First benchmarks of Intel's Conroe processor

[Civrock]

As mentioned by several news and rumor sites, Apple's most probably going to use Intel's Conroe processor for the next Desktop Mac generation (Mac Pro?)... Anandtech posted a preview and first benchmarks of it today and they are VERY impressive, they basically blow away the competition. This is the roadmap Apple talked about when they justified the switch.

http://www.anandtech.com/tradeshows/showdoc.aspx?i=2713

Take a long look at the Gaming Performance in particular.

[BFG]

One word: Wow

lots more words: Thats mighty impressive - I had to look at the media encoding performance first and thats inpressive, but the gaming stats blew me away - we're talking a difference in FPS far greater than the max FPS most of us ever get to start with! These chips are going to be ready by the end of the year (including hopfully the quad core although id be more than happy with just two DC's) and if like we all expect these go into the new powermacs then we're in for some blazingly fast machines.

No noise about power consumption which is a pity - would be nice to see it run up against the current G5s to give some of us an idea of real world improvements of moving work suites etc over to the new comps.

... my biggest concern is that we get the custom Motherboards that intel are meant to be building for apple in these macs and not any old standard PC board that comes to hand...


what is great is that WWDC will take place in August which seems like a good time to release the Pro desktop lineup... give people someting sexy to run their pro apps on!

[BTs_Mysterio]

I'd buy one in the fall if the CPU was socketed. If it was soldered I would wait until the next spring to get the quad-core.

[BFG]

well, imac and mac mini are both socketed right? don't think the macbook was but thats predictable... going by this im about 80% confident on betting the power um pro-macs will be socketed as well.

I must admit i was surprised about all this... apple are having to give up a nice source of revenue if we can simply pop in a tasty hotter new processor from intel... then again im sure there will be motherboard issues etc etc to make sure that the new comps still have to be bought

[BTs_Mysterio]

Maybe we should use a universally stickied thread for benchmarks. I didn't want to start a new thread about these, but here are some rather impressive... rather = very... MacBook and MacMini benches:

MacBook
http://barefeats.com/pbcd.html

Obviously the best anyone could have expected or wanted from a computer/processor new on the market. Even the PS tests look decent enough to be useable.

Mac Mini
http://barefeats.com/mincd.html

Weak in the graphics test, but maybe there needs to be some optimization to mac games for Integrate Graphics as we never have deal with them before? Overall, strong showing for it's targeted market.

I'm willing to bet that the next gen Mini will get a GPU in the range of the X1200 (is there one)? Apple has apparently been putting only MacMini Core Duos out in the store for test... maybe the Solo didn't meet their expectations?