Apple’s 45nm Refresh: New MacBook & MacBook Pro

File Decompression, Photoshop and Quicktime Performance

Using MacPAR Deluxe we took an 800MB archive and deleted 5% of it, forcing MacPAR to read the archive, calculate and write the missing bits, then extract the whole archive:

Once more the slightly lower clocked Penryn MacBook Pro manages close to a 5% lead over the 2.6GHz Merom system.

Our CS3 benchmark is the standard Retouch Artists test that we use in our CPU reviews. We're just timing how long it takes to complete a handful of operations on an image in Photoshop:

Photoshop performance is nearly identical between the 2.5GHz Penryn and 2.6GHz Merom systems.

Finally we have our Quicktime H.264 encode test. All we're doing here is taking a 500MB MPEG-2 avi file and encoding it using Apple's H.264 codec and Quicktime's default settings:

It looks like Quicktime isn't optimized for SSE4 yet as Penryn offers no advantage over Merom.

Overall, the performance differential ends up being a wash - there are some cases where Penryn is faster at lower clock speeds, while others where Merom manages a win - much as we expected.