At its current stage of development, the Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard beta is not outperforming 10.5 Leopard by any wide stretches, as developers dive into the new OS with GeekBench. The Netherlands' Mac Zone writes that benchmarking numbers indicate that 10.6 performs better than 10.5, but only by a small margin. This hardly is conclusive of the final product, however, given that 10.6 Snow Leopard is still under early development – early betas of 10.5 Leopard had a very Tiger-like interface and poorer performance than the final build. The 32-bit versions of 10.5 and 10.6 each earned total scores of 2859 and 2893, respectively, while the 64-bit versions saw scores of 3271 against Snow Leopard's 3351. Mac Zone notes that iCal 4.0 introduces Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 support, allowing users to forgo the use of Entourage in favour of Mail and iCal. |
