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Today I was lucky enough to have the opportunity to check out a Macbook Pro running the Developer Preview version of the next generation 64bit Macintosh operating system, OS 10.6 “Snow Leopard”.

This is the preview version that Apple handed out to developers back in June so of course it’s incomplete, stuff will change in the 12 months before its released, particularly drivers and general compatibility. But for fun I downloaded a copy of the XBench benchmarking utility and ran it on the same system, booting Snow Leopard off an external drive and booting “regular” Leopard off the internal drive. No apps were running and I waited for all disk activity to stop before I started the benchmarks.

The results for regular 10.5.5 Leopard are below, with the figures for Snow Leopard in brackets:

Xbench Version: 1.3

System Version: 10.5.5 (10.6.0 Preview)
Processor: Intel Core 2 Duo 2.33 GHz
Physical RAM: 3072 MB
Model: MacBookPro 2,2

CPU Test: 125.48 (164.77)
GCD Loop: 14.40 Mops/sec (14.21 Mops/sec)
Floating Point Basic: 3.11 Gflop/sec (3.15 Gflop/sec)
vecLib FFT: 2.42 Gflop/sec (3.57 Gflop/sec)
Floating Point Library: 25.09 Mops/sec (45.86 Mops/sec)

Thread Test: 222.32 (164.14)
Computation: 4.20 Mops/sec, 4 threads (3.29 Mops/sec, 4 threads)
Lock Contention: 10.30 Mlocks/sec, 4 threads (7.14 Mlocks/sec, 4 threads)

Memory Test: 129.37 (133.09)
System: 147.08 (153.70)
Allocate: 641.45 Kalloc/sec (870.88 Kalloc/sec)
Fill: 6455.31 MB/sec (6420.38 MB/sec)
Copy: 2893.01 MB/sec (2672.64 MB/sec)
Stream: 115.46 (117.35)
Copy: 2169.49 MB/sec (2233.39 MB/sec)
Scale: 2249.41 MB/sec (2269.80 MB/sec)
Add: 2664.32 MB/sec (2706.84 MB/sec)
Triad: 2692.86 MB/sec (2719.38 MB/sec)

Quartz Graphics Test: 177.48 (175.15)
Line: 10.68 Klines/sec (10.33 Klines/sec)
Rectangle: 64.55 Krects/sec (60.87 Krects/sec)
Circle: 14.17 Kcircles/sec (13.88 Kcircles/sec)
Bezier: 4.33 Kbeziers/sec (4.52 Kbeziers/sec)
Text: 10.91 Kchars/sec (10.90 Kchars/sec)

OpenGL Graphics Test: 227.39 (238.99)
Spinning Squares: 288.46 frames/sec (303.17 frames/sec)

User Interface Test: 255.54 (288.25)
Elements: 1.17 Krefresh/sec (1.32 Krefresh/sec)

Overall Score: 175.73 (181.61)

Any figures within a couple of percent of each other can be assumed to be the same really, but there were a couple of eyebrow raising results…

1. CPU Floating Point Tests
vecLib FFT: 2.42 Gflop/sec (3.57 Gflop/sec)
Floating Point Library: 25.09 Mops/sec (45.86 Mops/sec)

That’s a MASSIVE difference with Snow Leopard showing a 48% and 83% increase respectively.
I’m not sure what to make of that, answers on a postcard please…

2. Thread Tests
Computation: 4.20 Mops/sec, 4 threads (3.29 Mops/sec, 4 threads)
Lock Contention: 10.30 Mlocks/sec, 4 threads (7.14 Mlocks/sec, 4 threads)

Here Snow Leopard lags behind quite significantly…

3. Memory Tests
System Allocate: 641.45 Kalloc/sec (870.88 Kalloc/sec)

That’s quite a hefty increase in speed from Snow Leopard.

On the graphics tests it’s a little up and down but that’s probably down to drivers as much as anything else but on the user interface test Snow Leopard was basically about 12% faster.

It’s too soon to read much into this, in terms of the overall XBench score Snow Leopard barely managed to show a 4% increase in speed but there are some unusual results in there for sure…

UPDATE: PART 2 now posted.

Filed under: Computing