Mac Benchmarks (Late 2009)

Earlier this month Apple announced a lot of new hardware. While not all of it is available yet (in particular the Core i5 and Core i7 iMacs) most of it is and folks have been asking about how the new hardware performs compared to the old hardware. So, I've gathered Geekbench results for the new Mac models and compared them with results for the older Mac models (all results were gathered from the Geekbench Browser).

Geekbench is Primate Labs' processor and memory benchmark where a score of 1000 means a system has the same performance as a PowerMac G5 @ 1.6GHz. Higher scores are better.

iMac Benchmarks

iMac (Late 2009)
Intel Core 2 Duo E7600 3.06 GHz (2 cores)
4297
 
iMac (Early 2009)
Intel Core 2 Duo E8435 3.06 GHz (2 cores)
4131
 
iMac (Early 2009)
Intel Core 2 Duo E8335 2.93 GHz (2 cores)
3947
 
iMac (Early 2009)
Intel Core 2 Duo E8135 2.66 GHz (2 cores)
3628
 

MacBook Benchmarks

MacBook (Late 2009)
Intel Core 2 Duo P7550 @ 2.26 GHz (2 cores)
3245
 
MacBook (Late 2008)
Intel Core 2 Duo P8600 @ 2.40 GHz (2 cores)
3184
 
MacBook (Early 2009)
Intel Core 2 Duo P7450 @ 2.13 GHz (2 cores)
2926
 
MacBook (Late 2008)
Intel Core 2 Duo P7350 @ 2.0 GHz (2 cores)
2738
 
MacBook (Early 2009)
Intel Core 2 Duo P7350 @ 2.0 GHz (2 cores)
2664
 

Mac mini Benchmarks

Mac mini (Late 2009)
Intel Core 2 Duo P8700 2.53 GHz (2 cores)
3563
 
Mac mini (Early/Late 2009)
Intel Core 2 Duo P8400 2.26 GHz (2 cores)
3056
 
Mac mini (Early 2009)
Intel Core 2 Duo P7350 2.0 GHz (2 cores)
2783
 
Mac mini (Mid 2007)
Intel Core 2 T7200 2.0 GHz (2 cores)
2617
 
Mac mini (Mid 2007)
Intel Core 2 T5600 1.83 GHz (2 cores)
2400
 

Conclusions

The results are as expected; faster processors (of the same architecture) mean higher Geekbench scores. This shouldn't be surprising since Geekbench is predominantly a CPU benchmark. What I'm interested in seeing, though, is how the Core i5 and Core i7 iMacs stack up; not only do they have a new processor architecture they also have double the number of cores. I wonder if the high-end iMac i7 will (finally!) be comparable to a low-end Mac Pro?


 
John Poole is the founder of Primate Labs and lives in Toronto, Ontario with his wife Deborah. You can find John on Twitter or .