Barefeats has published performance benchmarks for Apple's latest 8-Core Mac Pro.
The initial report compares the 8-Core to the Quad-Core Mac Pro in Cinebench, GeekBench, Photoshop CS3, Aperture 1.5 and Quicktime 7.1.5 Exports.
A second report compares gaming frame rates between the two machines. They tested Doom 3, Quake 4, Halo, UT2004, World of Warcraft and Prey.
The 8-Core Mac Pro came out up to 40-55% faster on some tasks, such as Cinebench 9.5, GeekBench, and Quicktime Export speeds, but provided little advantage in the limited Photoshop CS3 and Aperture testing. The 8-Core also proved to be no faster across the board in the Gaming tests.
Barefeats speculates that the 8-Core Mac Pro maybe bottlenecked by the memory bus and also considers the possibility that Mac OS X Tiger may not be well optimized for the 8-Core Mac Pros.
Obviously some applications will be better suited to take advantage of multi-core Macs, so your mileage may vary, and decisions on 8-Core performance should be made based on the applications you use.
