Geekbench spots Core i7 MacBook Pro in the wild

Primate Labs’ Geekbench is a tiny little benchmarking application with one really neat funcitonality: run it on your system and it’ll upload the results to their servers, allowing users to easily compare benchmark scores across computers to inform their next purchasing decision.

That’s swell, but hardly news in and of itself… except that over the weekend, someone downloaded the GeekBench app and ran it on a system referring to itself as a MacBookPro6,1, the commonly acknowledged successor to the current MacBook Pro line. Oh, and it’s packing an Intel Core i7 M processor.

There’s a few reasons to be skeptical here — the performance leap over the current top-end MacBook Pro model on display here is staggering, and the 4.8GHz FSB is a bit strange — but everything else pans out, from the new Snow Leopard 10.6.2 build installed on the machine to the BIOS.

Of course, the real question is whether or not anyone internal to Apple would really use Geekbench to benchmark the latest MacBook Pro. You’d think they’d be smart enough not to, and that Apple would have its own set of benchmarking tools, but perhaps idle curiosity of what other programs said combined with ignorance of Geekbench’s uploading capability are the culprits here.

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Either way, we’re likely to see a refresh of the MacBook Pro line in the next month, and Intel’s Core iX line of mobile processors are an easy bet for Apple’s top-end laptop line. If the new MacBook Pros get anywhere near the Geekbench score we’re currently looking, at, it’s going to be a serious update indeed.

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