Apple's Core 2 Duo iMacs around 10% faster, closing gap on Mac Pro
Last week we announced Apple’s new range of iMac’s featuring Core 2 Duo processors and already the benchmark figures are starting to emerge.
If you’re interested in Mac-to-Mac comparisons (I’m going to leave the PC-Mac comparisons alone for the moment) then MacWorld’s first benchmarking tests (albeit unofficial) are worth a read.
They compare the new Core 2 Duo iMacs with the dual-core iMacs released earlier this year. The changed processor and doubled L2 cache saw between 10-20% increase in speed of the 2GHz processor over the previous models.
What’s interesting is the speed bump towards the Mac Pro:
More significant, the 2.16GHz system narrowed the performance gap between iMac and Mac Pro product lines. With twice the number of processor cores, all running faster than the iMac, the Mac Pro had a definite advantage in this match up. But because not all applications and tasks take full advantage of the Mac multiprocessing capabilities, most results showed the Mac Pro between 20 and 30 percent faster than the 2.16GHz iMac. I expect that test results of the new 24-inch model—with its faster graphics and the optional 2.33GHz processor upgrade—could close this performance gap even further.
So, whilst the performance isn’t up to the Mac Pro (and no-one would expect it to be) the new iMac’s are by no means sluggish.
Read
