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New MacBook Pro Benchmarks Show Massive Improvement

Thursday February 24, 2011 11:15 pm PST by Arnold Kim

PrimateLabs has compiled GeekBench results for the new Sandy Bridge MacBook Pros released just yesterday, and the results are impressive. The results show GeekBench results ranging from 5900 to 10164 across all models. What makes this particularly impressive is that the new low-end 13" MacBook Pro (2.3GHz Dual i5) scores near last year's top-end 15"/17" MacBook Pro (2.8GHz Dual i7).

Browsing through the complete list of benchmarks shows the new MacBook Pros in context with the other Macs. The top-of-the-line MacBook Pro now outrank many of last year's desktop machines including the Mac Pro and iMac. PrimateLabs concludes:

The performance of the new MacBook Pros is amazing. The slowest MacBook Pro performs on par with the fastest previous-generation MacBook Pro, and the fastest MacBook Pro is 80% faster than the fastest previous-generation MacBook Pro.

In fact, if you look at our Mac Benchmark charts, you'll see that the fastest MacBook Pro is faster than a lot of Mac Pros (including the current generation of Mac Pros). The new MacBook Pros truly are portable workstations.

As always, benchmarks are an artificial gauge of performance, but can be useful in head to head comparisons. These numbers also primarily reflect CPU/Memory performance and don't take into account differences in graphics hardware.

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