Leopard Beta Performance (June 2007)

Last week MacRumors posted a first-hand report of the latest Leopard beta. The report, which covered what was new and improved with the latest Leopard beta, also included a link to the Geekbench Browser; someone benchmarked a Mac Pro running Leopard using Geekbench 2.

I thought it'd be interesting to compare the Leopard Geekbench result against a Tiger Geekbench result from a similarly-configured Mac Pro to see if there are any performance improvements in Leopard.

Setup

• Mac Pro

  • Dual Intel Dual-Core Xeons @ 3.00GHz
  • 2.00 GB 667 MHz DDR2 FB-DIMM
  • Mac OS X 10.5 (Build 9A466)

• Mac Pro

  • Dual Intel Dual-Core Xeons @ 3.00GHz
  • 2.00 GB 667 MHz DDR2 FB-DIMM
  • Mac OS X 10.4.9 (Build 8P2137)

I’ve reported the average overall score for each model and processor combination, where 1000 is the score a Power Mac G5 @ 1.6GHz would receive. Higher scores are better. Keep in mind that Geekbench 2 only measures processor and memory performance; it won't catch any differences in other subsystems like, say, video drivers.

Results

Overall Performance

Integer Performance

Floating Point Performance

Memory Performance

Stream Performance

Conclusions

Processor performance (at least when it comes to Geekbench) is practically unchanged from Tiger to Leopard. While there's been talk of enhancements in Leopard that will increase performance on multiple-core machines, there's no sign of an improvement on a quad-core Mac Pro. It's entirely possible that these ehancements will only really benefit Macs with eight or more cores.

Unlike processor performance, memory performance (in both the memory and stream sections) has decreased under Leopard. While some of the decrease could be explained by unoptimized libraries in Leopard (which some of the benchmarks rely on quite heavily), I don't know why memory bandwidth decreased in the stream section.

Of course, Leopard is still in beta, so it's not clear how these numbers will look once Leopard is released in October. I still think it's interesting, though, to see where Leopard development is right now (especially now that Leopard is feature complete).