Early Benchmarks at new Macbook


Juli Clover for MacRumors:

Performance wise, the Retina MacBook seems to be par with the higher-end 2011 MacBook Air with a 1.8GHz Core i7 processor, but graphics performance on the new MacBook, which Geekbench does not measure, should be superior to that machine.

The new Macbook uses Intel's Core M processor, which is a departure from the Core i5/i7 CPUs used in previous MacBooks. As with everything mobile these days, the power consumption feature is a premium, along with the footprint required to run and cool. The other part is on-board graphics performance, which as indicated, we don't know yet.

So, basically the CPU in the new MacBook is as fast as a three year old MacBook Air. That's an interesting tradeoff to get something thinner, lighter, with a Retina display all without greatly sacrificing battery. Personally, still using a 2013 MacBook Air for the bulk of my mobile work where I'm away from the desk. Performance really isn't really a factor since I mostly use the web, email, Evernote, etc and no real heavy applications.