Now that Mathematica 12.0 has been released and is installed on my new 2019 iMac, I can now report the results, both running macOS 10.14.4:

• Late 2015 iMac — 4 GHz Core i7 CPU, 32 GB RAM, 3 TB Fusion drive: 3.10
• 2019 iMac — 3.6 GHz Core i9 CPU, 64 GB RAM, 2 TB SSD: 3.75

No, sorry: 11.3 is gone from my new machine and I don't have an 11.3 benchmark from the old one (which was traded in).

I missed those benchmark examinations on the long Apple iMac data page. This information is profitable to me, so thank you for demonstrating it!

If you are referring to the brand new 2019 iMac, I would not be surprised if it were slower!

I read that this machine is equipped with an old fashioned HDD of Fusion Drive. And not with a SSD. This will slow down everything badly.

Beware that the new Mathematica Version 12 will be over 10 GB on disk space. And although not all is loaded at the same time into memory, considerable portions are. And this is beyond user control.

The 2019 iMac I'm considering, like the late 2015 iMac I'm using now, has a 3 TB Fusion drive, which includes 128 GB flash storage.

There is an option for SSD only, but the max size Apple will offer, pathetically, is 2 TB for that.

But undoubtedly many, many thousands of dollars more expensive than the newest iMacs, and probably thousands more than the newest iMac Pros. So that's like comparing apples with onions.

Murray,

The best way to compare machines is here- geekbenchmarks

The multiple cores will not help much unless you use the parallel code. In default, Mathematica uses two cores.

Regards

Neil

Murray,

If you go to apple's website they give the speed up for the new iMac's in Mathematica. They claim a 40% speedup for the 6 core 4K machine and a 50% speedup for the 8 core 5k machine with the following footnote:

Testing conducted by Apple in February 2019 using preproduction 3.2GHz 6-core Intel Core i7-based 21.5-inch iMac systems with 32GB of RAM, and preproduction 3.6GHz 8-core Intel Core i9-based 27-inch iMac systems with 64GB of RAM; and shipping 3.6GHz quad-core Intel Core i7-based 21.5-inch iMac systems with 32GB of RAM, as well as shipping 4.2GHz quad-core Intel Core i7-based 27-inch iMac systems with 64GB of RAM. Tested using Mathematica v11.3.0 with built-in benchmark, WolframMark. Performance tests are conducted using specific computer systems and reflect the approximate performance of iMac.

You would have to look at the details of the WolframMark to decide how relevant it is to you. You can then get the comparisons of your existing machine to the quad core baseline on GeekBench to see how your speed up will compare. Alternatively you can run the WolframMark on your existing machine and make that comparison.

Update: Actually, I just realized that your current machine is just slightly slower than the baseline machine Apple used to compare so they are claiming a 50% faster performance for the two machines as you describe them.

Regards,

Neil