Intel Mac Performance Behind Hype

Barry Norton writes "Steve Jobs, at the MacWorld tradeshow, boasted: 'the new iMac [with] Intel processor is two to three times faster than the iMac G5.' MacWorld (the publication) has been putting the iMacs through their paces. The results are a good deal less impressive than Steve's boast, showing an average performance increase of 10 to 25 per cent while performing a series of everyday tasks with software specially designed for the new systems." Ars Technica had another perspective on the new systems earlier this week.

Comments

Re:Compiler?

[laffer1]

Xcode includes 4.0.1 of GCC but apple was using GCC 3.x to compile the kernel in 10.4. Kernel modules are C++, so it wasn't possible to use GCC 4.0 yet. (since GCC 4 tried to be more compliant.. even KDE 3.x didn't compile on it) Apple said they used intel compilers for the testing though I believe on the intel macs and ibm's compiler for the ppc build. I wish they would have used GCC since its more fair in a way. If anything its optimized for the x86 platform more, but its more apples to apples. :)

Only intel zealots would think that an intel chip would be 3 times faster anyway. POWER isn't that bad or Microsoft wouldn't have put them in xbox 360s. Another factor is that the software "optimized" for x86 hasn't been out long. Sure apple's been keeping the old nextstep port alive all these years (it ran on intel and 68k), but making it run and tuning it for the latest pentium chip are two different things.