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Ars Technica Reviews Intel iMacs
Milton Waddams writes "Ars kick off what I'm sure will be a torrent of reviews of the of the new Intel iMac. Overall it looks like it's a bit faster than the iMac G5 and a bit slower than the PowerMac G5 dual core. I'm sure it will surprise many slashdotters to find out that Jobs' statements about the new iMac being twice as fast as the iMac G5 as being slightly over optimistic. AND it doesn't run Windows...yet..." I'm still waiting for the most important benchmark: frames per second in molten core combat.
http://arstechnica.com/reviews/hardware/imac-cored uo.ars/7
I tried to boot from a Windows XP installer CD. No dice. I then tried booting from a Vista installer DVD (Build 5270). Again, no dice. When holding down the Option key, the only icon that appeared was for the iMac's internal hard drive. Holding down the D key to try to force booting off of the optical drive failed as well. With the Vista DVD, the optical drive churned a bit and the iMac hesitated as though it were contemplating whether it wanted to boot the foreign OS. Soon afterwards, the familiar gray Apple logo appeared on screen and Mac OS X finished booting.
The new Intel Macs don't have an EFI shell, so there's no way to directly get at the EFI. Someone is ultimately going to have to write and/or use an existing EFI shell to tell the EFI to boot from alternate media to get things going. Naturally, running Windows under virtualization, with technologies like Intel's VT/Vanderpool, which the Core Duo in the new Macs does support, are going to be the way to go for most users anyway.
There's obviously something seriously wrong with that G5 if it is taking that amount of time to boot. My G5 boots in roughly the same amount of time as that Intel iMac.
I think the 68k-PowerPC transition is not quite apt. You are correct that the first generation of PPC boxes were not nearly as nice as the second generation boxes, which had much more extensive changes than just the processor. But I think there was a lot more room for improvement in the last 68K boxes versus the PC state of the art at the time than there is in the last PPC boxes versus the PC state of the art. The NuBus expansion card bus versus the PCI bus is just one example. Both the last PPC boxes and the first Intel boxes have the latest and greatest interfaces such as USB2 and PCI Express.
In addition, the first Intel box is not a motherboard that Apple slapped together on its own, like it did for the first PPC boxes. It is a state-of-the-art Intel motherboard with all the latest doodads. Sure, Apple could stick in a fastre graphics card or hard drive, but the motherboard support chips are all modern. I think the next rev of the MacBook Pro will include Firewire 800, which I assume Apple couldn't integrate into the MacBook Pro motherboard in time to meet their ship date, but that's more of an incremental change than was included in the second-generation PPC boxes. (And don't forget the problems with the then-new PCI-bus Macs. Networking was so broken -- remember the Open Transport fiasco? The brand-new networking architecture that wasn't ready at the time the 7200/7500/8500 were released and which those new machines relied on, MacTCP having been deliberately obsoleted? It took several months after the boxes were shipped for *any* PPP dialing software to work at all with the Mac, and it took more than a year after that until most of the more significant networking bugs to be quashed.)
The intel iMac supports spanning! I'm surprised Steve didn't make a big deal about this. There goes one more major reason for people to buy a powermac. Kudos for Ars for mentioning that on the first page.
the more they over-think the plumbing the easier it is to stop up the pipe
Who here actually watched the keynote? Show of hands? I know I did.
Let's all go to www.apple.com/quicktime/qtv/mwsf06/ and load the keynote up to 1:07:00.
Steve Jobs is completely up front about which testsproduced the numbers (SPECint_rate2000 and SPEC_fp2000) and outright says "Now, everything is not going to run 2-3x, the discs aren't 2-3x faster, etc." He makes it very clear that his numbers are based off of these two benchmarks. He claims they are the most important benchmarks of performance, which is debatable, but they are certainly a fair test of raw cpu power. Other than the chip and motherboard, the only other significant component that has changed is the GPU, going from a Radeon x600 to an x1600. Does anyone disagree that this is in the 2-3x faster range?
All in all, people are making a mountain out of a molehill rather than checking the source of the numbers. god bless the internet.
-justinb
While the dev systems uses intel GMA900 integrated graphics, both the MacBook and new iMac use ATI Radeon X1600 chips.
The iBook and mini may use integrated graphics, but they will probably use newer chipsets with graphics faster than the GMA900.
Dan