MacBook Pro Benchmarks (April 2010)

A couple of months ago an interesting result appeared in the Geekbench Browser that appeared to be from an unreleased MacBook Pro with a Core i7 processor. This result generated a lot of discussion and excitement (as most Mac rumors do); people wanted to know if this result was real or not.

It turns out the result was real! When Apple released the updated MacBook Pro lineup on Tuesday the lineup included a Core i7 MacBook Pro. Now people are asking how does this new lineup perform compared to the previous lineup? I've gathered some Geekbench results to find out!

Setup

Performance results were gathered from user submissions to the Geekbench Browser. Each MacBook Pro listed below was running Geekbench 2.1.5 on Mac OS X 10.6.3 and had at least 4GB of 1067 MHz DDR3 RAM installed.

Keep in mind Geekbench only measures processor and memory performance; systems with the same processor but different video cards will score the same in Geekbench! Also, with Geekbench, higher scores are better.

Interested in seeing how your current machine compares? Download Geekbench here and run it on your own system.

Results

Overall Performance

Integer Performance

Floating Point Performance

Memory Performance

Stream Performance

Conclusions

It's no surprise the new laptops are faster. It's interesting to note, though, that the slowest Core i5 is faster than the fastest Core 2 Duo processor despite running at a much lower frequency (2.40GHz vs 3.06GHz). This is a result of the architecture improvements in the i5 and the i7. For example, Turbo Boost and Hyper-Threading provide a nice boost to processor scores; single-threaded workloads benefit from higher processor frequencies while multi-threaded workloads benefit from extra hardware threads. Memory scores (especially Stream scores which measure raw memory bandwidth) are higher due to the integrated memory controller#Technology) on the i5 and i7.

What people have been asking me, though, is whether they should get the i5 or the i7 MacBook Pro. Personally, I think the low-end i5 is more than sufficient for most tasks (it's about 15% slower but costs 25% less). Granted, it's got less drive space and less video card memory but it's still zippy. If, however, you want the fastest MacBook Pro available then go ahead and get an i7; you are paying a premium for the performance but at least it's not a steep premium!

Personally, if I were to buy a new MacBook Pro today, I'd get one with an i5 processor and spend the money I saved on upgrading the RAM to 8GB.