MacBook Pro Performance (February 2008)

Yesterday Apple released updated MacBooks and MacBook Pros both of which feature (among other things) new processors. While I don't have Geekbench results for the new MacBooks, I wanted to compare Geekbench results for some of the new MacBook Pros against results for older MacBook Pros.

Setup

Here is the configuration of the test machines:

• MacBook Pro (Early 2008)

  • Intel Core 2 Duo T9300 @ 2.50GHz
  • 2.00 GB 667 MHz DDR2 SDRAM
  • Mac OS X 10.5.2 (Build 9C2018)

• MacBook Pro (Early 2008)

  • Intel Core 2 Duo T8300 @ 2.40GHz
  • 2.00 GB 667 MHz DDR2 SDRAM
  • Mac OS X 10.5.2 (Build 9C2018)

• MacBook Pro (Mid 2007)

  • Intel Core 2 Duo T7800 @ 2.60GHz
  • 2.00 GB 667 MHz DDR2 SDRAM
  • Mac OS X 10.5.2 (Build 9C31)

• MacBook Pro (Mid 2007)

  • Intel Core 2 Duo T7700 @ 2.40GHz
  • 2.00 GB 667 MHz DDR2 SDRAM
  • Mac OS X 10.5.2 (Build 9C31)

If you’re not familiar with Geekbench 2, benchmarks are scored against a baseline, where a score of 1000 represents the performance of a Power Mac G5 @ 1.6GHz. Higher is better.

Results

Overall Performance

Integer Performance

Floating Point Performance

Memory Performance

Stream Performance

Conclusions

At first glance the results seems counter-intuitive; shouldn't the new MacBook Pro @ 2.4GHz be faster than the old MacBook Pro @ 2.4GHz? Isn't the Penryn better than the Merom? It turns out the answer is, "not necessarily".

The processor in the new MacBook Pro @ 2.4GHz (T8300) has less L2 cache than processor in the old MacBook Pro @ 2.4GHz (T7700) which explains the slight drop in performance.

However, when you consider the new MacBook Pro 2.4GHz is the base model, while the old MacBook Pro 2.4GHz was the mid-range model, the small drop in performance comes with a significant reduction in price. Plus, the new Penryn processor uses less energy than the old Merom processor, which means a cooler laptop with increased battery life.