According to a report, the yet-unreleased Intel Core i7 Ivy Bridge chip has been tested on a modified version of OS X Lion. And according to different benchmark tests and their scores, the OS environment runs very smoothly on the upcoming Intel chip. This is probably an indication of how well the two may go along shall Apple decide to use the chip in its next-generation Mac models.
The test was carried out using a Z77 motherboard and the results showed that OS X Lion runs fairly well on the chip. Since the standard version of OS X Lion 10.7.3 would not have supported a direct boot on the new chip, the testers modified the boot kernel before carrying out the tests.
The benchmark tests that were carried out gauged the performance of the processor and also that how well Inte’s HD Graphics 4000 would do on a Mac machine. According to the test results, this ‘Hackintosh’ machine earned a 13,453 on the Geekbench and a 20,250 for the floating point performance. During the test, quad-core processor with 8 GB of 2400MHz DDR3 RAM was used.
The test, although unofficial and by some anonymous developers, is quite significant since Apple has plans of rolling out Ivy Bridge-based Macs in the coming days. Rumors have it that the revamped, sleeker MacBook Pros will be using these same Ivy Bridge processors. A new 15-inch model of MacBook Pro is said to be offered as Intel i5 and i7 Ivy Bridge CPUs variations.
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