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MacWorld's iMac Core Duo Benchmarks Debunked?

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the numbers-always-lie dept.

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.

8 of 187 comments (clear)

  1. Re:WoW not such a good benchmarking program... by j.bellone · · Score: 1, Interesting

    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 .... $60 million?

    Finally someone that understands why the damn servers always lags. I am tired of hearing "Add more ram to your system" or "My game doesn't lag!" Which is total bullshit because unless you're inside their damn network you have lag. I totally agree with you though, you'd think all that money and they could upgrade some of their servers a bit.

    --
    I'm f#$king magic!
  2. Nothing settled until Pro Apps... by gsfprez · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.
    1. Re:Nothing settled until Pro Apps... by disappear · · Score: 4, Interesting

      As far as (3), with HandBrake's Intel build available on the web site, I'm able to encode at 30fps+ and still have one processor free to do other tasks. Subjective performance in my foreground tasks is excellent.

      Or to put it another way, I was able to rebuild my darwinports on one CPU and at the same time get better peformance out of Monster Fair (a pinball game) running via Rosetta than I managed at native on my 1ghz 12" PowerBook when I needed to quit every other app on the system on the PowerBook.

      A lot of the help is more memory --- 2gb versus 1.25gb on the PowerBook (each system was maxed out) --- but a second core makes a big difference, too. No doubt about it, I'm impressed by system performance. I hadn't thought that Monster Fair would be useable running via Rosetta, let alone faster, let alone faster while compiling software on the other CPU.

    2. Re:Nothing settled until Pro Apps... by dubiousmike · · Score: 2, Interesting

      I will not believe that the pro apps work well as long as they run using Rossetta.

      All I know is that today I used Compressor to turn a 2.5 hour full res quicktime into an mpeg-4. Usually it would be on a dual proc g5 with 4 gigs or ram and it would take almost two hours. On a dual proc xserve hooked up to a RAID 5 xraid via fiber, it took 34 minutes. 34 MINUTES! I was beside myself. I can't wait for my quad core g5 to get in next week so I can see how fast I can encode for the air and for web with that. Screw distributing the rendering over the network, 34 minutes is nothing. I can't wait to throw a dvd to see how handbrake works with the quad core via fiber.

      I really think that the disk i/o must be a HUGE contributing factor. And you know what, my 17" powerbook with 2 gigs of ram shows handbrake running at about 24 frames per second with about 7 other applications running in the foreground.

      We bought 10 imac s for our fcp lab last year. According to our rep, nothing should hold us back from the purchase...until we decided we needed the machines to expand (to accomodate for fiber cards). Now the imacs will be used for internet only. They will be useless in our workflow...

    3. Re:Nothing settled until Pro Apps... by noidentity · · Score: 2, Interesting

      "I hadn't thought that Monster Fair would be useable running via Rosetta, let alone faster, let alone faster while compiling software on the other CPU. "

      Remember that programs which use OS services to perform processor-intensive operations won't spend much time in the actual program code, thus won't be affected much by Rosetta emulation. They become glorified scripts that delegate the real work to the native OS code. It was the same with the switch from 68K to PowerPC in 1994, where many 68K programs ran at full speed because things like graphics blitting were done via OS calls, and thus ran PowerPC native.

  3. WoW would be a terrible benchmark... by rexbinary · · Score: 2, Interesting

    ...as it's not a Universal Binary yet.

  4. Just watch the damn video by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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.

  5. it just occurred to me by towermac · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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.