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Apple MacBook Pro 'Fastest Windows XP Notebook'?

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the dear-apple-we-need-new-laptops-xoxo dept.

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."

9 of 360 comments (clear)

  1. Best tool for the job by networkBoy · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Now all I want to know is which is faster: Photoshop on XP or OSX?
    -nB

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    whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
    1. Re:Best tool for the job by pammon · · Score: 4, Insightful
      How is supporting Mach and FreeBSD system calls an advantage?

      There's a lot of historical decisions of dubious validity in retrospect, but there's also an excellent technical defense that can be made for Mach. In short, Mach is really cool. Mach IPC makes signals, sockets, pipes, shared memory, SysV IPC, etc. look positively clumsy. What's FreeBSD's answer to the Mach Inteface Generator? CORBA?

      So OS X gets a lot of mileage out of Mach messaging - AppleEvents, distributed notifications, run loops, etc. If OS X processes seem good at talking to one another - think VoiceOver, Spotlight, the window server, iLife's media sharing, even copy and paste - it's due in part to the fast, flexible IPC mechanisms enabled by Mach.

      The 4/4 memory split only applies to 32 bit environments. Haven't the G3/G4/G5 been 64 bit?

      In principle, yes; in practice, OS X has a 32 bit kernel even on 64 bit machines, not least of all for driver binary compatibility. You want to know the win here - take a look at the binary compatibility driver story on 64 bit Linux or 64 bit Windows. Apple allows 64 bit processes on Tiger without breaking everyone's hardware.

      (Incidentally, only the G5 is 64 bit.)

      Are you suggesting that FreeBSD, Linux, Windows, or any other modern operating system doesn't use dynamic libraries?

      Yes. Benchmarks typically compare statically linked libraries on Linux (because they're faster) to dynamically linked binaries on OS X (because that's all Apple ships).

      Yes, there is an advantage to not using the buffer cache in some cases, something you can do in linux with the O_DIRECT filedescriptor flag

      Thanks, I wasn't familiar with that flag on Linux. From googling, it looks like it does somewhat different things, in particular, not speeding up sequential file access.

      In any case, I'll certainly agree that there Linux-specific filesystem optimizations; I was just commenting on a technique I found to give a substantial boost to OS X programs with sequential access patterns.

  2. Commercial Offering for Dual Boot by RunFatBoy.net · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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/

  3. Re:Apple no happy by Midnight+Thunder · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.
  4. Re:fastest in one test by gEvil+(beta) · · Score: 5, Insightful

    And please tell us what portions of the video encoding task are handled by the GPU.

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    This guy's the limit!
  5. Re:Why? by 99BottlesOfBeerInMyF · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  6. What a retarded article by greg1104 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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!

  7. Why a laptop? by cloudmaster · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

    Yay benchmarks. :( 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...

  8. Re:How things change. by rizzo320 · · Score: 5, Insightful
    You are correct. The iMac G3 was the first to have only USB ports. The Blue & White Power Mac G3 was the second, followed by the "Lombard" PowerBook G3.

    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.