With Apple’s next round of Macs likely include Intel’s Ivy Bridge processors that were recently confirmed for an April launch, there is still some speculation on which processors from the lineup will land in certain Macs. With rumors today pointing towards a refreshed iMac, new Benchmark tests (via tonymacx86) submitted to Geekbench shows Apple’s desktop OS offering performing with the 3.5GHz Quad-Core i7-3770K, one of Intel’s most powerful Ivy Bridge chips suitable for desktops.

Note that the “Mac Pro” in the above screen capture is the profile the Hackintosh user used, not the hardware. Also note that the user had to modify the kernel to use these new chips which will also see further optimizations by Apple.

Geekbench user hiwa obviously had to use a Hackintosh to boot with new chip and in this case a Z77 motherboard was used. Some benchmarks listed by the user show scores higher than any current Apple hardware. It’s unclear what machine the benchmarks were performed on, but it’s clear Ivy Bridge is posting some pretty impressive results compared with current Mac hardware.

While the benchmarks above show the Core i7-3770K desktop chip, Intel product manager Anand Kajshmanan claims Apple’s MacBooks (likely to include Ivy Bridge CPUs in the near future) will face strong competition from Intel-powered ultrabooks. In an interview with PC World, Anand was asked why a person would choose an Ultrabook over a MacBook Air or even an iPad:
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The MacBook Air is a great product, sure. It has the Intel Core processor, it’s a great choice for someone who wants to invest in the Mac operating system, and it offers some of the things we talked about. But really, with the Ultrabook, it’s about offering all those things in the same device–the great responsiveness, the great battery life–and with an operating system that people have come to love over the years, as well as all the legacy applications that they would like to run… And they want to do all this at mainstream price points, which is where we think one of the biggest key differentiators is, and the biggest value that Intel can bring to this space.

As for the iPad eating into ultrabook sales… Intel is betting touchscreens on ultrabooks to “take off” with Windows 8 in 2012 and 2013, but said iPad can’t beat ultrabooks for content creation:

The Ultrabook offers an extremely unique value proposition. Every time we’ve done market research, consumers have told us, “We love touch, but don’t touch our keyboards.” Even for email, people prefer keyboards. There’s no tactile feedback on touchscreens… The fact that you have content creation on Ultrabooks is a huge differentiator. Plus, with all the unique form factors, as we said, to be able to use the Ultrabook as a tablet when you want to is an extremely unique value proposition…We fundamentally believe in the concept of touch, and touch on a clamshell. We believe it’s going to take off in 2012 or at least 2013, especially with Windows 8.

• Report: Intel releasing Ivy Bridge CPUs April 8, will likely land in future Macs (9to5mac.com)
• The next Macs will likely have one of these Intel Ivy Bridge processors, due in a month (9to5mac.com)
• Apple iMac Core i7 Quad 3.4GHz 27″ w/ 32GB RAM, 2TB HD for $ 2,697 + $ 29 s&h (9to5toys.com)