Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
AMD doesn't make any dual-core notebook chips...
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
I'm Sascha Segan. Who are you?
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.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Here is the official Windows XP on Mac website: http://onmac.net/
The patch is available here: http://download.onmac.net/
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.