Will the new Mac Pro’s performance disappoint? The jury’s still out …

What appears to be a very disappointing Geekbench result for a pre-release version of the new Mac Pro may not tell the whole story, according to a blog entry by Primate Lab’s John Poole.

It had been widely expected that the new Mac Pro would generate a Geekbench score of over 30,000 rather than the 23,901 score posted. Poole suggests that the figure might not be representative of the true performance of the model that will go on sale later this year … 

This Geekbench result is from a pre-release machine with a radical new design. There could be any number of hardware, firmware, and software issues that affect performance. In particular, overheating problems thanks to the new thermal core could cause the processor to throttle performance, lowering the overall Geekbench score.

All the same, the gap to be closed if the new model is to hit expectations is a substantial one. While Poole observes that achieving a modest performance boost in a package an eight the size of the existing model is not to be sniffed at, Pro customers (hosting centres aside) are likely to be rather more interested in the numbers than the form-factor.