A benchmark comparison (geekench) of 293GHz Quad / 3.33GHz Quad and i7 iMac

[WardC]

So, I ran through the primatelabs geekbench results browser and fished out some good benchmark results from these various machines, showing their raw power. I compared a Quad Core 2.93GHz Mac Pro to an i7 iMac 2.8GHz, as well as compared the speed difference you would get with the 3.33GHz quad model. When looking at the 8-core machines, the benchmarks for the 2.93GHz 8-core are about double that of the i7 iMac. However, the i7 iMac and the 2.93GHz quad Mac Pro and the iMac were almost dead on par in the results. Here are the benchmarks:

http://www.wardcurry.com/imac27geek.jpg

http://www.wardcurry.com/macpro292geek.jpg

http://www.wardcurry.com/macpro333geek.jpg

As you can see, the 333GHz boost gives a bit of an edge over the other 2, but the iMac and the 2.93GHz quad Mac Pro are almost exactly on par for speed.

Just to give you all an idea, here is what it looks like on the 8-core 2.93GHz beast, everything is about double the speed of the iMac or the single core xeon:

http://www.wardcurry.com/macpro8core.jpg

And...utilizing the latest Xeon X5680 6-core chips in a dual-processor setup, a Hackintosh has been built which is reporting "off the charts" speed performance on geenbench. Over 28,000! Hopefully these are the chips we will get in the next Mac Pro refresh...the added cores (12-core) makes this machine fly like lightning:

http://www.wardcurry.com/hackintoshgeek.jpg

[gaspra]

How could the one with W3540 have 8 cores? It doesn't make sense since W3540 has only one QPI link. It can't work in dual socket mode.

[Major Reeves]

How could the one with W3540 have 8 cores? It doesn't make sense since W3540 has only one QPI link. It can't work in dual socket mode.

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[WardC]

The 2.93GHz W3540 has 4 cores but 8 virtual threads. The dual processor has 8 cores but 16 virtual threads.

[manhattanboy]

This settles it; we should all be using Hackintosh!

[strausd]

How come the first Mac Pro has 0 processors but 8 cores and 8 threads?