I got a new 20″ Intel iMac last week. It’s a 2.16Ghz Core 2 Duo and its crazy fast compared to my old PowerBook G4 1.33Ghz. As you may know if you’re a loyal reader of this blog that I like svnmark (compiling subversion) because it is a benchmark that directly shows how much productivity gains you might be able to get if you upgraded your Mac. I mean its nice to see how many frames per second you might get in World of Warcraft, but really – you want to see if more cores / more gigahertz gives you faster compiles.

OK – so what’s the svnmark score for Intel iMac 2.16Ghz Core 2 Duo?

1m46.405s or about 106 seconds

That puts it behind the 2.66 and 3.0 Mac Pros which run at 62 and 54 seconds respectively. But its right around where the Quad G5 was – 99 seconds.
It beats the previous 20″ iMac Core Duo 2.0Ghz (117 seconds) by about 9%.

But the big kicker? It beats my old PowerBook G4 1.33Ghz (655 seconds) by 84%! Or as Apple might say, the iMac 20″ 2.16Ghz is 6x faster than the 17″ PowerBook G4 1.33Ghz. Now that’s productivity!