Primate Labs today posted a summary of the new iMac benchmarks hitting the company's Geekbench Browser, showing fairly strong performance increases over the previous generation of machines. The analysis focuses on the 21.5-inch models, as the 27-inch models are not launching for several more weeks, and the latest high-end 21.5-inch model scores nearly 25% higher than its 2011 counterpart and even bests the high-end 27-inch model from last year by nearly 10%.
As for the Mac Pro, which is still stuck on older-generation processors rather than adopting Intel's Sandy Bridge E chips, the new iMac is now on par with all but the high-end 12-core Mac Pro models.What's interesting here, though, is how the quad-core Core i5 iMacs perform compared to the quad-core Core i7 Mac minis. Since Core i7 has hyper-threading technology (and the Core i5 does not), it can execute more instructions at once, leading to higher performance.
Here this means that the mid-range Mac mini is faster than the mid-range iMac that's almost twice the price. True, you do get a display and a discrete GPU with the iMac, but these Geekbench results show how powerful the new Mac mini is despite its size.
As for the new 27-inch iMac, a handful of Geekbench results have already appeared in the database running a special Build 12C2037 of OS X 10.8.2. The results indicate that an early benchmark that appeared in mid-May was indeed accurate and indicate that the new high-end 27-inch model will outperform its 2011 counterpart by nearly 15%.
Article Link: New iMac Benchmarks Show 10-25% Improvement Over Previous Generation