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Apple MacBook Pro 'Fastest Windows XP Notebook'?
rgraham writes "The Register has a great opening line in a recent article, "Want the fastest Windows XP Core Duo notebook? Then buy a Mac. According to benchmarks carried out by website GearLog, Apple's MacBook Pro running Windows XP is a better Adobe Photoshop rig than any other Core Duo laptop on the market." GearLog ran the same tests that were run by PC Magazine with the Mac coming out on top."
Now all I want to know is which is faster: Photoshop on XP or OSX?
-nB
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
Now that the Mac is showing off it's quality hardware and such, as the Intel models become commonplace, I wouldn't be surprised to see a couple of commercial offerings for dual boot between Mac and Windows.
There's an opportunity for business to finally transition to a quality hardware platform/OS, and I hope someone steps up to the plate to make a formal solution in this area (not that I don't appreciate the current hacks offered).
-- Jim http://www.runfatboy.net/
Well, it didn't have a working video card. It was a slightly (.16 GHz) faster processor, but didn't have a working video card driver. So anything that would have otherwise been put on the graphics card processor landed on the CPU
The graphics card isn't involved in media encoding. Well, there ARE schemes that involve it, but it's not normal. Of course, if they were actually displaying the clip while they encoded it, that could possibly do it - but that's a silly thing to do unless you're doing a very short clip and you want to see what the compression artifacting looks like as-you-go.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I bet Apple is PISSED right now. They're handing all their technology over to Microsoft.
But Apple is get paid $$ for the hardware, so they can't be that annoyed.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
And please tell us what portions of the video encoding task are handled by the GPU.
This guy's the limit!
Why should the MacBook be any faster then any other DuoCore notebook out there.
Because each laptop uses slightly different hardware. They use different brands, with different specs, and in different configurations. For any given test, one will win. If you read the article you'd know Macbook Pros scored about the same as the best other Duo Core notebooks out there. Sure they took first in a given photoshop test, but not by a really significant margin. They did worse in some other tests. There are no conspiracies here.
People willfully misinterpreting this test should be ashamed of the FUD they are spreading. This does not prove MacBooks are the "fastest" laptop. It proves they are (aside from the non-existant video drivers) as good as anything else out there for running Windows. This is good news for people who plan to dual boot. This is a good sign for those interested in emulating/VMing Windows. It is just trivia to anyone else.
AMD doesn't make any dual-core notebook chips...
That doesn't make comparisons impossible. Who cares how many cores there is. People want speed.
Religion for nerds. Stuff that really matters
Ultimately, a Windows vs. Mac CPU benchmark on the same hardware would amount to a comparison of the code generated by the respective compilers.
Don't know how fast the code generated by the Visual C++ compiler is, but I've read that the proprietary Intel compiler generates much faster code than gcc, which (I think) is the default compiler for OS/X apps these days. Does that bode poorly for the Mac in any benchmark wars?
Posted from my Android phone. Oh, I can change this? There, that's better...
It's been widely noted that the basic hardware in the MacBook pro is nearly identical to that in the Acer model mentioned in TFA; see http://www.everymac.com/systems/apple/macbook_pro/ faq/technical_performance_2.html for a rundown. So it's no wonder the run-time is the same.
The appropriate conclusion here is "Macbook Pro runs XP as fast as the fastest PC with the same CPU and chipset", to which I would say, duh!
So I'm curious, why does Photoshop being faster on one laptop than another mean anything? Surely if you care about all-out photoshop performance, you'll have a desktop machine with a real power supply to drive real processors, room for real memory, and a real display? This laptop's slower for almost everything else, and not appropriate for the onething it's faster at.
:( I'd be more imperssed if they laid the laptops out on a table at a college library and timed which one got stolen fastest. That'd test the *real* value of each laptop...
Yay benchmarks.
And a 35mm image can be printed at 20x30 and look better than an 8MPixel digital sensor image. Untill you specify the specific cameras, lenses, tripods, subject, lighting, scanner, scanner software, raw converter, film, processing lab, camera settings, postprocessing steps, printing technology, and intended use, it is you that's trolling. In the mean time I'll continue using what works for me.
It really depends on the intended use of their photos. Newspaper and portrait photographers shoot low-rez because that suits their needs. You can be sure though that PlayBoy's feature photographers are shooting full-frame digital at least (although I suspect medium-format Kodak Portra NC judging by the contrast, tonality, and colour balance).
I often choose 35mm Print film because it gives me resolution slightly better than I'd get with a 1Ds, but much nicer exposure lattitude. Plus I get smaller depth of field than with a sub-frame digital, without having to shell out $20,000 for a 1Ds and a bunch of new lenses.
You seem to be confusing newspaper photographers with all pro photographers. It depends on their intended use. Fashion photographers are just starting to go digital (from MF) with the introduction of full-frame digitals and digital backs for MF.
People who think that how they use their camera is how everyone uses their camera, and what they expect from prints is what everyone expects from prints get on my nerves.
Apple just wants to sell boxes. Whether they're little music players or laptops or a Jonathon Ives designed toaster, they get happy when people buy their stuff. What you do with it afterwards is your concern.
I drank what? -- Socrates
Although Apple may not have been the first to use USB, they were the first to remove the legacy ports to force peripheral and accessory manufacturers to introduce USB based devices. They were also one of the first computer manufacturers to encourage the ports use. I remember installing multiple labs of Dell Optiplex Gn+ and GXi workstations with USB disabled by default in the BIOS. It was until a year or two later that USB was enabled by default on all of their Optiplex models. Plus, Microsoft's OS USB support really didn't work well until Windows 98 (for DOS based) and Windows 2000 (NT based OS) were released.
Yeah, the Mac only got PCI what...12 years ago? (PowerMac 9500 was the first PCI Mac.) Prior to that, they had NuBus which was basically the same thing, but it lost out to the PCI standard.
Apple was the vendor that really caused USB to take off...8 or 9 years ago.
And let's lump Intel in there with protected memory.
Avoid Missing Ball for High Score
"Don't [let] the door hit you on the way out" - IBM
Nah, IBM was more, "What? You're leaving? Oh. Um... Weren't we supposed to be selling CPU chips to you? I mean, the leftovers after we had filled our important customer's orders? I swear we could remember saying we'd promised you nice fast chips... They're almost ready! "
Apparently I am blind:x
The Macbook pro w/ 2.16ghz Duo ran a photoshop script in 1:10
The Acer Duo w/ 2.0ghz Duo ran a photoshop script in 1:11
The Mac Duo laptop with a 8% higher clocked CPU ran a benchmark 1.4% faster than the Acer Duo.
If anything, this looks bad for the Mac Duo.
Why is it seeing such a tiny improvement when it is 160mhz faster?
Apple was the vendor that really caused USB to take off...8 or 9 years ago.
WTF are you talking about? Mac touted firewire as the hot swap connector of choice, they only introduced USB reluctantly after computer hardware makers said collectively "FUCK YOU APPLE, WERE ONLY MAKING PERIPHERALS IN USB".
Then and only then did Macs come with USB, long after it was standard PC issue.
To this day it's hard to find any use for firewire aside from external storage and DV transfers.
I completely agree.
Photoshop used to be a great benchmark, because computers used to be sllllooowwwwww. Remember when Photoshop power users could drop a few thousand on a fancy DSP card for their Mac? In fact a couple of Macs (the Centris 660Av and the Quadra 810AV ca. 1992 or so) came equipped with a 25/33 MHz DSP on-board to handle certain realtime stuff, like softmodem. Adobe didn't waste any time supporting this DSP to accelerate Photoshop, with a pretty sizable improvement. The point is, people used to waste so much time waiting for Photoshop, that anything, absolutely anything, that could improve its performance was a godsend.
These days, modern CPUs are real powerhouses. I have an older Mac (Dual 866 MHz G4, 1 GB RAM), and I have never cursed at it while waiting for it to complete a PS operation. I have never had to wait. Today, any CPU is pretty much fast enough for PS work... It's the RAM you have to worry about. The instant PS starts hitting the disk during an operation, you might as well have a P100 in there.