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MacBook Pro Benchmarks
jfpoole writes "Geek Patrol has benchmarked a MacBook Pro and a PowerBook G4 using Geekbench, their benchmarking utility. It's impressive to see how well the MacBook Pro performs compared to the PowerBook G4 (at least when it comes to Universal Binary performance)." Their benchmarks aren't particularly surprising, and they lack the most important benchmark: Frames Per Second during Molten Core Combat (or as it is more commonly referred to since I made it up 5 seconds ago, the FPSDMCCMark, which is the only number I'm waiting for).
rofl. so true.
not really surprised though, i think the major objection to intel chips for most applications was stability not speed. ditto for the graphics cards. more boxes = more games = more devs on the cards.
props to the amusing summary though.
A new product that's an improvement over the model it replaces. Wow! That's news!
Before the aricle even went live, the site was slashdotted. I guess the geek patrol got ambushed.
Maybe they should benchmark web servers next.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
Apparently Geekpatrol is hosted on a G4 Powerbook. Were it hosted on a Intellitosh it would have survived a bit longer.
Given that many of the same apps run on both Mac and PC platforms, why don't more people bench Mac vs. PC? I mean we are even talking about virtually the same architecture, the mac is now just another OS running on x86 hardware like Linux et al. I know it's interesting to see how the latest Mac stacks up against last years model, but how bout someone bench the latest Mac against it's contemporaries? The reason this isn't often done is because they usually get thrashed pretty bad, and feathers get ruffled (see: Adobe "PC Preferred" ad campaign, or Apple's SPEC processor benchmarks that were rejected because they were not completely legit). Windows always gets put against Linux, but Mac never seems to get benched against other platforms, and it is much, much closer to PC, as both platforms run many of the same apps. Just my two pennies...
1.83GHz, at a time when Pentium4 processors run somewhere close to 3.80GHz. I think the MHz myth is close to buried. The new myth has to do with power consumption!
It's like sex, except I'm having it!
i guess those kexts, the existence of fairplay and the itunes store, the expansion of itunes to video, and the AACS standards are not convincing enough?
Weather or not jobs likes it, these things are being loaded with DRM. I'm a loyal apple user, well used to be, but if this continues my g5 will be the last apple computer i buy.
as for the firewire 800, my friend's 17 inch was bought in 2003(if my chronology is right) and had fw800. 3 years is a long time in the computing world.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
I think standing between the bank and auction house in Ironforge would be a bit more of a trying test. Alliance tends to be more... frivolous with their time there. Mages seem to almost always have multiple blizzard spells going, paladins doing their consecrate thing. Dozens of Night Elfs showing of their mounts (or just dancing to annoy people).
Either way, though, once you get the game installed on the store machine (which will take a half-hour or so anyway), you have to download the monstrous 1.0-1.9 patch (approximately 325MB), and then each of the incremental 1.9.x patches. All told, you''ll have to find a way to distract the sales persons for around 2 hours.
You should go and do this on a Saturday around noon. They'll never notice.
No altivec. Less space than a Dell. Lame.
Religion for nerds. Stuff that really matters
If you want FW800 get an ExpressCard with it. Have you seen the inside pics of the MacBook? There is *NO* room for any other ports. It's packed full. They dropped the things that the fewest people use. Do people still use AV outs on a notebook? Every projector I've seen in the last several years had DVI/VGA hookups.
Actually, your statement does have some validity. FPS in the drake filled AoE room would be a much better benchmark than at any part of MC. :)
I had a PowerBook G4 1Ghz, 1Gig RAM (all graphics set to lowest setting) and would get insane lag in Ironforge around the AH. I couldn't run my epic horse through that area without ending up in the ditch. I now have a MacBookPro, 2.0 Ghz, 2 Gigs RAM and can run around in IF with 0, none, NADA lag and 30-35 FPS. I have all options turned on and the highest resolution the laptop screen can handle. Crusing around WSG is fun as I don't get lagged to death
The MacBookPro is insanely fast. I'm not a big fan of the magnetic power cord, it seems to fall out too often with just a switch in body position. It is quite a bit hotter on my lap and I have had some random crashes while in WoW. Complete computer lock up, power down, restart to get it working again. (CTRL-ALT+Power)
I haven't gone into MC yet but will hopefully go tonight, we are killing domo so that should be some tasty lag.
All in all, I'm extremely happy with my MacBookPro
Now I hope and pray that I will But today I am still, just a bill
Yeah, yeah.
;)
You're not fooling anyone. We all know that every time you boot your antiquated G4, you think about selling one of your kidneys to buy a new MacBook.
Rationalization is a beatiful thing.
Damn! I thought the MacBook Pro was going to be slower than the PowerBook G4...
I can almost guarantee you that new intel macs will not support legacy bios. EFI is the new 'bios', and macs will never bother to support the old cruft.
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anyone have any numbers on battery life?
3 hours? 5? DVD playing? airport on/off?
because, that's, you know kinda important when it comes to laptops...
If you don't know what AltaVista is (was), get off my lawn.
Dear Apple: Slashdot needs to review 5 of these indefinitely. Thank you XOXO ;) Seriously, i'm waiting for someone to give good benchmarks on these- especially testing for Warcraft. Now that it has a new Universal Binary I can't wait to see how it holds up against a modern windows machine.
'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.
I'm still waiting for the most important benchmark: frames per second in molten core combat.
We get it. You use your Mac for WoW.
If Jesus wants me it knows where to find me.
You mean like missing half their bits?
No, the G4 is a 32-bit processor as well. Remember Apple never released a G5 laptop, and we are talking about laptops here. Had this been about the G5 iMac vs. the Intel iMac, you probably would have had a point though . . .
Can I get an eye poke?
Dog House Forum
You're right -- it's the fact that no controller chipset from Intel supports FW800 that is the reason.
Apple went with Intel-based systems, including the chipset. Intel, so far as I've been able to determine through their website, has FW400 support in their chipsets, but no FW800. Adding a custom FW800 chip to the system would be non-trivial (as it's more than just space to drop in a chip -- you have to be able to connect it to the system bus somehow).
Yaz.
There is something that some of you forget about FW800. FireWire 800 was a mistake to begin with. There is no FireWire chipset that I know of that sits on the PCIe bus. That means, that if FW800 is on the PCI bus, it almost completely saturates the entire bus ITSELF. It was pointless. Until someone comes out with a FW controller that sits on the PCIe bus, FW800 is best left to something like ExressCard 54.
In theory, a FW 800 Express Card should be superior to FW800 built onto the PCI bus.
When the next generation of FW controllers come out that sit on the PCIe bus, then it will make sense. FW800 is just a little to early. Soon.
... no firewire 800 for one thing ...
Thank you Apple. I prefer not paying for things I do not need, SCSI in the old days, FW800 today. The few pros who need it can add it.
You're only proving plasmacutter's point about Apple zealots and DRM. DRM does matter. It matters because DRM tells us what we can and cannot do with the software/media that we bought. It matters because we, as in the user, have to give up control of our computers and files when we accept DRM. It matters because if nothing changes within the next few years, we're all going to be using locked down computers. I have lusted for Macs since OS X was released years ago, but since the Intel switch and Apple's stance with DRM, I have lost much of my enthusiasm with Macs and Apple in general. I don't want to buy a machine with TPM chips that may be used for much more evil purposes (such as locking down my media). I want to buy a machine that does what I, the customer wants, not what Apple or Microsoft or the **AA wants. Thankfully I can still buy and build some computers that aren't DRM-encumbered.
DRM matters. That's the bottom line. And I, for one, am not going to give up my freedoms, even for "ease of use" and other minor benefits. Nobody should tell me what I can do with my media, or with a certain OS (points at Apple and OS X), but that's why I don't use that stuff anyway; I prefer to be free instead.
Oh don't worry, you are still paying for it. You just aren't getting it.
Doubtful, the Intel Macs would probably be a little more expensive if they had FW800 support. Assuming that it is even an option. I'm not sure who is manufacturing Apple's motherboards but I'm not sure if Intel manufactured boards ever got to FW800.
I'm glad I futureproofed it though.
You can't totally future-proof something. I think a better term would be future-resistant.
Macworld unscientific test (dvd playing) put the g4 at 4 minutes longer battery than the mac book pro.
k firstlook/index.php
They also have some benchmarks
http://www.macworld.com/2006/02/firstlooks/macboo
I suspect batterlife will varry depending if your running a native intel app vs a rosetta interpreted (ppc) app.
I also performed some MacBook Pro benchmarks on the MacBook Pros introduced at Macworld and my results may be of interest. While the report only includes a 1.83 GHz MacBook Pro, it does include comparisons to G4 PowerBooks and a Dual G5 PowerMac.
MacBook Pro Performance Analysis
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Here is the link
http://www.osxbook.com/book/bonus/misc/vmware/
WOW plays poorly on G4 Macs because they have outdated graphics cards compared to gamer PCs.
A 2003 Dual 2 GHz G5 will play WOW poorly if you have a vanilla video card, but not because of the G5. In fact, if you watch processor use while the game is "challenged," you'll notice that with dual G5s, the CPUs are running about 60%. Turn one off and the processor redlines, but the gameplay doesn't change drastically. Put in a higher end PCI card, and it plays like a totally different machine.
The last revision of G5 Macs have PCIe, and better video cards. The Intel Macs have the same stuff or better. It's no surprise that WOW plays better with a much better video card.
The G5/Core Duo are not being compared when you pit them against each other playing WOW; it's pretty much just the video card difference.
The ignorance of the drm really scares me. It makes clear that the silent tactic of introducing socalled trusted computing step by step actually works. I really would like to love Apple and get one of the MacBookPros but no way I spend money on this. People, take care, but maybe its to late already. What do you need to wake up? How about 'trusted' harddisk? https://www.trustedcomputinggroup.org/groups/stora ge/Storage_Use_Case_Whitepaper_v07.pdf
And even though it pains me to admit it here in public, this being
So what do I do with that iBook ? Well I run Firefox (no, it doesn't look like the other Mac OS apps, what do I care?), CopyWrite (The *only* thing that would keep me using that machine; it exports to RTF though so I'd go back to OOo without trouble) and ssh. All that (mostly) on a WiFi link. Of course (apart from CopyWrite, which is an app I've been thinking of writing for years) I could do all of that on a random laptop without trouble. So why an Apple?
Because
On the other hand, the Unix software often feels out of place, there is little "free" (as in libre) native software (for a Unix user, maybe it feels like heaven for a Windowe person), the interface isn't all that great, the bundled software isn't all that great either (iPhoto is probably the worst offender there, or maybe despite the few hours I spent trying to "get" it, I just didn't), in other words, don't listen to the hype, sliced bread is good, Apple is too, but that's it.
Anyway to get back to the subject at hand, a lot of Linux people (those people who write Debian books, who admin hundreds of Linux machines, who have been running Linux for 6 to 10 years, whop have all their workstations running it at work and at home) have Apple laptops. Just because they are sick of the elusive driver search, of the great parameter poking game.
I talked to a lot of them. Most of them aren't overly fond of the Apple interface. They all grew up with the Unix way of doing things. Things like sloppy focus. Or like virtual desktops. Yet they all got i/PowerBooks. Because that was better than spending ages getting Linux running on whatever hardware was available.
So yes, poke fun at those people who (in your opinion) bought some overpriced hardware, but when I got a *very nice* Vaio laptop, the C1XD PictureBook (you can look it up if you like), you would have been astounded at the number of subsystems that weren't supported in Linux. Still, that machine never had anything but EXT2 partitions. Same with the IBM notebook before it.
So my iBook, at 1200 € might seem overpriced to you (at the time I added a few options, the same machine is about 950 now), however it *works*. It comes with most of the Unix stuff, it sleeps on demand, setting it up took all of five minutes, if I had to choose between it an the *same* machine running Linux (whatever the CPU), I'd pick Linux without a second thought, however Linux isn't there yet. A
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Made from the freshest electrons.
Benchmarks are useless, and this one doubly so. One great thing about the Mac is that it does lots of stuff OUTSIDE the processor. My 1.42Ghz PPC iBook is dog slow compared to new PCs, if all you're measuring is CPU speed, and it's video card is an embarrassing "mobility" chipset. Yet it's smooth and responsive even in the middle of a lengthy compile with multiple applications open and running.
Benchmarks measure the edges of the envelope where users rarely visit. If you're not doing serious number crunching or running last week's must-have video game, you don't need to worry about benchmarks. It's like worrying about the top speed of an Italian Sports car, when you're never going to drive it faster than 100 Kph. In other words, if you're content with the size of your penis you can safely ignore benchmarks.
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