MacBook Pro i7 CPU Performance and Memory Speed

This page analyzes raw CPU performance.

See the system configuration notes.

MemoryTester — memory bandwidth

See MemoryTester for details on this test.

The memory controller of the Core i7 delivers up to 46% better bandwidth for multi-threaded code! This is a real test with threads(pthreads) in a real C++ program, not theory.

MemoryTester bandwidth from stress command

MemoryTester — compute

See MemoryTester for details on this test. The graphs below are for 1/2/3/4 CPU threads on the horizontal axis.

For compute tasks, the Core i7 offers about 16% better performance at 2.66GHz than the 2.93GHz Core 2 Duo, fairly impressive given the clock speed disadvantage.

Even though memory itself is the same speed (1066MHz), the memory controller of the Core i7 delivers superior bandwidth.

SHA1 hash (CPU task with memory access)

Hyperthreading (3 or 4 threads) delivers a small improvement here, but not much.

MemoryTester compute command

Pure computation with no memory access

Hyperthreading (3 or 4 threads) delivers almost zero improvement.

MemoryTester compute command

Pure memory access: copy and compare memory.

The memory controller of the Core i7 delivers up to 29% better bandwidth with two threads copying and comparing memory.

Hyperthreading (3 or 4 threads) achieves nothing, as expected.

MemoryTester compute command