MacBook Performance (May 2007)

Apple released updated MacBooks earlier this week. While it's not a major upgrade, I still thought it'd be interesting to compare the performance of the new MacBooks against the performance of the old MacBooks using Geekbench 2.

Setup

Here's the configuration of the three MacBooks used in this performance comparison. Note that the first MacBook is from the new MacBook lineup, while the last two are from the old MacBook lineup (it looks like Apple didn't update the internal model string for the new MacBook lineup).

• MacBook (Late 2006)

  • Intel Core 2 Duo @ 2.16GHz
  • 1 GB 667 MHz DDR2 SDRAM
  • Mac OS X 10.4.9 (Build 8P4112)
  • Geekbench 2.0.2

• MacBook (Late 2006)

  • Intel Core 2 Duo @ 2.00GHz
  • 1 GB 667 MHz DDR2 SDRAM
  • Mac OS X 10.4.9 (Build 8P2137)
  • Geekbench 2.0.2

• MacBook (Late 2006)

  • Intel Core 2 Duo @ 1.83GHz
  • 1 GB 667 MHz DDR2 SDRAM
  • Mac OS X 10.4.9 (Build 8P2137)
  • Geekbench 2.0.2

I’m reporting the baseline score, rather than the raw score, for each benchmark (where a score of 1000 is the score a Power Mac G5 1.6GHz would receive). Higher is better.

Results

Overall Performance

Integer Performance

Floating Point Performance

Memory Performance

Stream Performance

Conclusions

From a performance perspective this upgrade isn't terribly exciting; the new MacBooks are only slightly faster than the old MacBooks (which isn't surprising considering the modest increase in clock speed).

However, if you consider that the new MacBooks also have larger hard drives and (at least for the base model) more memory at the same price points as the old MacBooks, this upgrade doesn't look half-bad at all.