Even though Apple's new MacBook Pros look like the old MacBook Pros, there's a lot that's new and exciting under the hood, like a completely new peripheral interface (Thunderbolt) and the new AMD GPUs. What I'm most excited about are the new Sandy Bridge processors (especially now that Apple finally has a quad-core laptop).
What I was curious to know, though, was how fast are these new processors? How much of a performance benefit do the Sandy Bridge processors bring to the MacBook Pro lineup? I grabbed Geekbench 2 scores from the Geekbench Browser for the current- and previous-generation MacBook Pro models in order to answer that question.
If you're not familiar with Geekbench 2, higher Geekbench 2 scores are better. Also, keep in mind that Geekbench 2 only measures processor and memory performance; it won't measure the benefits of new video cards or storage devices.
Oh, if you're curious how your computer stacks up against the new MacBook Pros you can download Geekbench and find out (it's a free download).
MacBook Pro Benchmarks, 2010 to 2011
| 17-inch Early 2011 Intel Core i7-2820QM 2.3 GHz (4 cores) |
10,164 | |
| 17-inch Early 2011 Intel Core i7-2720QM 2.2 GHz (4 cores) |
10,026 | |
| 15-inch Early 2011 Intel Core i7-2820QM 2.3 GHz (4 cores) |
9,886 | |
| 15-inch Early 2011 Intel Core i7-2635QM 2.0 GHz (4 cores) |
8,804 | |
| 13-inch Early 2011 Intel Core i7-2620M 2.7 GHz (2 cores) |
6,796 | |
| 15-inch Early 2010 Intel Core i7 M 640 2.8 GHz (2 cores) |
5,910 | |
| 13-inch Early 2011 Intel Core i5-2415M 2.3 GHz (2 cores) |
5,900 | |
| 17-inch Early 2010 Intel Core i7 M 640 2.8 GHz (2 cores) |
5,837 | |
| 15-inch Early 2010 Intel Core i7 M 620 2.67 GHz (2 cores) |
5,564 | |
| 17-inch Early 2010 Intel Core i7 M 620 2.67 GHz (2 cores) |
5,559 | |
| 15-inch Early 2010 Intel Core i5 M 540 2.53 GHz (2 cores) |
4,985 | |
| 17-inch Early 2010 Intel Core i5 M 540 2.53 GHz (2 cores) |
4,980 | |
| 15-inch Early 2010 Intel Core i5 M 520 2.4 GHz (2 cores) |
4,866 | |
| 13-inch Early 2010 Intel Core 2 Duo P8800 2.66 GHz (2 cores) |
3,645 | |
| 13-inch Early 2010 Intel Core 2 Duo P8600 2.4 GHz (2 cores) |
3,351 |
Thoughts
The performance of the new MacBook Pros is amazing. The slowest MacBook Pro performs on par with the fastest previous-generation MacBook Pro, and the fastest MacBook Pro is 80% faster than the fastest previous-generation MacBook Pro.
In fact, if you look at our Mac Benchmark charts, you'll see that the fastest MacBook Pro is faster than a lot of Mac Pros (including the current generation of Mac Pros). The new MacBook Pros truly are portable workstations.