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Primate benchmarks Apple's new 8-core Mac Pro

Just days after its introduction, the folks at Primate Labs have grabbed hold of one of Apple's new 2.8GHz Harpertown-based Mac Pros and pit the system against its 3.0GHz Clovertown-based predecessor in a set Geekbench benchmark tests.

The results saw the new Mac Pro with its two 45-nanomete (nm) quad-core 2.8GHz chips and 2GB of 800MHz DDR2 RAM nearly match the overall performance of the previous-generation Mac Pro, which employed two 65 nm quad-core 3.0GHz chips and 1GB of 667MHz DDR2 RAM.

While the Harpertown Mac Pro trailed the Clovertown machine in floating point performance, it bested the system in integer, memory and stream performance. Overall, the Hapertown Mac Pro achieved a Geekbench 2 score of 7598 compared to the Clovertown Mac Pro's 7680.

The results are impressive, notes Primate, when you consider that the new Mac Pro is much more affordable than the old Mac Pro. Apple also offers the latest Mac Pro at speeds of up to 3.2GHz — a configuration which should handily trounce the 3.0GHz Clovertown machine in each and every benchmark.

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51 Comments

solipsism

said about 16 years ago

How is this "much more affordable" given the $300 increase for the 2nd model, and the base model being the same price but only having one processor?

edit: I see. They are comparing the suggested model with the previous high-end machine.

mikenap

said about 16 years ago

I thought i had read that the 2.8 was a different chip than the 3.0 and 3.2, with a slower frontside buss? Anyone know for sure?

jragosta

said about 16 years ago

It would be nice if they'd make an effort to minimize the variables. In this comparison, they've changed the clock speed, chip type, and amount of RAM. Ideally, they would have compared 3.0 GHz Cloverton to 3.0 GHz Penryn. Even if they didn't have the 3.0 GHz Cloverton, they should have AT LEAST put the same amount of RAM in both machines. It's impossible to tell how much the RAM difference affected the results, so how do you draw conclusions?

solipsism

said about 16 years ago

Quote:

Originally Posted by mikenap

View Post

I thought i had read that the 2.8 was a different chip than the 3.0 and 3.2, with a slower frontside buss? Anyone know for sure?

Processing
8-core: Two 2.8GHz, 3.0GHz, or 3.2GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon 5400 series processors

Quad-core: One 2.8GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon 5400 series processor

Enhanced Intel Core microarchitecture
• 12MB of L2 cache per processor (each pair of cores shares 6MB)
• 128-bit SSE4 SIMD engine
• 64-bit data paths and registers
• Energy efficiency optimization

1600MHz, 64-bit dual independent frontside buses

(source)

They all use the same high-end Xeon L2 cache and FSB.

roehlstation

said about 16 years ago

Quote:

Originally Posted by jragosta

View Post

Ideally, they would have compared 3.0 GHz Cloverton to 3.0 GHz Penryn.

Did I completely not get what you were saying? How would it be ideal to compare the Clovertown to the Penryn? They don't use the Penryn in the Mac Pro, it is a Core 2 processor not a Xeon.

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