ZDNet has recetnly tested Apple Mac Pro, upgraded with a pair of Intel’s quad-core 2.66GHz Xeon 5355 processors. The eight-core Mac Pro was 31 percent faster than the same four-core machine.
“As the Intel Xeon 5355 is pin-compatible with the Xeon 5160 processors that came installed in our Mac Pro, we proceeded to swap out the two dual-core processors with the new quad-core processors. We saw a 31 percent performance increase on the Mac OS X version of the Cinebench test from the two dual-core chips to the two quad-core chips. Although we doubled the number of cores, we didn’t see twice the performance. There are a few reasons for this: the quad-core chips are actually running at a slower speed (2.66GHz) than the dual-core chips (3.0GHz). Also, the extra cores introduce some additional computational overhead to the overall workload. Additionally, our ‘octo-core’ testbed is our own unsanctioned unit, and therefore isn’t benefiting from any of Apple’s inside knowledge, such as firmware and driver updates to better optimise the system for the additional cores”, the reports says.
Benchmarks: the unofficial eight-core Mac Pro Tech Guide in Reviews at ZDNet.co.uk
