Andrew O'Hara
The new 2019 iMacs have just started being delivered to customers, and there are now a wide set of benchmarks that span the entire refreshed lineup.
Shared by Geekbench's John Poole, the new benchmarks show the impressive gains of the Intel 8th and 9th-generation Coffee Lake chipsets. The benchmarks were naturally from Geekbench 4's CPU and GPU tests.
The biggest boost in the new 2019 iMacs was the 27-inch Core i9 processor which has a multi-core score up 66 percent. The rest of the 27-inch 5K models had multi-core gains of between 43 percent and 49 percent and a range of 6 percent to 11 percent for single core.
Poole credits the increases in speed largely to higher frequencies and more cores rather than any significant change in Intel's architecture.
Additionally, the new six and eight core machines were competitive with the eight- and ten-core iMac Pro. As an example, the 10-core iMac Pro is only 10 percent faster on the multi-core test compared to the 8-core iMac and is 16 percent slower in the single-core test.
The 21.5-inch models didn't have quite as impressive gains as the 27-inch did, but still 5-10 percent higher in single-core and 10-50 percent higher in multi.
Those who regularly use apps that take advantage of multi-core systems should see the best performance though Poole says it isn't enough to "justify upgrading" if you've got a 2017 iMac.
Check out AppleInsider's own comprehensive benchmarks of the new 21.5-inch 4K iMac to see how it performed in all the other tests as well.
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7 Comments
The usual naysayers have been bitching about the cooling systems in these new iMacs, saying they will cause outrageous throttling and therefore be useless. All I can say is that the fans in my Late 2013 iMax 14,2 with the i7 Haswell CPU have never rose above the minimum speed in the 5 years I’ve owned it. The Intel Power Gadget app always shows the CPU running at max speed. The machine never feels warm at all. Correct me if I’m wrong but aren’t the CPUs in the iMacs in the laptop class and therefore more easily dealt with from a thermal viewpoint?
I don't mind hard drives in the lower end models, but why in 2019 is Apple still shipping 5400rpm drives? 7200 or even 10k rpm drives would be a boost and probably a few dollars more for them per unit.
You can debate processors all day long, but faster drives make a significant difference to the end user experience as anyone who's upgraded a sata hdd to ssd will know.
Does anyone know how the new GPUs compare to the 2017 models?