Benchmarks for the New Mac Mini and MacBook Air

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Posted July 30, 2011 at 3:52pm by iClarified

Primate Labs has released their benchmarks for the new Mac mini and MacBook Air.

Mac Mini
The Sandy Bridge processors in the new Mac mini provides a tremendous boost in performance: the quad-core Mac mini server is 2.3x faster than the previous Mac mini while the dual-core Mac minis are 1.6x to 1.9x faster.

Another interesting thing (not shown in the chart above) is that the Mac mini server has roughly the same performance as the entry-level Mac Pro. While this will not hold true after the next Mac Pro update (which is overdue), it's impressive to see Apple's smallest computer provide comparable performance to Apple's largest computer!

MacBook Air
Like the Mac mini, the new Sandy Bridge processors provide a tremendous performance boost to the MacBook Air lineup: the 13-inch MacBook Air is 1.9x faster than the previous 13-inch MacBook Air, while the 11-inch MacBook Air is an incredible 2.6x faster.

The Core i7-based MacBook Air is almost as fast as the Core i5-based MacBook Pro ( only 20% slower). While there has always been a (sometimes sizable) gap between the fastest MacBook Air and the slowest MacBook Pro, this update eradicates that gap.

These benchmarks were compiled from the Geekbench browser. You can benchmark your own system by getting Geekbench from here.

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Terry Gao - August 1, 2011 at 2:53pm

I got 5448 on my 13's new macbook air. 1.7i5.

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Jorge Figueroa - August 1, 2011 at 5:15am

It's impressive how much of speed improvement the processor makes. http://theelectronicoblog.blogspot.com/

Andrew - July 31, 2011 at 10:35am

Why does my early 2011 15" 2.3 i7 get a geek bench score of 11285? http://img641.imageshack.us/img641/2184/screenshot20110731at112.png

AA - August 1, 2011 at 8:08am

I think the one on the graph is only rocking 4GB of RAM, your machine has double that at 8GB. Hence the slight difference in scores.