Snow Leopard benchmarks show modest gains
If recent Mac OS X Snow Leopard developer builds are any indication, users should expect performance gains -- if slight -- over the earlier version.
GeekBench tests run by Dutch site Mac-Zone show an early version of Snow Leopard just barely edging out today's operating system with a score of 3,351 versus 3,274 on the same 2.2GHz MacBook Pro.
Apple has promised that the future Mac OS X release, which isn't due until 2009, will offer better multi-core performance but is primarily focusing this on future computers rather than most current Macs, which with two cores are already heavily used by current software.
GeekBench tests run by Dutch site Mac-Zone show an early version of Snow Leopard just barely edging out today's operating system with a score of 3,351 versus 3,274 on the same 2.2GHz MacBook Pro.
Apple has promised that the future Mac OS X release, which isn't due until 2009, will offer better multi-core performance but is primarily focusing this on future computers rather than most current Macs, which with two cores are already heavily used by current software.
Comments
With SSE4 optimizations, improved compilers, possibly using the GPU with OpenCL in some cases, there should be a far more significant improvement in future or at least with more reliable benchmarking.
Perhaps even running the factorial script or whatever it is on this forum would be a better benchmark as it should run using the built-in interpreter with the OS, which I presume would be optimized.
There's not much to be fixed either imo. Whatever bugs that remain in Leopard will hopefully be fixed in future point releases. By 10.5.7 this should run as smooth as 10.4.11 does. Was 10.4.4 really perfect?
So it will take a few more builds for those things to start to work their way around the Apple campus. And since we have about a year to go, there is no rush at this point.