The former is 16.6% faster in our Photoshop test. The real comparison is between the 2.4GHz Core i5 vs. The old 13-inch MacBook Pro is penalized by only shipping with 2GB of memory, which is why it performs so poorly here. We're running the exact same benchmark here, basically performing a bunch of image manipulations and filters and timing the entire process. The Retouch Artists Speed Test we use for our CPU testing under Windows also works under OS X. That's actually more than I expected but the real strength of the i7 is visible in the more CPU bound tests. The $2199 model with a Core i7 running at 2.66GHz pushes performance up another 3.9% over the base model.
In other words, the 2.4GHz 15-inch MacBook Pro should perform no worse than last year’s 2.53GHz model. This is compared to the old 2.53GHz Core 2 Duo and should serve as a baseline for the minimum performance improvement you should see. I measured a 3% increase in performance, which although repeatable, isn’t really spectacular. The new MacBook Pro also doesn’t improve performance that much. If you’re curious, installing an Intel X25-M G2 in any of the MBPs will drop their times to 16 seconds or less. The MacBook Pros are stuck with mechanical hard drives and thus don’t perform nearly as well. My application launch test absolutely rocks on the MacBook Air because it ships with an SSD by default. The entire process stresses both the disk and CPU, which is why we see a huge improvement when going to an SSD as well as differences between CPU speeds. I launched, in order: Mail, Safari, Activity Monitor, iTunes, iCal, DVD Player, iPhoto, Photo Booth, Quicktime Player, Disk Utility, Preview, iMovie, Front Row, Garage Band and Aperture. I decided to take it to the next level and write a quick script to launch 15 applications in a row, timing how long the entire process takes. General OS usage is a difficult thing to quantify, but one measure of performance has always been the number of bounces an icon in the dock makes before an application loads. We’ll start with general application performance. The Core i5 system is the new entry level 15-inch MacBook Pro. I’m using the same tests I introduced in my Holiday 2009 Macbook Pro roundup and running on the same hardware (specs listed in the tables on the previous pages). Luckily I’m in dire need of creative outlets so creating OS X benchmarks works for me. Benchmarking under OS X isn’t difficult, you just need to get creative.
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