MacBook Pro Benchmarks (Early 2011)

Even though Apple's new MacBook Pros look like the old MacBook Pros, there's a lot that's new and exciting under the hood, like a completely new peripheral interface (Thunderbolt) and the new AMD GPUs. What I'm most excited about are the new Sandy Bridge processors (especially now that Apple finally has a quad-core laptop).

What I was curious to know, though, was how fast are these new processors? How much of a performance benefit do the Sandy Bridge processors bring to the MacBook Pro lineup? I grabbed Geekbench 2 scores from the Geekbench Result Browser for the current- and previous-generation MacBook Pro models in order to answer that question.

If you're not familiar with Geekbench 2, higher Geekbench 2 scores are better. Also, keep in mind that Geekbench 2 only measures processor and memory performance; it won't measure the benefits of new video cards or storage devices.

Oh, if you're curious how your computer stacks up against the new MacBook Pros you can download Geekbench and find out (it's a free download).

MacBook Pro Benchmarks

MacBook Pro (17-inch Early 2011)
Intel Core i7-2820QM 2.3 GHz (4 cores)
10164
 
MacBook Pro (17-inch Early 2011)
Intel Core i7-2720QM 2.2 GHz (4 cores)
10026
 
MacBook Pro (15-inch Early 2011)
Intel Core i7-2820QM 2.3 GHz (4 cores)
9886
 
MacBook Pro (15-inch Early 2011)
Intel Core i7-2635QM 2.0 GHz (4 cores)
8804
 
MacBook Pro (13-inch Early 2011)
Intel Core i7-2620M 2.7 GHz (2 cores)
6796
 
MacBook Pro (15-inch Early 2010)
Intel Core i7 M 640 2.8 GHz (2 cores)
5910
 
MacBook Pro (13-inch Early 2011)
Intel Core i5-2415M 2.3 GHz (2 cores)
5900
 
MacBook Pro (17-inch Early 2010)
Intel Core i7 M 640 2.8 GHz (2 cores)
5837
 
MacBook Pro (15-inch Early 2010)
Intel Core i7 M 620 2.67 GHz (2 cores)
5564
 
MacBook Pro (17-inch Early 2010)
Intel Core i7 M 620 2.67 GHz (2 cores)
5559
 
MacBook Pro (15-inch Early 2010)
Intel Core i5 M 540 2.53 GHz (2 cores)
4985
 
MacBook Pro (17-inch Early 2010)
Intel Core i5 M 540 2.53 GHz (2 cores)
4980
 
MacBook Pro (15-inch Early 2010)
Intel Core i5 M 520 2.4 GHz (2 cores)
4866
 
MacBook Pro (13-inch Early 2010)
Intel Core 2 Duo P8800 2.66 GHz (2 cores)
3645
 
MacBook Pro (13-inch Early 2010)
Intel Core 2 Duo P8600 2.4 GHz (2 cores)
3351
 

Thoughts

The performance of the new MacBook Pros is amazing. The slowest MacBook Pro performs on par with the fastest previous-generation MacBook Pro, and the fastest MacBook Pro is 80% faster than the fastest previous-generation MacBook Pro.

In fact, if you look at our Mac Benchmark charts, you'll see that the fastest MacBook Pro is faster than a lot of Mac Pros (including the current generation of Mac Pros). The new MacBook Pros truly are portable workstations.