13-inch Retina MacBook Pro Shows up in New Benchmarks

At WWDC Apple announced its new next generation MacBook Pro, the 15-inch MacBook Pro with Retina Display. The company has plans to bring the high-resolution screen to the smaller MacBook Pro as well, it seems.

According to MacRumors, new benchmarks at Geekbench point to a 13-inch MacBook Pro with a Retina Display. The new benchmarks are actually similar to ones from last month, but with a few changes. This machine has 8GB of RAM instead of 4GB, and it uses OS X 10.8.1, which Apple hasn’t released to developers yet.

The MacBook Pro 10,2, as it’s called in the benchmarks, uses a 2.9GHz Intel Core i7-3520M, which is the same CPU as the high-end 13-inch MacBook Pro. In fact, aside from the model number and the motherboard, it wouldn’t be as obvious that this is a new MacBook Pro model. The motherboard listed doesn’t match any identifiers in Mountain Lion.

Both the 4GB and 8GB models of the 13-inch MacBook pro with Retina Display score around 7800 in Geekbench, which is very good. The laptop will likely be at least as fast as the high-end 13-inch MacBook Pro with the standard 1280×800 display.

Some rumors suggest Apple might release the 13-inch MacBook Pro with Retina Display in October. If true the laptop will come a month after the rumored launch and release of the iPhone 5. It will come out around the same time as Windows 8 and the Microsoft Surface, along with a plethora of Windows 8 laptops and tablets.

We hope the October release is true, and that Apple prices the 13-inch MacBook Pro with Retina Display a few hundred dollars less than the 15-inch version.