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Intel Developer Macs Outperform G5s

Posted by timothy on from the good-time-to-own-appl dept.

bonch writes "Developers working with the new Intel-based, developer-only Macs are impressed with the performance. The machines take as little as 10 seconds to boot from Apple logo to desktop, and apparently run Windows XP at 'blazing speeds.' Rosetta tests demonstrate the PowerPC-native build of Firefox running just as fast as it does on a high-end G5."

3 of 829 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Good news! by marmoset · · Score: 5, Informative

    That's becaus you're running the wrong builds. :)

  2. Re:Boot times disk/network bound by Rosyna · · Score: 5, Informative

    If your default boot disk is available then a normal Mac doesn't take anytime looking for other boot devices. These Intel dev Macs do support booting from USB drives so that is not the case anyway.

    What makes you think they support booting from USB drives?

    OSX kernel extensions are very rare. Almost no program uses them except Norton products(anti-virus and disk doctor). I recommend staying away from Norton stuff for this reason and using Alsoft's Disk Warrior. Third party kernel extensions are a bad idea on any OS.

    Uhm, I hope you realize that apple includes many as well that aren't exactly usable on these Dev kits. Such as Bluetooth kexts, ATI kexts (or Nvidia kexts), Airport kexts, netboot, FWTDM kexts, Audio kexts (there are 8 audio kexts loaded on my G5), CHUD kexts, fan control kexts, slew, voltage, sensor kexts, and other kinds of kexts that either lack the hardware or software support on the Intel Dev Kits.

    Then for third party kexts there are Logitech Drivers, Norton Utilities kexts, Virtual PC kexts, the Ambrosia kext, DiskWarrior kexts, and many other third party drivers and kexts that shouldn't be loading at startup and shouldn't even be kexts but are.

    What features are lacking?? The Intel dev Macs have Firefox, iPhoto, iDVD, and Quicktime installed. The average user may install some extra dashboard widgets and a driver or two, but I doubt that would add more than a couple seconds to boot time.

    What makes you think these dev kits have either iDVD or Firefox installed on them? Did you see iDVD in use during Steve Jobs' WWDC keynote?

    See above for a large list. You don't need to load a kext for hardware that doesn't exist.

  3. G4 optimized Firefox builds by green+pizza · · Score: 5, Informative

    G4 Optimized Firefox 1.1 pre-alpha nightlies (fast!)
    http://homepage.mac.com/krmathis/