Benchmarking Xcode performance between My Hackintosh and MacBook Pro

It’s been a month since I’m working exclusively using Hackintosh and I curious how it perform compared with MacBook Pro.

Here’s the Hackintosh spec:

• CPU: 3.7Ghz Hexa-Core Intel Core i5
• RAM: 32GB
• SSD: 250GB

MacBook Pro (mid 2019) spec:

• CPU: 2,4 GHz Quad-Core Intel Core i5
• RAM: 16GB
• SSD: 256GB

So today I try to benchmark Xcode using both machine with this Xcode benchmark project. The Xcode benchmark project itself is typical large Swift project which contains more 40 deps. (see: Podfile) and several of them are commonly used, such as Alamofire, Moya, Firebase, [[ RxSwift ]], etc.

Benchmarking is performed using Xcode 12 GM (12A7209) Before performing the benchmark, here are few things I do:

• Update the dependencies using pod update. This is because one of the dependecies make compile failed with Segmentation fault: 11
• Enable showing build time in Xcode
• Quit all apps except Xcode and Terminal

For each measurement, I do the following

1. Delete the derived data from ~/Library/Developer/Xcode/
2. Compile the project as soon as Xcode ready
3. I run 3 times for each machine

Result

On Hackintosh, Xcode compile the project in

• 240.3s
• 239.0s
• 240.4s

average: 240.4s

On Macbook Pro, compilation done in

• 399.5s
• 399.0s
• 402.4s

average: 400.4s

Findings

It’s not surprising that Hackintosh compile faster since it has faster clock speed and more cores. By looking at the numbers, Hackintosh cuts compile time by 40%.