A reader, Nicolas has just received his Mac Pro Octo 3 GHz fitted with a Radeon X2600 XT. He shares with us the results obtained with Cinebench R10:
We have redone he same test using a first generation - 4 core Mac Pro
Running with a single core at the same frequency, the new machine does better; with multiple core, it is almost exactly twice as good (due to twice the number of cores). Even though this last result seems mathematically trivial, it is not so - since the efficiency of each core decreases as one adds more cores. The Mac Pro 4 x 3 GHz has an efficiency of 0.7775 per core, while the 8 x 3 GHz losses relatively little with an efficiency of 0.72375.
These excellent results are due partly to the improvement of the CPU architecture but more so to the new arch
