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

Newsflash!

[daveschroeder]

Company performs benchmarks to show product in best light!

From http://www.apple.com/imac/intelcoreduo.html:

2. Testing conducted by Apple in December 2005 using preproduction 20-inch iMac units with 2GHz Intel Core Duo; all other systems were shipping units. All scores are estimated.SPEC is a registered trademark of the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation (SPEC); see www.spec.org for more information. Benchmarks were compiled using the IBM compiler and a beta version of the Intel compiler for Mac OS.

3. Testing conducted by Apple in December 2005 using preproduction 20-inch iMac units with 2GHz Intel Core Duo; all other systems were shipping units. All of the iMac and iMac G5 systems ran beta Universal version of Modo. All other applications were beta versions.

And since actual application performance has been subjective since the dawn of time, how is this surprising?

I mean, we're talking about a company that said no one wanted flash players until they made one, that no one wanted to watch video on an iPod until they made an iPod that played video, and that said all x86 architecture and CISC processors sucked until they switched to them.

And you know what? All of the above statements had significant elements of truth to them. Apple is doing nothing more than showing its products, accurately insofar as it goes, in the best possible light. Is this the least bit stunning?

Re:Newsflash!

[Jezza]

Actually Steve never said that the system was that fast, he was only talking about the chip. He said "the disks are 2 the 3 times as fast" so I don't see why we find it so amazing that the real world performance is lower than the benchmarks. It is always going depend on the application. So an application that spends most of its time waiting for the disk isn't going to see much of a speed up with a faster processor (it'll see a little because it'll move from wait-state to wait-state faster). For a lot of applications this is the norm (described as "disk bound").

What is probably more important (for home users) is actually something Steve side stepped, these new iMac should generate less heat and therefore run more quietly (because the fans won't need to spin as fast/often) for users in a domestic setting this is important.

I think most people who buy Macs (especially iMacs) are not buying it because they think it's the fastest computer around (amazing as it may sound there are other factors in the purchasing decision).

Re:Newsflash!

[Haeleth]

So, where are the important benchmarks that show things actually running 2-3 times faster? RTFA: they performed a wide variety of tests here, and the largest performance increase they measured was 1.84x, which is not "2-3x" by any means. And that was for system startup, hardly an "important" benchmark, given that most people I know with Macs use the suspend feature instead of switching the thing right off every night. And the average speed increase on "important" benchmarks, which I take to mean "things people actually wish were faster", was 1.2-1.5x. That's a good figure. If Steve Jobs had said "it's 50% faster", people would still have been impressed. But that's not what he said.

Look, if you go to the Apple Store right now, what you'll see is a banner that says "The 2x faster iMac". Not "The iMac that's 2x faster on artificial benchmarks, but actually only 1.2-1.5x faster in real life because most tasks are IO-bound". Apple are selling this thing as 2x faster, period - and it isn't. Call it lying, or call it marketing, as you wish, but it still doesn't reflect well on Apple.

Apples and Oranges

[Anonymous Coward]

Steve Jobs was reporting improvments in CPU benchmarks, but the article refers to application benchmarks.

The CPU is going to be doing different things from those benchmarks in those applications- and may not even be the bottleneck in any given "real world" task.

Now whether Steve should have demonstrated "real world" improvements is up for debate, but all he presented were CPU benchmarks. He made no claim about application performance.