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 — compute
See MemoryTester for details on this test. The graphs below are for 1/2/3/4 CPU threads on the horizontal axis.
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.
Pure computation with no memory access
Hyperthreading (3 or 4 threads) delivers almost zero improvement.
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.
