Snow Leopard benchmarks show modest gains

AppleInsiderAppleInsider
Posted:
in macOS edited January 2014
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.

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 6
    valanchanvalanchan Posts: 41member
    I doubt that there will be huge performance boosts on just two cores. It's a bit like expecting two train platforms(cores) to work well with 6-10 trains(apps) wanting to come and go at once. I expect Grand Central will scale well, so that when we have 8+ cores as standard the apps will be managed better.
  • Reply 2 of 6
    MarvinMarvin Posts: 15,322moderator
    Was Geekbench compiled on that system though? I thought Snow Leopard was supposed to use better compilers.



    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.
  • Reply 3 of 6
    benroethigbenroethig Posts: 2,782member
    Geeekbench tests theoretical performance, not real world application performance.
  • Reply 4 of 6
    haggarhaggar Posts: 1,568member
    Will it fix the issue where the Nvidia Geforce 8800 GT has slower Core Image performance than less powerful ATI cards?
  • Reply 5 of 6
    lorrelorre Posts: 396member
    Well of course it doesn't improve that much, it wasn't meant to either. Snow Leopard is about future proofing the OS architecture, not "fixing Leopard's crappiness" as so many people like to call it.

    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?
  • Reply 6 of 6
    karl kuehnkarl kuehn Posts: 756member
    I don't know why people expect this build to be faster. I was at WWDC, and so saw all the demos, and (legitimately) have the developer preview. And as that name implies, it is all about giving developers advanced access to the new API's to play with. The teams that were working to build the new APIs all probably targeted WWDC to have their stuff ready, and so none of them were ready in time for any other group to use their work for the WWDC build. I would further bet that WWDC was the first time that many of those groups even saw the work of the other groups.



    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.
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