MacBook Air Performance (December 2008)

When Apple released the new MacBooks and MacBook Pros last month, Apple also updated the MacBook Air. While the changes for the MacBook Air weren't as radical, there were still a number of improvements made such as a new chipset, faster RAM, better graphics cards, and faster processors (at least for the high-end model).

What do these improvements mean for processor performance? My initial guess is that, like the new MacBooks and MacBook Pros, it doesn't mean much, but let's look at some Geekbench results to see if that's the case.

Setup

I used Geekbench 2, our cross-platform benchmark, to measure the processor and memory performance of the new MacBooks and MacBook Pros. Here is the configuration of the four test machines.

• MacBook Air (Late 2008)

  • Intel Core 2 Duo @ 1.86GHz or
  • Intel Core 2 Duo @ 1.60GHz
  • 2.00 GB 1067 MHz DDR3
  • Mac OS X 10.5.5 (Build 9F2523)

• MacBook Air

  • Intel Core 2 Duo @ 1.80GHz or
  • Intel Core 2 Duo @ 1.60GHz
  • 2.00 GB 667 MHz DDR2 SDRAM
  • Mac OS X 10.5.5 (Build 9F33)

Geekbench 2 scores are calibrated against a baseline score of 1000 (which is the score a Power Mac G5 @ 1.6GHz would receive). Higher scores are better.

Results

Overall Performance

Integer Performance

Floating Point Performance

Memory Performance

Stream Performance

Conclusions

I thought the new MacBook Air wouldn't be that much faster than the old MacBook Air, and it turns out I'm partly right (or partly wrong, depending on how you look at it). While the high-end MacBook Air is only slightly faster, the low-end MacBook Air is almost 10% faster (a dramatic improvement).

Keep in mind, too, these benchmarks ignore one of the big improvements to the MacBook Air -- the new graphics chipset. While Geekbench isn't able to measure graphics performance (an unfortunate limitation) benchmarks elsewhere show the huge gains NVIDIA's integrated graphics have over Intel's integrated graphics.

So if you're thinking about buying a MacBook Air, don't be too concerned that processor performance hasn't improved for the high-end MacBook Air; the new graphics cards will certainly make up for it. Plus, while many complain about the low performance of the MacBook Air, remember it's faster than the first round of Intel-based laptops and all of the dual-processor PowerMac G5s.