Update On Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard Benchmarks

As we mentioned earlier this week, we will be providing Mac OS X 10.6 benchmarks on launch day (well, potentially the morning after, depending upon timing). This week has been very busy in preparations for this article along with last minute work on the Phoronix Test Suite to add in a few more Mac-compatible test profiles and other work for Snow Leopard.

The popular video-cpu-usage test profile that charts out the CPU usage while an H.264 1080p video is being played back, is now compatible with Mac OS X and also using Apple's CoreVideo technology. OpenArena, Warsow, and GraphicsMagick are just some of the other test profiles to be added to the Mac OS X benchmarking list. For our first Mac OS X 10.6.0 benchmarking extravaganza we are looking at Nexuiz, Urban Terror, OpenArena, X-Plane 9, Java 2D Microbenchmarks, H.264 video playback, LAME MP3 encoding, FFmpeg, dcraw, GraphicsMagick, timed apache compilation, timed PHP compilation, 7-Zip compression, Gzip compression, GnuPG file encryption, Bork file encryption, OpenSSL signing, BYTE Unix Benchmarks, SciMark 2.0, Threaded I/O Tester, Stream, John The Ripper, timed MAFFT alignment, PostgreSQL, Sudokut, PyBench, Crafty, TSCP, Tachyon, C-Ray, and Sunflow Rendering System. With some of these test profiles there were multiple options that we ran the tests with, which in total leads to 60 different tests we are using for this Leopard vs. Snow Leopard benchmarking. With the Phoronix Test Suite most test profiles are automatically ran multiple times to ensure the numbers are statistically significant and accurate, which puts the number of actual runs even many times higher.

Originally we were just going to be running all of these tests from an older Mac Mini with Intel integrated graphics, but being far too excited about benchmarking, we decided to run out and pickup a new Mac Mini too. So we will be providing Snow Leopard performance benchmarks from an older Core 2 Duo Mac Mini with Intel 945 graphics to show off any performance improvements on this lower-end, old Mac Mini. Then, they will be accompanied by results from a newer Mac Mini with a faster processor and the NVIDIA GeForce 9400M graphics for showing off the Snow Leopard numbers on a higher-end Mac that has a 64-bit EFI and with a GPU that is capable of running OpenCL. There's lots of benchmarking ahead!

After this article is out the door on Friday or early Saturday, our attention will then turn to delivering comparative Ubuntu 9.04 benchmarks and early numbers from an Ubuntu 9.10 development snapshot. After that, there is our big operating system comparison next month.

With all of this work ahead and just picking up a new Mac Mini for this testing, do consider subscribing to Phoronix Premium, making a donation, or shopping with an affiliate link to support our ongoing efforts.