Mac OS X 10.6 Brings Serious Performance Gains

Mac OS X 10.6.0 is shipping with Python 2.6 compared to Python 2.5 under Mac OS X 10.5.8 and in part may be attributed to the better success of PyBench. The total of the average test times had dropped with today's Apple operating system release.

The popular and advanced chess engine AI known as Crafty had performed astonishingly well with Snow Leopard. Using our new Mac Mini the chess solving time was nearly sliced in half! It went from 106 seconds to 55 seconds.

TSCP, which is another AI chess engine, had also benefited from Grand Central Dispatch and other performance enhancements found in Snow Leopard. There was about a 15% boost in the node count for MM2.