Primate benchmarks Apple's new 8-core Mac Pro
The results saw the new Mac Pro with its two 45-nanomete (nm) quad-core 2.8GHz chips and 2GB of 800MHz DDR2 RAM nearly match the overall performance of the previous-generation Mac Pro, which employed two 65 nm quad-core 3.0GHz chips and 1GB of 667MHz DDR2 RAM.
While the Harpertown Mac Pro trailed the Clovertown machine in floating point performance, it bested the system in integer, memory and stream performance. Overall, the Hapertown Mac Pro achieved a Geekbench 2 score of 7598 compared to the Clovertown Mac Pro's 7680.
The results are impressive, notes Primate, when you consider that the new Mac Pro is much more affordable than the old Mac Pro. Apple also offers the latest Mac Pro at speeds of up to 3.2GHz — a configuration which should handily trounce the 3.0GHz Clovertown machine in each and every benchmark.