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I’m : a programmer, writer, podcaster, geek, and coffee enthusiast.

Xeon E5 scores well for a hypothetical Mac Pro

I just ordered my first Xeon E5 server for Instapaper, and it’s a monster. Some Geekbench scores that I just ran: (higher is better)

No synthetic benchmark is truly representative of exactly what you do on a computer, but they’re usually good to approximate relative performance between CPUs.

I ran these all on Linux, which tends to score lower on Geekbench than the same processors in OS X. I suspect the dual E5-2690s in OS X might score around 36,000. (By comparison, in OS X, the current top-of-the-line dual X5670 Mac Pro scores about 24,000 and the 3.4 GHz iMac scores about 12,500.)

An E5-2690 currently costs about $2,000. So if Apple offers two of these as the high-end CPU option on a Mac Pro, it wouldn’t surprise me to see a price tag in the $6,000 range. (Don’t just blame Apple for the Mac Pro’s high price.) But there are lower-clocked, lower-cost E5s that could be very attractive in midrange Mac Pros.


  1. I use the E3-1270 servers for database replication, backups, and search indexing. ↩︎

  2. Most of Instapaper’s duties except databases and search are shared by three servers with dual X5670s. The new dual E5-2690 server is joining them tonight. ↩︎