New MacBook Air Benchmarks Reveal Slight Performance Bump

If you haven’t heard yet yesterday Apple launched the 2014 MacBook Air lineup without much fanfare. There aren’t any major updates, save for the fast that the processors have been updated and that the notebooks are now $100 cheaper. Its the same Haswell silicon from Intel that’s clocks in at 1.4GHz as opposed to 1.3GHz on the predecessor.

Geekbench stress tests of the 2014 MacBook Air lineup are already available on the Geekbench Browser. The Intel Core i5-4260U chip that powers both 11-inch and 13-inch models of the new MacBook Air registered a 32-bit Geekbench single-core score of 2,532 and a multi-core score of 4,781.

Last year’s MacBook Air lineup was powered by the Intel Core i5-4250U processor, which is clocked at 1.3GHz, are registered a single-score score of 2,461 and multi-core score of 4,615. These measurable gains are quite small and naturally users shouldn’t expect a massive improvement in performance given that Apple hasn’t even increased the RAM this time around.

One might have expected Apple’s MacBooks to be one of the first computers to tout Intel’s next generation Broadwell processors that were initially supposed to be released earlier this year. Though recent reports suggest that Broadwell powered computers might not be released until 2015. The new MacBook Air models are now available for purchase through the company’s online and retail stores.

Adnan Farooqui
Categories: Apple, Computers
Tags: haswell, macbook air