MacBook Pro i7 Software Development Performance (XCode)

2010-04-20 • SEND FEEDBACK •
Related: defaults write, diglloydTools, DiskTester, laptop, MacBook, MacBook Pro, Macs

See the system configuration notes.

Apple XCode build DiskTester

Build DiskTester with Apple XCode (DiskTester is part of diglloydTools).

This is a CPU intensive test that is not influenced by disk speed (smart I/O and caching hide the I/O speed).

The Core i7 offers a 20% performance improvement, and this is one test where hyperthreading helps; running the test and limiting XCode to 2 threads results in 140 second runtime, suggesting that clock speed is also important here.

Time in seconds, lower is better

Developers: you can control the number of threads XCode uses while building:

defaults write com.apple.Xcode PBXNumberOfParallelBuildSubtasks 4