MacBook Pro 15" with SSD - Benchmarks

Updated 30 June 2009 13:20

Benchmarking of the MacBook Pro 15"
Last time we talked about virtual performances. Now, it's time to talk about the real stuff. Let's do some real world benchmarks! I'll start with a basic boot time comparison between the Mac Pro, the MacBook Pro 13" with standard HDD and the MacBook Pro 15" with SSD. I'll then test multiple applications startup at the same time and the lunch time of some major applications like Photoshop. The specs of both every computers are supposed to be on my blog.

	MacBook Pro 15" Apple SSD	MacBook 13" Alu 5400 RPM HDD	Mac Pro 2008 4x Seagate 7200.11 HDDs
Boot time
Fastest	30.624 sec.	48.121 sec.	73.806 sec.
Slowest	30.989 sec.	52.506 sec.	82.113 sec.
Average of 3	30.825 sec.	50.07 sec.	77.467 sec.
Application startup
Safari 4.0.1	0.678 sec.	2.231 sec.	2.124 sec.
iPhoto 8.0.3	1.864 sec.	7.238 sec.	9.877 sec.
iTunes 8.2	1.315 sec.	7.192 sec.	5.322 sec.
iMovie 8.0.3	3.391 sec.	11.538 sec.	6.394 sec.
Photoshop 10.0.1	3.732 sec.	12.372 sec.	6.64 sec.
Pages 4.0.2	1.023 sec.	9.715 sec.	3.25 sec.
All of the above (Simultaneous)	6.238 sec.	64.245 sec.	24.116 sec.

Analysis
Wow! I'd like to add that the boot time is the physical boot time. It combine EFI and OS X boot time. The system was considered booted when the desktop, dock and menu bar was visible and accepting interactions. The time for the EFI to startup is about 12 seconds. It should remain the same for whatever MacBook Pro you have. On the other side, OS X 10.5.7 did boot in 18 seconds which is blazing fast! The Mac Pro EFI needed about 40 seconds to power up since the RAID card start evey disk one after the other to reduce power stress on the power supply. Even with this 28 seconds gap, the MacBook Pro surpassed the Mac Pro by 18.642 seconds.

An other interesting fact is that it take half the time to start every applications at the same time compared to starting them individually. This fact point that the mass storage device (Apple SSD in this case) is not the bottle-neck of this computer. The fact that it is exactly half the time shows us that the CPU is the one slowing everything. When I started multiple applications at once, I took advantage of it's multi-core architecture thus executing 2x more information at the same time.

Conclusion
The SSD option is definitely worth it. If you want a fast, silent and tough computer, it's the first thing to get. I can't imagine what one of those SSDs can do in the Mac Pro. It would surely be a screamer! Let's say that it's defenitly in my plan to do so. I will probably post a follow up when it will happen. In the mean time, let's wait for the videos of those benchmarks and the review of my new iPhone 3G S. See you next week.

Update 30 June 2009 11:52
Those benchmarks might appear incomplete to you so, if you are interested in a specific value that is not present in the list, just ask using whatever means of communication you'd prefer. I'm also open to suggestions about hardware comparison.