The new 17- and 15-inch MacBook Pros with Core i5/i7 processors are fast. Fast. Overall I’d say they’re about 50 per cent faster than the last gen Core 2 Duos, which is about the same bump the iMacs got with Core i7.
Here are benchmarks to show exactly how much faster.
About 50 per cent faster in the Geekbench tests.
The Xbench tests are a bit more all-over-the-place, but that’s more because Xbench hasn’t been updated in a while. Still, faster.
Re-encoding a file with Handbrake 64-bit shows pretty well the race between CPUs. At 19:54 vs 32:19, the Core i7 MacBook pro – even though it’s 2.66GHz vs 2.8GHz – is just about 50 per cent faster.
So there ya go, the Core i7 CPUs make a pretty damn big difference in performance. We’ll be testing the Nvidia Geforce 330M discrete graphics in another post to see how much that has improved over the 9600M.
Ganesh
Wednesday, April 14, 2010 at 9:17 AMI would really like to see what the difference in performance between the i5 and i7 15″ MBP is. That will allow me to make my informed buying decision!
Mike
Wednesday, April 14, 2010 at 9:37 AMYeah I agree.
Mark Ampersand
Wednesday, April 14, 2010 at 3:09 PMI’d been eye-ing off the last batch of 13inch MBPs, so a bit sad to see they didn’t get much love this time around.