Yesterday, when Apple announced its new MacPro systems, the company claimed that the new machines deliver “up to twice the performance” of the previous MacPros. Of course, we’ll have to wait until some geek site gets their hands on one of the new towers in order to really verify those claims but in the mean time, ZDnet‘s “Apple Core” blog points us to a series of benchmarks on Apple’s site that pit the new “Harpertown” Xeon 5400-series-based MacPros against previous Mac towers. The benchmark tests include real world tasks like video rendering in Final Cut Pro, heavy-duty graphics work in Photoshop CS3 and sound modeling in Logic Pro. Indeed, the new systems do appear to be quite a bit faster than the old G5-based Pros, though they’re generally only marginally faster than the previous 8-core model. Turns out, Apple meant that the standard-config 8-core 2.8Ghz MacPro is “up to twice as fast” as the previous standard-config model, which had only one 2.66Ghz dual-core CPU. Regardless, the new Harpertown chips do seem to be quite fast and the performance gains will likely increase as more and more developers use multithreading to take advantage of the latest hardware.

For more on the new MacPros:
– see this ZDnet article