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."

Comments

Best tool for the job

[networkBoy]

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

Re:Best tool for the job

[TheRaven64]

Some parts of OS X are much slower than others. System calls are quite expensive (roughly 10x the cost on a conventional UNIX system), for example. The slowest part of the system I have found is the VM subsystem, which absolutely crawls. I wrote some fairly I/O intensive code with a number of back ends. The aio back end is about half the speed on OS X as on FreeBSD on similar hardware. The mmap backend is an order of magnitude slower on OS X than the aio back end, while they are both about the same speed on FreeBSD. This means that anything that causes page faults is going to slow the system down to a painful speed, which is why Mac users always recommend that you buy a lot of RAM.

Re:Best tool for the job

[bunratty]

Differences in cache size, cache speed, disk access time, and disk throughput, among other things, would cause two computers with exactly the same CPU, RAM, and bus to run at different speeds. This is part of the MHz myth -- there's more to how fast a computer is than the speed of its individual parts.

Re:Best tool for the job

[pammon]

Some parts of OS X are much slower than others. System calls are quite expensive (roughly 10x the cost on a conventional UNIX system), for example

I'm not disputing this, but I'd like to provide some context so people aren't left with the impression that "Apple's programmers are st00pid n00bs." There's at least three decisions that negatively impact OS X's system call performance, but that provide wins in other areas.

1) Mach/FreeBSD system call disambiguation. OS X has to support both Mach and FreeBSD system calls through the same trap interface. Determining which you have isn't cheap, but the win is apparent - how many Mach messages per second does your conventional UNIX benchmark at? Features don't come for free. This is fixed overhead which will be especially apparent with "fast" system calls.

2) 4/4 memory split. A system call requires a context switch to and from the kernel's own address space. I'm not sure about other UNIX flavors, but Linux in particular (usually) maps the kernel's address space into each process with a 3/1 split, which is faster but has an obvious downside - 25% less address space for the process and 75% less for the kernel!

3) Dynamic library binding. OS X is unusual in that every library is always dynamically bound, which adds overhead for every call, but gives you all the benefits of non-static libraries (code sharing, security, etc.) Benchmarks often don't take this into account.

The slowest part of the system I have found is the VM subsystem, which absolutely crawls. I wrote some fairly I/O intensive code with a number of back ends.

There's a few things I've found that impact OS X's I/O negatively:

1) Spotlight wants to index any file you opened for writing and then closed. That's obviously going to incur a cost.

2) Unified buffer cache - cacheing reads in the VM system. For a linear read of a huge file, this only hurts; it can be turned off on a per descriptor basis, but code compiled naively for OS X won't have bothered to do that.

3) Bugs. There seems to be a bug where a program doing linear I/O can monopolize the I/O system, which improves performance for that process but decreases apparent responsiveness.

Re:Best tool for the job

[communikatsiglobale]

Gentlemen, Wa wa wa wa wa, wa wa wa OSX wa! Wa wa, wa wa wa XP. Wa wa wa wa wa wa wa. Wa wa wa wa, wa wa wa wa! Wa wa OSX wa XP wa wa wa? Wa! Wa wa wa wa wa wa. Wa wa wa wa wa wa wa, wa: 1 Wa wa wa wa wa wa wa. 2 Wa wa XP wa wa wa. Wa wa wa wa wa? 3 Wa wa wa wa wa wa? Wa. Wa wa, 4 Wa wa wa wa? IMHO wa wa wa wa wa OSX wa wa wa wa wa. Wa wa? Wa wa wa wa wa wa XP, wa wa wa wa wa wa wa, wa wa wa wa.

Re:Best tool for the job

[megabeck42]

1, How is supporting Mach and FreeBSD system calls an advantage? Apps should not be making direct system calls and instead invoke the appropriate c library wrapper. This doesn't seem like a feature, it sounds like a bad design decision. What was the reasoning by basing OSX on Mach in the first place? What is the justification for this excessive, per system call overhead?

How many Mach messages per second does my conventional UNIX benchmark at? None. It can't. Does this preclude me from doing anything I need to do? No.

2, The 4/4 memory split only applies to 32 bit environments. Haven't the G3/G4/G5 been 64 bit? I know the current Core Duo's are 32 bit, but the next generation are supposed to support AMD's x86-64 (called EM64T in Intel language.). There's no advantage to seperate virtual address spaces when you have 64 bit architectures. Even on 32bit architectures, a 2/2 or 3/1 split is only a problem if you have more than two or three gigabytes of physical ram or if your application wants to memory map more than two or three gigs of virtual address space. If you need to do that, then get an architecture that supports it. Most people still have less than 2 gigs of ram in their computers, why optimize for those that do when the computers people will be buying when four gigs of ram or more is common will already be 64 bit.

3, Are you suggesting that FreeBSD, Linux, Windows, or any other modern operating system doesn't use dynamic libraries? What is so special about OSX's dynamic loader that Benchmarks need to take it into account?

1, Agreed.

2, What? Please. 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, but in most cases, it's not worth the trouble. Bypassing the buffer cache spares you the cost of a copy, but if you ever need the block again, you are at a clear advantage if it could have been read out of the buffer cache.

3. Don't know anything about it, but it's quite possible.

Re:Best tool for the job

[rsborg]

You can make a system with wicked clever algorithms, and still it wouldn't matter because what people are drawn to are pretty colors of the hardware and the UI.

Isn't it a bit deceptive to label "Good UI" as "pretty colors"? It's been proven that the OSX UI guidelines, look and feel, is MUCH better than both Windows and especially Linux.

It doesn't matter a damn that a computer or program is 50% faster, as most of the time the process waits on user input... it's making the users more productive and happy that really makes a computer/program solution *faster*... if that means "pretty colors" or "good UI guidelines" or "system stability" makes this possible, then those should really be what matters in benchmarking.

Re:Best tool for the job

[pammon]

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.

Re:Best tool for the job

[Kalak]

time to market is probably correct, as OS X is a continuation of NextStep, not a write from scratch. Now NextStep chose Mach for different reasons than time to market I suspect, but in speaking strictly of OSX you have to remember its original origins (part of the reasson Intel compatability is a simple issue for the OS, since the dual life is quite historical for NextStep).

AMD

[Eightyford]

It would be nice if they tested AMD notebooks.

Re:AMD

[jonnythan]

AMD doesn't make any dual-core notebook chips...

Re:AMD

[IronTek]

AMD will release their Turion64 X2 dual core processor pretty soon. But I am impressed with the Intel CoreDuo. It does not seem to be (and is not) the POS that their first "dual core" processor was.

Re:AMD

[hattig]

Current Core Duo (Yonah) is 32-bits only.

AMD will be releasing 25W Dual-Core Turions in May, running with DDR2 memory (which will save a few Watts over DDR memory).

Yonah is 31W (TDP, actual power consumption is lower. Same goes for AMD of course.). AMD includes half of a northbridge on their processor as well.

Of course, AMD's 25W Turion X2s only come in 1.6GHz and 1.8GHz variants. The 2.0GHz and 2.2GHz versions are 35W, but still comparable in power consumption to Yonah. The interesting thing is that this is at 90nm. If AMD has any of the hi-speed, low-power-consumption features of IBM's 65mn process, then next year could be very interesting however.

Doesn't negate the fact that Intel was there first, nor that AMD isn't overtaking them but merely having a competitive offering in the mobile arena.

fastest in one test

[gEvil (beta)]

Fastest WinXP notebook for the Photoshop test. It doesn't look like it fared so well in the Windows Media encode test.

Re:fastest in one test

[MustardMan]

Am I the only one who feels a little dirty reading about encoding windows media on windows xp running on apple hardware? It just feels so wrong.

Re:fastest in one test

[gEvil (beta)]

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

Bah! Plugins are not a real benchmark...

[tpgp]

Fastest at running certain photoshop plugins :-/

Still - yet another reason to not dismiss windows-on-mac-hardware efforts.

Find out next year

[Midnight Thunder]

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

That will have to wait until next year, sine Adobe has stated that the Intel version of Photoshop for MacOS X won't be available until next year.

Commercial Offering for Dual Boot

[RunFatBoy.net]

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/

Re:Commercial Offering for Dual Boot

[MindStalker]

Why would you pay for an ipod when you can build your own MP3 player with a altoids can and some electronics parts. Geez Doesn't sounds like a a great buisness plan to me.

Thats really not a fair comparison I know. But people will pay a premium for a preconfigured system with good support. Hell I quit building my own machines are work because I just have the time to support them, and just order from dell (work for a university grant, so dell sees us as the university which means we get top tier support)

Why photoshop?

[Locke2005]

Because photoshop is one of the few applications out there that is actually designed to take advantage of multiple CPUs by splitting up the work.

Re:Ummm...

[MustardMan]

Ya know, I'm pretty much an apple zealot... but the biggest thing they do to piss me off is include far too little ram in their systems. I bought a powermac dual g5 that came standard with 512 megs of ram. This is supposedly a top of the line powerhorse, and I paid a price premium for it. The LEAST they could do is throw in a couple sticks of ram to get the thing up to par. Applications on an imac launched every bit as fast as those on my top end dual processor beast. After I threw an extra gig in there, the machine started really smoking - like it should have off the factory floor.

Macbooks are also the most expensive

[Enrique1218]

I have been shopping around for a notebook for a family member. I found that Lenovo and Apple have the highest price dual core. Dell is of course the lowest. But looking at the specs, the lower price ones tend to have GMA or ATI Hypermemory GPU, slower memory, and are pretty bulky. Apple does put in the best stuff available at the launch. I would even venture to guess that the Macbooks are gaming quality.

The Reg sexed up our dossier

[saschasegan]

Just wanted to preemptively strike out and mention that the Reg "sexed up our dossier" a little, to use a British reference.

Over here at PC Mag/Gearlog (it's the same thing - Gearlog is the blog of PC Mag) we like to say that our tests show Apple makes a "fast" Windows machine, not "the fastest." As somebody else pointed out, while the MacBook squeaked out a win on the Photoshop test, it came in behind other Core Duo laptops on the Windows Media Encoder test. But the news in my mind isn't a one-second difference in this or that. It's that Apple's machines run Windows comparably to the best designed-for-Windows machines. That bodes very well for folks who want to have the best of both worlds by running both OSes natively.

We couldn't run 3DMark, Sysmark, etc. because of the missing video drivers - wouldn't have been fair. The Photoshop and Windows Media tests were the only ones of our standard benchmark suite we thought would generate results that made any proper sense, because they hit processor/disk/RAM rather than video.

Also, for the AMD fanboys, we haven't tested any AMD dual core notebooks yet, so we didn't have the data to compare those.

If you haven't already, read our original story: http://gearlog.com/blogs/gearlog/archive/2006/03/2 1/8212.aspx

Re:The Reg sexed up our dossier

[saschasegan]

Apple has a tendency to heavily customize their machines, and one of their selling points is a tight coupling between hardware and software (namely, OS X.) So we wanted to make sure there was nothing in the Macs that would have prevented XP from running to the limits of the performance of the hardware, and to prove that a dual-boot solution could be both viable and desirable. I'll personally wait for the video drivers to call it "desirable," but we're safely within the realm of viable.

Running these benchmarks also allowed a direct comparison between Apple hardware and other manufacturers' that always used to be cloaked a little by the difference in OSes. Now of course you can argue that the driver situation may have affected our results, but I hope this will be only the first of many data points. It's a start.

Re:Apple no happy

[Midnight Thunder]

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.

Re:hmm is it released now

[jinushaun]

Here is the official Windows XP on Mac website: http://onmac.net/

The patch is available here: http://download.onmac.net/

Re:Why?

[hahiss]

Dude, its because the Apple has speed holes

Re:Why?

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

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.

Currently

[Upaut]

The solution of many problems, by having a Windows partition on ones Macbook, does have a few issues that will both effect preformance, and ones comfort. With the GPU not having any drivers yet, the CPU is doing all the work. So slower animations, more heat (massive amounts) being generated, and an inability to play any games. Now, I am still glad that I have this partition, so I can use a lkot of "Windows only" software my work/school wants me to be able to run, but until the graphics chip is running, I don't think most benchmarkes will be really reliable. That and while running Windows, until a driver is written, I really recomend that you don't have the machine in your lap, unless its a really cold day...

Other issues that are less important are:
*Trackpad does not work
*That little camera doesn't work

What a retarded article

[greg1104]

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!

Photoshop Test

[chowhound]

I've always felt the photoshop tests were an absurd measure of a computer's speed. I run Photoshop CS1 on my G4/400 1GB at home. The only time I ran into a problem was attempting to work on a backlit movie poster for a theatre - 3x5 foot by 300 dpi, with layers, effects & filters. But that is an absurdly huge file. As a designer for 10 years, I never encountered a file that big.

The point is that today's computers are overpowered. The now-deprecated Quad 2.7 G5 is vastly more powerful than any Photoshop jockey needs. Unless you're rastering 3D shiz or crunching a full length DVD-quality movie (neither of which requires Photoshop) it's just gonna be an issue for most users.

Why a laptop?

[cloudmaster]

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...

Re:Ummm...

[temojen]

oh good god. a 8MP image can be printed at 20X30 and look better than 35mm film.

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.

Most pro photographers do not shoot at more than 6MP because THERE IS NO USE for higher res right now.

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.

Pros are not rushing out to buy new digitals they are getting FANTASTIC results with 6mp right now.

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.

you weenies that think that megapixels are everything are getting on my nerves.

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.

Re:How things change.

[rizzo320]

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.

Apples and oranges, truly

[SilentChris]

One should also note that the machines they compared didn't even have the same hardware. The Mac is a dual-core 2.16 GHz machine while the PCs were 2.0 GHz. Not to mention discrepancies with hard drive speeds, video cards (including the non-existant XP drivers on the Mac), etc. It's just not a good comparison by any stretch of the imagination.

A more valid comparison would be SPEC tests between the MacBook and other machines. What you'd likely see is, given the same hardware, they perform exactly the same -- which is the point.

As someone pointed out, most geeks would be interested in a box that runs both XP and Mac OS equally well. Apple is in a big transition year: with Vista delayed and the switch to Intel, they finally have means to court a massive number of geeks to their platform. Some random people claiming the MacBook is somehow "faster" than PCs with different hardware damages this. Geeks will look at the specs and know it's not a valid comparison. Mac fans just need to sit tight and let the benchmarks speak for themselves.

I run photoshop ONLY on my laptop

[drhamad]

Laptops have reached a point where they're fast enough for most anything. Heck, if you look at Apple's current offerings, their desktops and laptops use basically the same hardware! (of course, the PowerMac excepted)

Some people such as myself need Photoshop on the go. Others, also like myself, only have 1 license. Third, I have two systems: a Mac mini (G4) and a Thinkpad T40 (1.3 GHz Centrino, I believe). Should I therefore not use Photoshop, since both are (basically - the Mac mini is an iBook) laptops? Should people with iMac's not use Photoshop either, since those systems use Core Duo's?

Low end systems and laptops both passed the point years ago where they were fast enough for almost anything. Sure, Photoshop is faster on a high end G5 or P4 or whatever system, but it's very useable on any modern laptop or low end system.