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Filed under: OS, TUAW Labs, Snow Leopard

Benchmarking results: Is Snow Leopard really any faster than Leopard?

Be sure to check all of our ongoing Snow Leopard coverage right here.

One of the biggest features of Snow Leopard isn't something apparent to the naked eye: software tweaks and refinements intended to make OS X a leaner, meaner OS for your fighting Apple machine. But is Snow Leopard really any faster? Now that I've successfully upgraded two Macs to Snow Leopard I've got some benchmarking results to share.

My Early 2008 MacBook Pro shipped with OS X Leopard 10.5.2 installed. I ran Geekbench on the stock OS X installation after upgrading the RAM to 4 GB to get a baseline for comparison of future performance. 18 months later I ran the same test immediately after updating to 10.6. Both tests were performed with Geekbench testing in 32-bit mode immediately after a restart, with no other programs open except the Finder, nothing loaded in Dashboard, and no Time Machine backup running.



Machine specs:

Intel Core 2 Duo @ 2.60 GHz w/ 4GB RAM

Average Overall Geekbench score for this model of MacBook Pro: 3304

Read on for the scores.

Continue readingBenchmarking results: Is Snow Leopard really any faster than Leopard?

Filed under: PowerBook, Macbook Pro, Universal Binary

MacBook Pro vs PowerBook benchmarks


If you are like me and enjoy a good clean fight, check out these benchmarks at Geek Patrol using their own pre-production software: Geekbench, a multi-platform benchmarking utility. These numbers reflect benchmarking on a 1.5GHz PowerBook G4 with 1.25GB RAM vs a 2.0GHz MacBook Pro with 1GB RAM (the latter benchmark running as a Universal Binary not in Rosetta).

I took it upon myself to average their twenty benchmark results. Using Geek Patrol's benchmarking results, the MacBook Pro they used is 3.74 times faster than the PowerBook they tested. If I throw out the low results they received from Stdlib Allocate (which they note: "depends more on library performance than raw hardware performance"), the MacBook Pro is on average, 4.26 times faster than a PowerBook.

We all know that real world testing is what will really determine whether or not the MacBook Pro can severely outperform the PowerBook, but we will have to wait for more pro apps to be released as Universal Binaries before anyone takes a crack at graphing those statistics. Until then, all of you who have a MacBook Pro, enjoy your zippy new laptop.

[via Slashdot and reader Ernest Leitch]

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