According to Apple's Photoshop benchmark, the 2009 2.93GHz
octocore is 1.2X faster than the 2008 3.2GHz octocore. Casting
science and careful thinking to one side, I'm going to assume
that within the same architecture benchmark completion times
scale linearly with clock speed.
So the new machine is (1.2 X 3.2)/2.93 = 1.31 times faster
per GHz than the old one. And that makes the octocore 2.26GHz
model the equal of an imaginary 2.96GHz harpertown Mac Pro.
Hence the default configuration 8 core 2009 model will show
a 2.96/2.8 = 5.7% performance increase over its predecessor.
Now I wait to proven wrong
octocore is 1.2X faster than the 2008 3.2GHz octocore. Casting
science and careful thinking to one side, I'm going to assume
that within the same architecture benchmark completion times
scale linearly with clock speed.
So the new machine is (1.2 X 3.2)/2.93 = 1.31 times faster
per GHz than the old one. And that makes the octocore 2.26GHz
model the equal of an imaginary 2.96GHz harpertown Mac Pro.
Hence the default configuration 8 core 2009 model will show
a 2.96/2.8 = 5.7% performance increase over its predecessor.
Now I wait to proven wrong