Apple 2013 Haswell MacBook Air Performance

Last month I wrote about how running Ubuntu Linux is a mess on the 2013 MacBook Air with Intel Core i5 "Haswell" processor. Not much has changed since then, but for those curious about the performance, here are the first official Phoronix benchmarks of the Haswell-based MacBook Air with its wonderfully-long battery life.

Last month I posted some quick benchmarks of the 2013 MacBook Air but available now are a full assortment of benchmarks compared to other Apple systems. With the current Linux state being less than desirable on this hardware, OS X 10.8.4 had to be used. Once Linux 3.11-rc1 has been released, I will re-test it on the MacBook Air to see if the GPU hangs are cured along with the Linux 3.10 kernel problems I had on the hardware.

The tested Apple MacBook Air was the MD711LL/A model and sports an Intel Core i5 4250U "Haswell" processor with a base clock of 1.30GHz, 4GB of DDR3 system memory, a 120GB Apple (PCI Express) SSD SD0128, Intel Haswell-ULT HD Graphics 5000, Intel Haswell audio, and Broadcom 802.11ac WiFi.

The hardware that this 11-inch MacBook Air MD711LL/A was compared to included the:

2010 MacBook Pro with Intel Core i5 CPU clocked at 2.40GHz, 4GB of RAM, 120GB OCZ Agility 2 SSD, and a combination of Intel HD (Ironlake) graphics with a NVIDIA GeForce GT 330M discrete GPU.

2011 Mac Mini that is of the Intel "Sandy Bridge" generation with the a dual-core 2.30GHz CPU, 2GB of RAM, 500GB Hitachi HDD, and Intel HD 3000 graphics.

2012 Retina MacBook Pro with Intel Core i7 2.30GHz Ivy Bridge processor, 8GB of RAM, 250GB Apple SSD, and Intel HD 4000 graphics with NVIDIA GeForce GT 650M discrete graphics.

This is the assortment of modern Apple systems currently within my lab. All of these systems were running Apple OS X 10.8.4 with all available software updates at the time of testing and were using Apple Xcode 4.6.3 with its LLVM/Clang 3.2 compiler as the default and GCC 4.2.1 as fallback (pardon the confusion in the reported system table, all systems were using OS X 10.8.4 and Xcode) with a Journaled HFS+ file-system.

All of this benchmarking was handled in a fully automated and reproducible manner using the open-source Phoronix Test Suite software.