Hot off the presses

So some new Ivy Bridge Macbook Pro benchmarks have supposedly hit Geekbench, and I thought I'd size them up against a Sandy Bridge Nordic PC Thor, mostly because the Macbook Pro actually scored higher than the newest iMac. The new 3rd Generation Core series from Intel is still shaping up, but so far it looks like you'll need a box cutter and a very steady hand to get good overclocks from this newest CPU because of a poor interface between the CPU silicon and the heatspreader. Since we tune and tweak all of our CPUs in the Tyr line and up, we actually get better performance from Sandy than Ivy at this point.

Needless to say, let's take a peak at what the numbers have to say:

First off, we're comparing a 4.8Ghz Sandy Bridge to a 3.7Ghz Ivy Bridge. Right off the bat, we've got an extra Ghz on this machine with our tweaks. That shows up nicely with a 45% gain over the Macbook in Integer performance. However, Ivy's got a trick up it's sleeve in this particular Floating Point benchmark. We have seen rare cases where Ivy really takes off, and Geekbench's FP test is obviously one of them with a commanding 10% lead.

Once we get to memory though, things are a little different. Both machines are outfitted with DDR3-1600, 8GB of it to be exact, and Ivy should beat out Sandy in raw memory bandwidth. However, our Thor has a solid 14% lead in Memory and a commanding 28% lead in stream (or memory bandwidth performance). Whatever Apple did to the RAM in the new Macbook looks like it is causing a big performance hit. The results for the iMac with 4GB of DDR3-1600 are even more pathetic at just 5557 and 4741 respectively. That's 51% lower than the Thor's Memory and nearly half in stream.

Realistically, the only way to get such horrible memory scores are with a single DDR3 module as opposed to dual-channel operation. I talked a little bit about that in the last article, and it appears that if there is indeed a 4GB option to the new iMac, it'll be a horrible performer.

I wish that other vendor's systems garnished enough media attention for us to compare our systems to everyone else's, but for now we'll just have to be happy taking a solid win over the new Macbook and iMac from Apple. We've already took out the Mac Pro with our head-to-head competition last year, showing that in Photoshop and Premiere, the clock speed of our overclocked, water-cooled systems can trounce the extra cores of a 6-core Westmere. We're proving day in and day out that we are the guys you want to come to for design workstations, and Apple just cares about phones and pads these days.