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MacWorld's iMac Core Duo Benchmarks Debunked?
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.
How many stories can we have about the Intel-based iMac's benchmarks?
1 2/2478
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/
"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."
Many of the users of WoW have done all they can to reduce the lag on their end. It's time for Blizzard to step up to the plate and use the massive amounts of money we give them monthly to get some better servers. I'm not so good with math but 5,000,000 users paying 12 dollars a month is
My work here is dung.
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.
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?
guns kill people like spoons make Rosie O'Donnell fat.
"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?
sig.
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.
...as it's not a Universal Binary yet.
Yeah.... Like they are not biased or fudge things like the numbers....
But I guess stuff from a site like WindowsXPSpeedZone would be fair, even in stuff like a Linux/BSD/etc comparison to XP...
Did anyone notice that the power cord on the new iMac is 30% longer? Guess size does matter...
Links to the site or mirrors?
Think Deeply.
But does it run windows yet? i dont know what it takes to run XP or Vista on it, maybe a bit more cowbell, but i really feel that running a dual boor imac really ties the room together, like a nice rug.. i'm dissapointed in the geek community that no one has managed to run windows on it yet...come on! (arrested development style) maybe i should put out a bounty on the wholoe dual boot thing..o wait...
I just got the 20" Intel iMac last weekend. It's an upgrade from the last-generation Powerbooks. WOW is a significant increase in performance at the highest widescreen resolution.
Although, this was only after I installed another 512MB ram, with the default 512 MB ram, the game was 10 FPS in major cities at the highest resolution.
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?
Maybe they should have run that article off of the new iMac before Slashdot got ahold of it.
Microsoft says their software is secure...
Oracle says their database is hack-proof...
Symantec says their software protects me from hackers...
this has to be big joke right? a Core Duo as fast as a Quad G5? gimme a break.
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.
Religion for nerds. Stuff that really matters
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.
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 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 between the G5 and MacIntel iMac are a consequence of having a dual core chip (and being a generation ahead of the G5) besides, Apple could have feasibly used the dual-core G5 chips that they've had at their disposal for a while now. Any Mac zealot will argue that their PowerPC Mac is "just" as fast as an intel based system, but performance is NOT the issue. This is why the iMac was updated first, it is a consumer product, supporting Apple's fledgling attempts to enter the living room (consider front row ) - it desperately needs Intel's brand name associated with its hardware.
The significance of this new product is long term and cannot be underestimated.
Apple finanlly has penetrated the consumer electronics market with the iPod, and their brand recognition and image could not be better. Apple has shoehorned its way into the psyche of the common man. It now has to bring its key product, the mac, to the masses. Consumers will be attracted from a design perspective and because it shares the same logo as their iPod, the OS is a little different to windows, but now at least you have the reasurrance of dual booting into windows (I'd like proof of this concept, but I'm sure it will come) and the processor gives the security of a well recognised brand name (consider brand strengh of Intel vs. AMD).
In the future, I doubt that IBM's die shrunk Power chips will share the low power consumption that I expect Intel will bring, and many concepts for great products will never be realised. I'll be interested to see if the new Intel chips can match up to the PowerPC altivec-ised vDSP FFT's , but in a way I don't care. It is an exciting time to be a Mac user, as more people join the fantastic experience that we have had for so long, and new software and hardware comes our way. Either way, they're finally here and it will be interesting to see what the future holds.
Nothing sucks like a Vax, nothing blows like a PowerMac G4
In the real world computing tasks are dependant on the system, not just the CPU, and a computer that is 9% SLOWER at exporting an image while resizing is NOT going to deliver Job's promise.
Spare CPU capacity is neither here nor there; the user's experience is the time from clicking "go" or whatever to seeing the little timer/bouncing ball turn back to a regular arrow. Because users can't task-switch every 300ns; they click and wait most of the time.
So, MacSpeed's figures are probably correct but totally academic for most users, and MacWorld's figures are probably well short of the machine's capacity but a much better indication of the user's experience.
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
The only reason this is interesting is because Apple is the only vendor with a shipping CoreDuo system. We know the new systems are faster than the old ones. Quantifying how much faster is a nice exercise, but not really relevant. Is anyone *seriously* considering buying a PPC iMac at this point?
Now, when Windows hardware vendors ship CoreDuo products next month will we have the same uproar? I doubt it. I'm sure someone will benchmark application performance. But no one will care, because they'll be SECOND to market.
then the new Intel iMacs are fast, and the PPC G5s are half-fast.
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.
"I have the attention span of a strobe lit goldfish, please get to the point quickly!"
We have been fortunate enough at home to come into some extra money and are getting ready to upgrade to the new iMac 20" core duo model. Can't wait. :-) Sure hope it will give great results with Second Life.
I always wanted the G5 20" iMac but the way the $ worked out we can now get either, or. We're going with the new one. I frankly don't care about all these damn benchmarks because when it comes down to it - they're faster and they're the newest thing in Apple's orchard. We'll go with fresh fruit right off the factory tree and hope for the best.
ML
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
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.
There's 2 conflicting reports, so automatically the one that makes the new macs sound bad is a premature that needs to be debunked, and the one that makes the new macs sound good is right and does that debunking.
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.
:) [pat. pending]
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!!
I'd just like to point out that a good video card and internet connection are much more important than processor speed these days. You, uh, download a lot of porn, I take it?
Slashdot: Where anecdotes and generalizations can be freely substituted for facts, logic, or intelligence
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.
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
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 product because their architecture doesn't support it.
From a migration standpoint, hopefully there will soon be Windows emulators that take advantage of the virtualization on the CPU. A lot more users will be enticed onto the mac if it's straightforward to run the software they need.
"it feels snappier," and leave it at that? That's all it usually takes to get Apple users to upgrade.
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 were running them in Rosetta.
- There is only a handful of universal application and in all likelihood, they came with your computer
No more articles till are more universal applications out. No more articles where the author counts the number of icon bounces. No more article where the author times the boot up. I am pretty sure we have figure whether or not to buy a new Intel Mac at this point.
You don't have to be smart to use a Mac, you just have to be smart enough to buy one
You know, the one that shows an Intel iMac and a G5 iMac getting powered up simultaneously?
The Intel iMac flat out smokes the G5 iMac. It's not even close.
So basically all of us that have been happily using intel and amd cpus for years were right the old macs were overpriced and over hyped machines.
Doesn't the quote below indicate that the processor capacity argument overwhelmingly favors the dual G5's? How is the intel iMac mopping up anything when faced with increased parallelism? If anything, shouldn't MacWorld's methodology benefit the new intel iMac's?
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
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.
OK I'm running the world's worst OS at work - HP UNIX
We recently got twin cpu boxes as an'upgrade' and have been living with disappointment ever since.
In the many hours that I have spent watching the xload graph and top it is apparent that my main application process is single threaded. HP UNIX seems to be able to be able to correctly run all the other stuff (X and so on) on the other cpu. However, the speed penalty when I try and run two of main apps at once is ridiculous.
OK, I'm out of my depth here...
Blarg. In my RSS viewer, all I saw was "MacWorld's iMac Core Duo Benchmarks Deb...", and I thought the last word was "Debian". I'm so disappointed.
http://outcampaign.org/
Holy hell, I have been saying that that PPC Macs were overpriced and slow for years. I would always get modded away. Morons. This is just yet another proof that everyone should listen to me. I am generally correct you zealot dumbasses!
I am the smrtest! -- Homer
Wow, I ripped and posted several +5 comments from the last weeks two iMac benchmark stories and they got modded up again! I actually used my account and got my 0 status raised back up to my +2 bonus again! Nothing beats the dumbass Apple fanboi moderators.
will the PPC games running under Rosetta, such as the Sims 2, WoW, Myst IV etc performed on the new intel iMac?
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 fast as themselves.
When you consider that AMD CPUs are even faster than that, I'm pretty sure this is the end of the space-time continuum as we know it.
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.
Umm yeaaaaa, the xServe is a fiber channel server... think about it.
Props on the post though, truley informative!
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 relative lull.
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 effect".
I'm supposed to strategize my word processing now? And MacWorld is at fault whuh?
I guess the methodology they use is interesting, but it doesn't mean a whole heck of a lot in the context of "CPU utilization". How is that utilization code written? Who knows if it's even 100% accurate on Intel?
i wonder if their bench mark program was universal... dev's say that with out rosetta you gain a 100% increase... so almost all their crap is wrong if it is using rosetta
(yes i know i suck at spelling fell free to correct my grammar and/or spellin i dont care, im still not going to change
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.
September 2011: Looking for Cocoa/iOS work in Boston area Cocoa Programmer Quincy, MA
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, delivered, tested and wrapped up in a custom motherboard that you didn't have to build. And less power. And cheap.
I bet it's shocking what Apple's paying for duos. I bet they're paying next to nothing on the first round. Steve talked bad to them and they said yes sir. There was only one thing Intel insisted on...
Intel wouldn't put their chip in anything that said "Power" on it.
"MacBook" is stupid enough that weird California types could have conceivably come up with it. And they did, in a way; when forbidden to use "power", they had to keep the other half of the name; it is a book, after all. And a Mac.
Anyway, as soon as they can scrape AMD off, look for processor improvements to "plateau" soon after.
I'm underwhelmed.
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 should be easier to compare, and nobody is interested?? It would seem to me that single cpu tests of FFTs using the highly optimized vector library on both would give a good clue of science performance.
Also, apple didn't use GCC, and there is no way IBM's compiler stands up to intel's compiler. Apple used GCC before to make the G5 look better, because its not fair to use the intel compiler for comparison, it is just too much better than the rest---besides lots of software doesn't use it.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
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!
Zero Sum (don't amount to much). [root@localhost]
Anyway, I've become an apple whore. I'd take a new iMac and like it. Actually, if the rumored 13.3" widescreen laptop becomes reality I might not be able to help myself.
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, and the top resolution.
Therefore, I'd say WOW isn't a very good test of processor differences between Core Duo and G5, particularly if you are not comparing a similar bus architecture and video card, which is the real bottleneck.
--
Another benchmarking flaw comes from comparing the Intel build of 10.4.4 against the PPC build, as the PPC version isn't identical.
All the comparisons I've seen so far haven't even bothered to install the same amount of RAM. WTF? Who DOESN'T know that installing another 512 MB in a Mac makes Mac OS X run completely different?!
One could take any Mac, run benchmarks with differing amounts of RAM, enable different features, disable various components of Mac OS X, and do things like delete caches and adjust things like disk speed and graphics resolution, and get fantastic different results from the same machine.
Unless benchmarks are done by someone who knows what they are doing, they are completely useless. Of course, benchmarks are generally done by somebody trying to prove a given point, so they are frequently misleading and exaggerated by design.
When motives aren't getting in the way of the 'truth', incompetence usually is.
Looking at the benchmarks, it's the same old story users of both platforms have always known. The Intel did better than the G5 in some tasks, and the G5 did better than the Intel in others. I doubt one is truly faster than the other. They'll simply be faster at specific tasks.
I hate to break it to you, but the only lag you'll experience from either setup will probably be server side (depending on your realm)
The reference was to the performance of the system, the performance of a system (good or bad) has nothing to do with lag.
The slang term 'lag', in the context of on line gaming, refers purely to the delay on the network (and/or the server in processing player movement and actions). There has been a trend in the last couple of years or so to confuse this with poor client side performance, but these are completely different things, and it's not a good idea to confuse them.
Many of the users of WoW have done all they can to reduce the lag on their end.
They might have upgrade their system, e.g. by adding more RAM, a faster graphic card with more VRAM or a faster processor - that has nothing to do with minimising 'lag' in WoW though.
When there is 'lag', players experience warping and long delays in performing actions (for themselves and for others), but the framerate is not effected. If your framerate is ever not high enough or the game stutters, it's the system the game is running on. If your running 6600GT might still be running into limitations of the hardware, especially if you have 128 MB or less VRAM (particularly if you are running at a high resolution, or have FSAA or AF enabled).
The current G4 PowerBooks with the best graphics cards avalible in them still very much struggle with WoW (even the fastest models, I know because I have one, and play WoW on it as well as on my Windows gaming system). Primarily because of the limited bus speed on the G4 models (which is a bottleneck, and cripples 3D gaming performance on them, not least because of the texture data they try and shift around). Current Intel / Windows laptops often struggle with WoW (and other MMO's) too, also because they struggle with handling large amounts of texture data.
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.
When it comes to Apple laptops, not really:
WoW is only just playable on a curent high end G4 PowerBook (1.67 Ghz, 1 GB RAM, ATI 9700 128 MB VRAM). It's only slightly better than the performance when running on a iBook with a ~1.4 Ghz CPU, 512 MB and graphics card with 32 MB VRAM, as both systems - like the Mac Mini - are held back by the 167 Mhz Bus speed on all the G4 laptops (and the horribly slow disk speed).
Other 'Wintel' laptops often struggle with WoW too (though it's generally still better than it's been on the current PowerBook range). The new MacBook pro, on paper at least, should beat everything but the likes of the dedicated "luggable" gamer laptops (e.g. from Alienware).
Performance of commonly used software, like WoW, will be really intesting to see (and will make or break the purchasing decision for a lot of people I think - probably including me, though I'm likely to wait till the first revision). If it's playable with the draw distance / texture detail / screen resolution at a level comparible to a reasonable desktop then that will be a big improvement in terms of gaming performance (and will bode well for the platform).
Looking at default XCode settings for "Cocoa Application" project template, it defaults to instruction scheduling optimization for G4, not G5, although you can switch it to G5 (that equals -mtune=970 in GCC). In XCode, the GCC switch for enabling G5 specific instructions isn't even easily accessible! You need to rewrite the architecture string from the generic "ppc" to "ppc970", and sneak in the "-mcpu=970" in the "Other C flags" setting, all manually -- XCode GUI won't assist you in any of this. Then again, probably no commercial software out there utilizes these settings in order for their software to be able to run on a pre-G5 CPU as well.
What'd be interesting if it'd be possible to build "Universal binaries" that not only carry two code versions - generic PPC and Intel, but three of them: generic PCC, G5, and Intel. I'm not sure this wouldn't work: universal binaries are built with architecture string "ppc i386", and they build if I modify it to "ppc ppc970 i386". I have no idea though how could I detect that I now actually have a three-code-version binary, as well as to detect if indeed "ppc970" is being loaded on a G5 machine in Mac OS X.
OTOH, Intel binaries can be fully optimized for the Core Duo CPU, as there's no compatibility baggage there.
Sig erased via substitution of an identical one.
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.
I've read many times that while you can acceptably emulate x86 on PowerPC, emulating PowerPC on x86 is damn near impossible. So to those of you who understand instruction sets far more than I do, how about it... with Rosetta, has Apple accomplished the "nearly impossible"? Would they win the Nobel Prize in CompSci, if such a thing existed?
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
You want to show me how fast the Core Duo iMac is? Do an MPEG-2 encode of a two hour .dv file to a disk image (eliminates DVD drive bottleneck). Do the same thing with the Quad G5. Compare.
Any test designed to evaluate the horsepower of the machine should involve at least 99% processor utilization. Any tester not willing to do that should not receive machines for evaluation. Grrr.
And please, stop using Quicktime encodes and iMovie effects in tests. Those only use a single processor. Only tells you how little the idle processor contributes to performance.
After applying the intel patch so that it runs natively WOW actually runs at over 100 frames/second on the lower end model!
How is it "cheating"? They are sucessfully running PowerPC code on an x86 processor, and not incurring a 99% performance penalty.
What it boils down to, I think, is that those who said this was "impossible" were just plain wrong.
That that is is that that that that is not is not.