version, in case they get hammered), which aggregates benchmark results from thousands of users all over the globe. This particular page reports the performance of a previously unreleased MacBook Pro model (MacBookPro6,1) which claims an Intel Core i7 M 620 processor running the show. Real? Maybe, although at this point it's a bit suspicious that it's not running a dev build of 10.6.3 instead of an internal build of 10.6.2 as reported on the page; also, Geekbench results are frequently spoofed by hackintoshes (unless Apple built an AMD-based MacBook Pro and simply neglected to tell us about it). Fast? Heck yes; the benchmark score of 5260 handily blows by the speed of currently shipping machines. The eventual appearance of the 6,1 version of the MBP has been a bit of a foregone conclusion since October of last year, when developer builds of OS X 10.6.2 were found to include support files specific to those model IDs. A laptop refresh in Q1 would be a very nice thing, but in this case I wouldn't get the checkbook sharpened quite yet. Thanks to Ken and Jack for sending this one in.
Benchmarking results: Is Snow Leopard really any faster than Leopard?
Be sure to check all of our ongoing Snow Leopard coverage right here. One of the biggest features of Snow Leopard isn't something apparent to the naked eye: software tweaks and refinements intended to make OS X a leaner, meaner OS for your fighting Apple machine. But is Snow Leopard really any faster? Now that I've successfully upgraded two Macs to Snow Leopard I've got some benchmarking results to share. My Early 2008 MacBook Pro shipped with OS X Leopard 10.5.2 installed. I ran Geekbench on the stock OS X installation after upgrading the RAM to 4 GB to get a baseline for comparison of future performance. 18 months later I ran the same test immediately after updating to 10.6. Both tests were performed with Geekbench testing in 32-bit mode immediately after a restart, with no other programs open except the Finder, nothing loaded in Dashboard, and no Time Machine backup running. Machine specs: Intel Core 2 Duo @ 2.60 GHz w/ 4GB RAM Average Overall Geekbench score for this model of MacBook Pro: 3304 Read on for the scores.
Linux test shows PS3 beat by a Power Mac G5
General-purpose code seems to slow down the Cell performance a bit, as it would appear on a recent Geekbench test. Primate Labs ran a few benchmarks under Linux and the results show the PS3 being beat by a Power Mac G5 1.6GHz in all tests except memory performance. We have to keep in mind, the tests only prove the Cell is not a wonderful "general-purpose" CPU. And lest anyone forget, the purpose of the PS3 is to play games! Cell-specific optimizations are going to be implemented in a future Geekbench test, so once round 2 comes along, we'll get a taste of what's really cooking underneath the hood of our favorite console. Fire when ready! [Via digg]
MacBook Pro vs PowerBook benchmarks
If you are like me and enjoy a good clean fight, check out these benchmarks at Geek Patrol using their own pre-production software: Geekbench, a multi-platform benchmarking utility. These numbers reflect benchmarking on a 1.5GHz PowerBook G4 with 1.25GB RAM vs a 2.0GHz MacBook Pro with 1GB RAM (the latter benchmark running as a Universal Binary not in Rosetta). I took it upon myself to average their twenty benchmark results. Using Geek Patrol's benchmarking results, the MacBook Pro they used is 3.74 times faster than the PowerBook they tested. If I throw out the low results they received from Stdlib Allocate (which they note: "depends more on library performance than raw hardware performance"), the MacBook Pro is on average, 4.26 times faster than a PowerBook.We all know that real world testing is what will really determine whether or not the MacBook Pro can severely outperform the PowerBook, but we will have to wait for more pro apps to be released as Universal Binaries before anyone takes a crack at graphing those statistics. Until then, all of you who have a MacBook Pro, enjoy your zippy new laptop.[via Slashdot and reader Ernest Leitch]
