Calling last week’s MacBook update merely a “speed bump” may be accurate to the letter, but it doesn’t faithfully describe the spirit of the upgrade. Primate Labs, which makes Geekbench, a benchmarking application (surprise!), says that processor performance is only marginally improved. That makes sense: Apple only slightly increased the processor speeds, so you’re not likely to find any giant speed increase.
And then there was Santa Rosa.
Thanks to the new chipset, memory performance saw a 15 percent increase while stream performance (memory bandwidth sustainability) jumped 25 percent. Throw a few extra sticks of RAM in there and you’re ready to do something crazy, like run Photoshop and Final Cut at the same time.
Despite these encouraging numbers, I think I’ll wait till January’s MacWorld before buying my next laptop. I need useless new features in my next laptop and not just better memory performance.
MacBook Performance (November 2007) [Prime Labs Blog via Mac Rumors]