New MacBook Pro Benchmarks Reveal Serious Performance Boost

Yesterday, we noted that the new MacBook Pros mark an evolutionary, rather than revolutionary, change to Apple’s lineup — they look the same as the past generation of MacBook Pros, weigh the same, have the same battery life, still don’t come with SSDs by default, and haven’t moved towards the great iPad convergence predicted by Apple-watchers. The main changes here are performance boosts and the addition of the new Thunderbolt data transfer technology.

But lest we sweep them under the rug, those performance boosts are very real, thanks in large part to new Sandy Bridge quad-core processors from Intel. PrimateLabs looked through Geekbench benchmarking scores for the new MBPs (shown above), and had this to say:

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.

Note that these tests measure CPU and memory performance, and do not reflect the additional muscle provided by video cards or external storage devices.

If you want to run the same tests on your Mac, you can download Geekbench and git ‘er done in a matter of one or two minutes. My early 2008 MacBook Pro got a 3200.

(PrimateLabs via MacRumors)