I don’t know yet.
According to the first Geekbench results, the Intel i7-620M at 2.66/3.33 GHz in latest flagship MBPs is about 30% faster than the previous Core 2 Duo T9900 at 3.06 GHz. Compared to my early 2008 MacBook (which has a T8300), that’s a 70% speedup. That’s huge, but it’s just a synthetic benchmark. Still, it’s clear that the new MacBooks are speedy, and the new CPUs are not the only reason.
Cupertino finally dumped the crappy NVIDIA chipset in favor of Intel’s integrated graphics. It was a bad deal for MacBook Pros all along: While the MacBook really benefits from a more powerful GPU, especially when some applications use OpenCL, the Pros already have a good graphics chip built-in! All Apple achieved in the late 2008 update was to nullify the speedup that updating to DDR3 would have meant.
Today, Apple corrected their mistake. The i5 and i7 chips seem to be the fastest that Intel makes for the 35W class. I’ll be visiting a Mac shop in the next days to try out some my-world benchmarks. Hopefully, I can get what I have been searching for over a year now: More Speed™.
Update: Geekbench has confirmed my results.