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iMac Businesses Apple Hardware

MacWorld's iMac Core Duo Benchmarks Debunked? 187

Posted by CmdrTaco from the numbers-always-lie dept.
madgunde writes "Looks like MacWorld magazine was a little premature in reporting that the new Apple iMac Core Duo doesn't live up to Apple's speed claims. The folks over at MacSpeedZone have done some performance testing of their own that debunks MacWorld's results and shows that the new iMac Core Duo DOES live up to the hype. Not only did the new iMac wipe the floor with the old model in their tests, but using MacWorld's own test methodology would allow MacSpeedZone to conclude that the new Intel iMac is almost as fast as a PowerMac Quad G5. " I see only one way to solve this: Give me one. I'll run WoW on it, and decide.
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MacWorld's iMac Core Duo Benchmarks Debunked? More

MacWorld's iMac Core Duo Benchmarks Debunked?

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  • Jeez, guys... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by daveschroeder ( 516195 ) * on Thursday January 26, 2006 @04:28PM (#14572797)
    How many stories can we have about the Intel-based iMac's benchmarks?

    All of these "benchmarks" are true, as far as they go.

    Apple's original SPEC benchmarks are "true".

    Macworld's "real world" application benchmarks are "true".

    And now, MacSpeedZone's further tests of various tasks also are "true".

    I mean, obviously the new iMac isn't going to be 2 times faster for everything under the sun. In fact, Jobs even spoke to this fact in the keynote when he directly said that the tests were just for the CPU and that everything else, like disk I/O and other subsystems, weren't all twice as fast, but it was to illustrate the performance (and performance per watt) of the new Core Duo, which is indeed impressive by any measure.

    I think it's safe to say that the new iMac running native applications is definitely faster - sometimes up to twice as fast, and sometimes even more - than the iMac it's replacing. And Rosetta is so impressive that while non-native applications will run slower, it's damned good until native versions of those applications come out, too.

    And speaking of CmdrTaco's request for a WoW test on the new iMac...

    http://arstechnica.com/journals/apple.ars/2006/1/1 2/2478 [arstechnica.com]

    "It's fast, fast as in a superlative and not a comparative sense. One wonders why Steve Jobs didn't blow the crowd away with the saturated colors and excessive frame rates of WoW on an iMac. It loaded fast, and when the first character popped up in town, the frame rate never dropped below 60, and this was pretty much going full tilt in the settings."

    • Re:Jeez, guys... (Score:5, Funny)

      by sammy baby ( 14909 ) on Thursday January 26, 2006 @04:37PM (#14572906) Journal
      "It's fast, fast as in a superlative and not a comparative sense. One wonders why Steve Jobs didn't blow the crowd away with the saturated colors and excessive frame rates of WoW on an iMac. It loaded fast, and when the first character popped up in town, the frame rate never dropped below 60, and this was pretty much going full tilt in the settings."


      Pfft. Do they really need to ask this question?

      The Jobinator has connected.
      QtElfASSASSINlord596: n00b


      (Apologies for the obvious fact that I've never played WoW, or the status messages above would look more realistic.)

    • Re:Jeez, guys... (Score:5, Funny)

      by f0dder ( 570496 ) on Thursday January 26, 2006 @04:47PM (#14573032)

      With over a million zealots hanging on your every word.

      Depending on WoW's login server to give a Keynote presentation is not a wise decision.

    • WOW is highly dependent on your graphics card. The Intel Mac's PCIe graphics card is far better than what most Mac users are used to: middle of the road 4x AGP or less.

      Watching the processor use graph on my dual 2.0 GHz (first generation) G5, I could turn off one processor and see a minor difference in performance. With both processors running, utilization was about 60% on both at the max.

      When I upgraded my G5's video card, I saw enormous advances in how the game played, how many effects I could turn on, an

  • Two possible slashdot headlines from next week (Score:4, Funny)

    by Spazntwich ( 208070 ) on Thursday January 26, 2006 @04:31PM (#14572830)
    MacWorld uncovers secret Apple contributions to MacSpeedZone.

    OR

    Prices for flying pigs drop dramatically as supply increases after Apple products live up to claimed bench marks.

  • Nothing settled until Pro Apps... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by gsfprez ( 27403 ) on Thursday January 26, 2006 @04:37PM (#14572908)
    i'm completley convinced that for using email, web browser, iPhoto, etc.. that the new iiMacs wipe the floor with comparably priced PPC macs.

    what i want to know - and what holds me back from moving to an iiMac from my DP g5 1.8 - is

    1. how they will perform when rendering with Compressor
    2. how much faster is FCP when hooked up to similar disk packs (like cheap desktop FW400 raids)
    3. Will i still be able to run background processing tasks like Compressor and handbrake yet get good foreground performance so i can email, websurf and get on with life while waiting for those 30-1 hour long tasks, instead of walking away from the machine, lest i get tempted to use it and really slow down the renders.
    4. Will Aperture stop sucking performance wise?
    • "Will i still be able to run background processing tasks like Compressor and handbrake yet get good foreground performance so i can email, websurf and get on with life while waiting for those 30-1 hour long tasks, instead of walking away from the machine, lest i get tempted to use it and really slow down the renders."

      With the second core, I imagine it has a decisive advantage for things like this. The reviews I've seen all make a point of saying how responsive the machine is.
    • Does it matter? the intel Macs top out at 2GB ram. Your DP G5 can handle at least 4GB - and you need it if you're running those apps.

    • Re:Nothing settled until Pro Apps... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by disappear ( 21915 ) on Thursday January 26, 2006 @05:14PM (#14573378) Homepage
      As far as (3), with HandBrake's Intel build available on the web site, I'm able to encode at 30fps+ and still have one processor free to do other tasks. Subjective performance in my foreground tasks is excellent.

      Or to put it another way, I was able to rebuild my darwinports on one CPU and at the same time get better peformance out of Monster Fair (a pinball game) running via Rosetta than I managed at native on my 1ghz 12" PowerBook when I needed to quit every other app on the system on the PowerBook.

      A lot of the help is more memory --- 2gb versus 1.25gb on the PowerBook (each system was maxed out) --- but a second core makes a big difference, too. No doubt about it, I'm impressed by system performance. I hadn't thought that Monster Fair would be useable running via Rosetta, let alone faster, let alone faster while compiling software on the other CPU.
      • "I hadn't thought that Monster Fair would be useable running via Rosetta, let alone faster, let alone faster while compiling software on the other CPU. "

        Remember that programs which use OS services to perform processor-intensive operations won't spend much time in the actual program code, thus won't be affected much by Rosetta emulation. They become glorified scripts that delegate the real work to the native OS code. It was the same with the switch from 68K to PowerPC in 1994, where many 68K programs ran at

    • Re:Nothing settled until Pro Apps... (Score:5, Informative)

      by JohnsonJohnson ( 524590 ) on Thursday January 26, 2006 @05:42PM (#14573681)

      what i want to know - and what holds me back from moving to an iiMac from my DP g5 1.8 - is

      In general there's no reason to do so, the iMac Core Duo should be roughly equivalent in speed to a dual G5 system right now. Having the cores on a single chip gives it a slight advantage but the power dissipation aside the G5 is a very efficient chip and matches up well with the new Intel offerings on a clock for clock basis.

      The Intel iMacs are not a Power Mac replacement, and shouldn't be considered as such, they bring roughly Power Mac levels of performance to the iMac and Powerbook lines, but do not surpass it.

      More specifically...

      1. how they will perform when rendering with Compressor

      Probably about the same or even in favor of the G5. Compressor's code is highly dependent on the SIMD (SSE or Altivec) unit and the G5's Altivec unit, or the G4's for that matter is generally considered a better SIMD implementation on a general purpose microprocessor than SSE.

      2. how much faster is FCP when hooked up to similar disk packs (like cheap desktop FW400 raids)

      Again there will probably be no significant difference between the two platforms, since a the Core Duo is roughly twice as fast as the G5 iMac, but so is a dual G5.

      3. Will i still be able to run background processing tasks like Compressor and handbrake yet get good foreground performance so i can email, websurf and get on with life while waiting for those 30-1 hour long tasks, instead of walking away from the machine, lest i get tempted to use it and really slow down the renders.

      Multitasking performance is as much a function of the operating system's scheduler as the hardware. Again you would see little difference between the two machines. The G5's ability to hold more memory actually gives it a higher level of potential performance when the memory is maxed out than the iMac.

      4. Will Aperture stop sucking performance wise?

      Short answer, no. Aperture's performance is largely a function of Core Image which depends on the graphics card and system bus moreso than the CPU.

      In general if you need an immediate speed upgrade a quad core G5 with a lot of memory is what you should purchase, otherwise wait for the workstation class Intel machines (MacMac? Following the PowerBook -> MacBook convention)

    • I will not believe that the pro apps work well as long as they run using Rossetta.

      All I know is that today I used Compressor to turn a 2.5 hour full res quicktime into an mpeg-4. Usually it would be on a dual proc g5 with 4 gigs or ram and it would take almost two hours. On a dual proc xserve hooked up to a RAID 5 xraid via fiber, it took 34 minutes. 34 MINUTES! I was beside myself. I can't wait for my quad core g5 to get in next week so I can see how fast I can encode for the air and for web with that
  • "Using Macworld's logic we could argue, given the data above, the Quad G5 Power Mac is only 14% faster when running some of Apple's own applications. We think that this is misleading, as we pointed out."

    The article mentions that their logic was flawed, but they don't explain the logic problems with MacWorld's article. After looking at it I can't really seem how they came to the "14% faster" conclusion.

    Can anyone else explain this?

    • Re:What was MacWorld's flawed logic? (Score:5, Informative)

      by be-fan ( 61476 ) on Thursday January 26, 2006 @04:52PM (#14573101)
      That's the point of the article. The Macworld article never considered processor useage. They said the new Intel Mac is "10-20% faster" without considering whether their benchmarks used the full capacity of the processor. They claimed that Jobs' statement that the new Mac was "2x faster" was wrong because they got smaller speedups. What this article s howed is that if you used Macworld's methodology (showing benchmark results without showing processor usage) you could argue that the quad-core G5 is only 14% faster than the Intel iMac running Quicktime. They're not saying that such a conclusion is correct, they're using it as an example to show what conclusions you can arrive at if you use Macworld's logic.

      The basic problem was that Macworld's benchmarks were not CPU benchmarks and didn't make full use of the second core in the Intel Mac. The '2x' number Apple said was for the CPU --- even SJ mentioned that it doesn't mean apps will be 2x faster since the disks and everything else are the same. This article shows that in cases where the benchmark is CPU bound, the new Intel Mac can be almost twice as fast.
      • Yes, I remember all those benchmarks from the past where the final line went something like,

        "The dual 1.2 GHz Mac was barely 20% faster than the 1 GHz single processor machine... ...OX X multiprocessing sucks."

        -or

        "According to Apple this dual processor Mac should be smoking this single processor Pentium system, but its barely keeping up..."

        Never seeming to understand what happens when a single-threaded benchmark runs on a dual processor/core system.
      • It's still a little misleading. If the average Mac fanatic hears in the Stevenote that the InteliMacs are "twice as fast" and so he runs out and gets one.
        He then doesn't see much of a performance increase when he uses it for whatever he does with it. Will he be satisfied by some Apple PR guy saying "But look! It's not using as much of the CPU as your old Mac! That means it's MUCH faster!"
        The average Smoky McPotts Mac freak won't really care if it's using less of the CPU if it still takes as long to d

      • Yes, but who really cares about CPU benchmarks?

        My 2.6GHz Thinkpad smokes my 1.0GHz G4 iMac in CPU benchmarks. I use them both every day for many hours a day and for many common tasks. However, in spite of the CPU performance difference, the iMac seems faster (i.e. it's more responsive AND my productivity/output is higher).

        Now I'm sure that there are some applications (that I never use) where the standard benchmarks do give meaningful results... However, for the applications that I use, I find most benc

        • I use them both every day for many hours a day and for many common tasks. However, in spite of the CPU performance difference, the iMac seems faster (i.e. it's more responsive AND my productivity/output is higher).

          I find this amazing, because I've always found OS X to be sluggish and unresponsive on anything short of top-end G5s (and even then, it's relatively slow).

          My 1Ghz iBook, while usable running Mail and a few tabs in Safari, gets extremely sluggish when asked to do anything more - and this is with

        • Yes, but who really cares about CPU benchmarks?

          People whose apps are CPU-bound? Eg: the SPEC results for the Core Duo are a pretty good indicator of GCC performance. The Core Duo is 3x as fast as the iMac G5 in SPECint, and according to the xcode mailing list, the Core Duo iMac is just a hair slower than a quad. There are lots of apps that are CPU-bound: 3D rendering, many scientific codes, etc. Things like SPEC are a good indicator for the performance of such apps.
          • > There are lots of apps that are CPU-bound:...

            You missed my point - perhaps I was too subtle.

            I challenge your assertion: there are NOT a lot of apps that are cpu bound (or rather, the percentage of apps and users of those apps is a fraction of a fraction of the general population of users). I acknowledge that there are examples where CPU speed is king, but often, even these are limited by memory access and worse still disk access or even worse still network bandwidth... My point is that the legitima

      • The '2x' number Apple said was for the CPU

        Go to apple.com and there's a picture of an iMac, the tagline below is "2x faster. Twice as amazing."

        That clearly gives the impression the machine is 2x faster. The machine isn't going to be twice as amazing if only one small part of it is 2x faster.

        The tagline isn't "2x faster processor" ( of course the processor is 2x faster, there's two of them! )

        And the picture isn't of the CPU.

        here's a link to the pic incase the apple homepage changes
        http://images.apple.com/ho [apple.com]

    • Re:What was MacWorld's flawed logic? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by rjstanford ( 69735 ) on Thursday January 26, 2006 @04:58PM (#14573180) Homepage Journal
      Its referring to tests that don't max out the CPU anyway, and therefore presumably have bottlenecks in some other part of the system. Here's a more rediculous example using the same theory:

      Test: Compressing and sending a 16MB file over the network
      iMac: 83 seconds (cpu usage 23%)
      quad: 84 seconds (cpu usage 11%)

      Wow! The iMac is faster than the quad! Of course, in reality it was working much harder to accomplish the same task (compressing at a bandwidth-limited speed). The articles point - and it is very poorly written, I will agree - is that this kind of test is crap.

      The Macworld test used the same theories in the other direction. After all, if you perform a task that takes the old G5 iMac 20 seconds but uses 99% of its CPU, and takes the new intel iMac 19 seconds but only uses 45% of its total CPU power, I think you'd say that the iMac was more than 5% more powerful, right?

      Admittedly if all you ever do is one task at a time, you wouldn't notice the difference. Considering that many people like to do multiple tasks - watching the recent keynote in a background window while doing some other work in a foreground window, for example - this is not an inconsequential point.

      That brings up the example from the linked MacSpeedZone article:

      Encoding one QuickTime movie:
      intel dual core iMac: 97.02 seconds (87% CPU)
      g5 quad core powermac: 84.85 seconds (42% CPU)
      advantage g5: 14% faster

      Encoding two QuickTime movies:
      intel dual core iMac: 176.60 seconds (100% CPU)
      g5 quad core powermac: 86.25 seconds (87% CPU)
      advantage g5: 105% faster

      Even that's a little misleading, since the quad still had spare processor bandwidth. This is why a lot of benchmark tests are designed to test each piece separately, spinning them up to 100%. Of course, real world tests are great as well - but only if your usage actually parallels those tests.

      • How fast does it feel? (Score:3, Insightful)

        by tgibbs ( 83782 )
        For most purposes, the key question for most users is not going to be how fast it is really, but how fast it "feels," in practice, say watching a QT movie with maybe a browser loading a couple of windows in the background and a Spotlight search in progress.

        The OS X seems to be pretty good at spreading the load of multiple programs and the OS across processors. I remember that the dual 450 MHz Macs seemed dramatically snappier that the 800 MHz iBook, even though in most tests the iBook would come out ahead.
        • Most operating systems are pretty good at this these days. Many moons ago when the ~600mhz PIII was top of the line, I found a good deal on some HP Kayaks with dual 300mhz PIIIs instead. They performed amazingly well when doing normal interactive tasks, and had close to the same performance for any batch processing that was parallelized.
      • i've read fairly regularly on this site that it takes a good 20 minutes to copy a 16 meg file!
    • The article mentions that their logic was flawed, but they don't explain the logic problems with MacWorld's article. After looking at it I can't really seem how they came to the "14% faster" conclusion.

      The problem with the Macworld benchmark is that many of the applications in it are not CPU bound (the disk, the graphics card, or even the CD drive (iTunes rippling) is likely the bottleneck). Other applications do not have enough parallelism to exploit all processing power, so are not using all available

  • Splitting hairs (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Belseth ( 835595 ) on Thursday January 26, 2006 @04:41PM (#14572949)
    The machines themselves have to be faster. If the old chips were on par with similar PC chips the very fact they are dual core increases the speed. The real problem is in applications. Even in the PC world most apps don't take advantage of the dual core architecture. Even Maya only uses multiple processors when rendering. If you have a quad machine, a dual/dual core, it will only use one processor for most functions but will use all four nodes in rendering. If I ran a benchmark that involved modelling it would show no improvement in speed over a single chip machine. If I ran a render test would clock in around 4X faster. Both tests are accurate and simply reflect how the software is designed not how the chips themselves function.

    • If I ran a benchmark that involved modelling it would show no improvement in speed over a single chip machine. If I ran a render test would clock in around 4X faster. Both tests are accurate and simply reflect how the software is designed not how the chips themselves function.

      This, of course assumes that the OS uses no CPU time and you are running no other applications. I don't know about you, but I have nine applications running right now and a total of 63 processes. I don't know how many threads. About

  • ...as it's not a Universal Binary yet.
  • Links to the site or mirrors?

  • Velocity Engine (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 26, 2006 @04:48PM (#14573040)
    AltiVec! Velocity Engine!
    I thought this was the best CPU technology?
    Steve Jobs told me I had a super computer when I bought
    my G3, G4 and G5.
    My PowerPC processors were unique. It made me special. Anyone
    can have an Intel processor. Even poor people. How is that exclusive?
    I'm an upper middle class elitist snob. Why did Apple take away my bragging rights! Now I'm a technological nobody. I'm plain and boring again. For pete's sake, poor people can even buy IPODS now!!
    I want my super computer back! Because I lack a personality and I have no soul what product can help? Please Steve Jobs tell me what to buy to get my soul back. What can I buy so that I feel whole again?
    What about a Hybrid car, will that help me?

    • I want my super computer back!

      Relax. Calm down. Apple's entire G4 and G5 lineup is still intact, so you can still buy one and have all of that PowerPC and AltiVec goodness while it's still available.

      When that is over with, you can do what other x86 haters (like myself) would do if they won the lottery and treat yourself to a Sun notebook [sun.com], or Sun Blade 2500 [sun.com], which I'm pretty sure will get your soul back. Unless you're not a x86 hater and just don't like poor people with Macs, that is....

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by account_deleted ( 4530225 )
      Comment removed based on user account deletion

      • I thought this was the best CPU technology?

        It was. Then, Intel caught up.

        Caught up to what? SSE-1 + SSE-2, which are the comparable techonologies to Altivec, both shipped *BEFORE* Altivec. Furthermore, anyone who has watched the x86 world to any degree has seen Intel and AMD actually *SLOWING DOWN* lately. They pushed a little too hard on Moore's law during 2001 - 2003, and are having a hard time just keeping up with their own pace. If anything, they are joining the x86 arena during a period of relati

        • Caught up to what? SSE-1 + SSE-2, which are the comparable techonologies to Altivec, both shipped *BEFORE* Altivec.

          Not really. Altivec and SSE were released in the same timeframe in 1999. If you want to talk about "copycat", AMD beat both technologies to market with their 3D-Now! extensions in 1998.

          We will ignore MMX because it was clumsy and limited due to the implementation taking over floating-point registers.

          Altivec on the G4 was unique in that it had two vector processing pipelines, but the poor bus
        • Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • A Segway. That's what you need.
    • What about a Hybrid car, will that help me?

      Definitely. I just got my new Hyundai hybrid and I feel like the cat's ass... though my neighbour with the Prius seems unhappy with me for some reason.

    • Re:Velocity Engine (Score:4, Funny)

      by SteeldrivingJon ( 842919 ) on Thursday January 26, 2006 @10:21PM (#14575652) Homepage Journal
      What can I buy so that I feel whole again?

      Neuticles.
    • "Now I'm a technological nobody."

      Don't worry, mac users has always been.
  • Maybe they should have run that article off of the new iMac before Slashdot got ahold of it.

  • Who to believe? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by QuietLagoon ( 813062 ) on Thursday January 26, 2006 @04:51PM (#14573090)
    Apple says their systems are fast...

    Microsoft says their software is secure...

    Oracle says their database is hack-proof...

    Symantec says their software protects me from hackers...

  • I see only one way to solve this: Give me one. I'll run WoW on it, and decide.

    I know that was obiously a joke, but I'd just like to point out that a good video card and internet connection are much more important than processor speed these days.
    • Actually, you're wrong. The limiting factor on Macs isn't the GPU performance, it's the CPU. Whether that's a difference in DirectX vs. OpenGL or just the way the chips are designed/programs written I don't know. However, on a Mac the limiting factor is the CPU.
  • I doubt that Apple's move to Intel had a great deal to do with performance, and I dislike this fact being used as a key selling point for the iMac. If you refer to the "definitive" G5 vs. everyone else benchmarks at http://www.anandtech.com/mac/showdoc.aspx?i=2436 [anandtech.com] it is apparent that the G5 is largely comparable to offerings from AMD and Intel (admitedly the new Intel Core Duo is not benchmarked) and although the G5 is, in many cases, not the fastest chip, it is similar. The increases of 2-3x in performance
    • Most of the less-technical people i know can tell you if they have a dell, compaq or mac... but i'd be surprised if many know if they run Intel or AMD and the significance of that.

      The Apple and brand is far better known amongst non-techy users...

      http://www.brandchannel.com/start1.asp?fa_id=298 [brandchannel.com]

      I'd bet that intel needs Apple.

      Apple are in a good position because they can demand a premium for their products. By switching to the x86 platform they are unlikely to be in a position where they cant offer a premium p

  • I have both G5 2Ghz and Core Duo 2Ghz iMacs (Score:5, Insightful)

    by GreatDrok ( 684119 ) on Thursday January 26, 2006 @05:22PM (#14573465) Journal
    OK, lots of talk about these but here it is from someone with both G5 and Intel iMac 20" machines. For some things the Intel is faster than the G5 by a significant margin (Safari in particular feels quite snappy) but when you have to run PPC apps the G5 is much better. For the moment there are really quite a lot of apps that are not Intel native so the overall impression when using the two machines is that the Intel is no quicker, and some times much much slower. For PPC apps the Intel machine is no better than my 933Mhz iBook G4. Worse, there is significant pain at the moment in doing much that is taken for granted with the G5 iMac. Many programs do not run (we use BlueJ and Eclipse, neither work on the Intel). You still get the spinning beachball of death, and it seems quite often too. All in all, it feels just like any other previous Mac.

    One thing that impressed me was the fact that Rosetta is able to run command line apps compiled for PPC. Gives a good idea of just how fast Rosetta is when running raw PPC code without a GUI. The answer is that a 2Ghz Intel chip running PPC code is about the same speed as a 500Mhz PPC. very reasonable compared with something like PearPC but still a significant drain. You get some back with the GUI as much of that code is native so something like MS Office actually feels usable. Our 2.3Ghz G5 Xserves smoke both the G5 iMac and the Intel even when the Intel is running native code at least with our apps.

    So, do I recommend the Intel iMac? Probably. Would I recommend against a G5? Nope. Buy whichever you like. With the G5, you know what you are getting and it will still run software for the forseeable future. The Intel machine is pretty hard work at the moment but has the promise of getting better as more universal apps come along. Of course, there is currently no viable fast PC emulator so you can't run Windows or Linux on it. With Qemu or VPC on the G5 you can run Windows quite reasonably but not as quickly as you will be able to in say, six months when MS get off their arses and build VPC for the Intel Mac.

    I can see why Apple released the iMac first, makes sense. The G5 iMac was never really a speed demon so the Intel one doesn't suffer too much overall. Same goes for the MacBook Pro which should be able to keep up with the G4 PowerBooks. It will take a while yet before slotting an Intel chip into the pro towers makes sense though.

    A Mac is a Mac though, doesn't really matter what is inside chip wise.
    • Many programs do not run (we use BlueJ and Eclipse, neither work on the Intel).

      What an amazing surprise, since Eclipse has always worked [eclipse.org] perfectly [eclipse.org] on under Mac OS X before.

      As someone who spends a lot of time in Eclipse, the fact that it's never quite worked right under OS X is the only reason I'm still typing this on a PC running Windows. While it's unfortunate for early adopters like yourself, I'm kind of glad it's altogether broken because perhaps this will force Apple to pay more attention to the issu
    • Install the developer tools and you get a preference pane that lets you turn off the extra cpus. Then you can do a real intel vs g5 test.

      I have a Quad, and the laptop is comin. I plan to test single cpus and compare them; but you are in better shape since you have a 2Ghz G5 to compare with. Some CLI bench marks would be nice; but i'd like to see some comparisons between chips at the same speed that are more cpu bound.

      Isn't anybody interested in comparisons between processors? Years of G4/G5 hype and now it

  • WoW on intel iMac (Score:2, Informative)

    by qyiet ( 851101 )
    Give me one. I'll run WoW on it, and decide.

    One of my guildmates just got her one up and going last night, Running WoW under rosetta. It wasn't actually a comprehensive test, but here comment was "Wow I'm in orgrimar and not lagging". So I'm guessing at default settings it's OK.

    Performance should improve when bliz relases 1.9.3 and she dosn't have to use rosetta anymore.

    -Qyiet

  • Do people really do this?? (Score:3, Funny)

    by AC-x ( 735297 ) on Thursday January 26, 2006 @05:50PM (#14573762)
    Yes, if you're upgrading to an Intel-based iMac from an iMac G5 you bought just a few months ago, all of your non-Universal software will run at half speed.

    I know apple users have a reputation for following fads, but I hope people don't rush out and by a new iMac every time they do a CPU upgrade (not even a new form factor!), please tell me they don't!!

    :) [pat. pending]
  • Same story, year after year after year: PowerPC benchmark flawed, Intel really faster(*). Oh, wait, I see the difference, Apple is on the Intel side this time around. ;-)

    (*) Yes, I know that for PowerPC and Intel of the *same clockrate* PowerPC is generally 25-30% faster, the problem is PowerPC's perpetual lower clockrates. Brute force may not be elegant but it can prevail.
    • That depends entirely on what Intel processor you're talking about, and what PPC you're talking about. Just about *anything* was faster than a P4 clock for clock, but P4s aren't what are being discussed.
      • It's generally been true for Intel vs. PPC comparisons for nearly ten years. And yes I am also discussing the P4, it appeared in many of Job's stage demonstrations, and historically it generally beat it's contemporary PPCs when the artificial technical constraint of matching clockrates was lifeted.

    • (*) Yes, I know that for PowerPC and Intel of the *same clockrate* PowerPC is generally 25-30% faster, the problem is PowerPC's perpetual lower clockrates.

      This is actually *NOT TRUE*, and your repetition of it is testimony to the effectiveness of Jobs' reality distortion field. Especially the latest generation of PowerPCs -- Athlon/Opteron and now the new Pentium-M based CPUs all have tremendously highly *PER CLOCK* performance (this due in large part to IBM's decision to go with 2-cycle latency integer i

      • I wouldn't call the difference *tremendous*. On integer code, the Athlon 64 (running 64-bit code) is maybe 30% faster. Running 32-bit code, the difference is probably more like 20%, per clock. On floating-point code, the difference is maybe 10-15%, depending on how well-optimized the code is. Significant, yes, tremendous, no.
      • This is actually *NOT TRUE*, and your repetition of it is testimony to the effectiveness of Jobs' reality distortion field.

        Or perhaps you are having trouble with the word "generally" and didn't catch the clue that "Same story, year after year after year" indicates I am not discussing only the latest and greatest CPUs. I'm actually going back all the way to 603/604 days. Anyway, thanks for the laugh. I'm usually getting flamed by the RDF'd Mac advocates for spreading the heresy that PowerMac are only mar

        • Or perhaps you are having trouble with the word "generally" and didn't catch the clue that "Same story, year after year after year" indicates I am not discussing only the latest and greatest CPUs. I'm actually going back all the way to 603/604 days.

          Its been true since the Athlon/Pentium III days. Before that there were no benchmarks on the Power PC at all (you're not going to bring up ByteMark are you?), and thus you have no basis at all to make such a claim.

          • ts been true since the Athlon/Pentium III days. Before that there were no benchmarks on the Power PC at all (you're not going to bring up ByteMark are you?), and thus you have no basis at all to make such a claim.

            I did try ByteMark when Apple used it as a basis for it's claims, as I did with their other basis during other advertising campaigns over the years. When x86 ByteMark was compiled with a current compiler with appropriate settings the PowerPC improvements were far less dramatic than when Apple u

            • I did try ByteMark when Apple used it as a basis for it's claims, as I did with their other basis during other advertising campaigns over the years. When x86 ByteMark was compiled with a current compiler with appropriate settings the PowerPC improvements were far less dramatic than when Apple used an old 486 optimized version on a Pentium against a current PowerPC build.

              And did you try ByteMark with a compiler built specifically for winning that benchmark on the x86? (Like the Intel Compiler?) Remember Ap

  • Here is a quick summary of the benchmark articles (10 or so) I read this week.

    - PowerPC Application that are not universal binaries will run faster on a G5 than CoreDuo. Well DUH, they have to be translated through Rosetta first!!

    - Universal Apllication show slighly better performance for single thread apps and higher performance for multithreaded applications on CoreDuo. Again duh, I would expect a dual core system to outperform a single core system.

    - Macs still suck at games but in all fairness, they w

  • Just watch the damn video (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    You know, the one that shows an Intel iMac and a G5 iMac getting powered up simultaneously? [youtube.com]

    The Intel iMac flat out smokes the G5 iMac. It's not even close.
    • There's something wrong with that iMac G5 - my guess is that it was switched off instead of shutting down cleanly and it's doing a filesystem check. My 1.5ghz PowerBook boots from cold in under 50 seconds and an iMac will crush it.
  • The new Macs are basically PCs running OSX, right? So when Apple says the new Macs are twice as fast as the old Macs, what they are really saying is the old Macs ran at half the speed of a PC. While that fact isn't exactly "news" to anyone living outside the iMarketing reality distortion field, it is "news" that Apple is admitting it.

    Or, considering Apple used to claim old Macs were twice as fast as Intel PCs, if the new (Intel-based) Macs are twice as fast as those, this means Intel CPUs are four times as
    • ...what they are really saying is the old Macs ran at half the speed of a PC.

      No, what they are really saying is the old Macs ran at half the speed of a PC with a dual core processor. But let's not get little details get in the way of a good self-congratulatory rant...
    • The new Macs are twice as fast as the old Macs because they have a dual-core processor. Yes, the current line of x86 CPUs is faster than the G5, but its not an enormous difference. I've got a dual core Athlon X2 and a dual core G5 (2.2 Ghz and 2.3 GHz, respectively), and the X2 is maybe 20% faster (less for floating-point, a bit more for integer).
  • We have long argued that, to really take full advantage of multiprocessor machines, you need to be in a production type of environment, and have a strategy for utilizing the significant resources these computers make available. It is possible to do this, and we fault the Macworld article for not pointing it out ... this was, after all, one of the reasons for OSX.

    What the f*ck?

    If I'm not mistaken, this paragraph says that "To use multiprocessor machines efficiently, you must plan your usage for maximum eff

    • If all you're doing is word processing please put down the benchmarking articles. It doesn't matter, the benchmarks, of any kind, are totally irrelevant to you.

      Now, suppose you decide to compress that movie you downloaded off bittorrent... I mean ripped off the DVD you bought... and then, rather than sitting there staring at it waiting to finish you went off and did something else... maybe WATCHED a quicktime video. Oh, and Mail decided to check your e-mail and had to do some spam filtering. Maybe you've
  • One good way to get at the heart of the difference between the iMac G5 and the iMac Core Duo would be to measure the time taken to simultaneously do some Quicktime encoding *and* iTunes ripping, rather than comparing each individually.

    That'd help demonstrate the advantage of the second core, in a more real-world manner than SPECMark tests.
  • So the dual core Intel is twice as fast at running integer code as the single core G5 it replaces. give or take. yippee.

    Intel wanted in, because long term, Apple was a threat. (AMD is a short term threat) If OSX were to take off on somebody else's processor, well, that's somebody else's processor (that they can't build) selling, and Bill Gates would compile Windows in a heartbeat to run on that processor too. He's done it before for less. So Intel offers Apple everything; all you can eat chips, cheap, deliv
  • I have mine sitting in the box next to me yet to be unwrapped, 20, 2gig. And I bought the thing to replace a Dual CPU G5 PowerMac with 3.5 gig which I use to play WoW and not much else nowadays (and that is why I never metamoderate any more). Thanks for making me sure I made the right choice!

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