It’s always “fun” to compare the performance of machines across product lines and generations. I decided to run Geekbench across two machines that I use a fair bit these days:

I was impressed at the performance provided by the 17" MacBook Pro. Despite having only 4 physical cores compared to the 8 in the Mac Pro, it was still running fairly close. Granted the Mac Pro is 2 and a half years older, but I still expected a dual quad-core Xeon desktop workstation to seriously outperform a portable machine.

I still love my Mac Pro though, if only for the sheer joy that comes when it’s time to upgrade a hard disk.