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New iMac, Mac Mini Benchmarks Show Changes Are Slight
jfpoole writes "Primate Labs has posted some preliminary benchmarks of the new iMacs and Mac minis. They found that processor speed is virtually unchanged between the older and newer models. Clearly these new Macs are minor updates rather than the major upgrades many Mac users were hoping for." As reader olddotter points out, there are changes, also slight, to the new Mini's case.
What about a video benchmark between the old 2Ghz MacMini and the new one? The main change in this machine was chipset/video related.
Menzoberranzan Networks
You'll have to look for a while as the Mac Pro is the only PC available today on the market with a Nehalem processor. But keep shouting, somebody might believe you.
They found that processor speed is virtually unchanged between the older and newer models.
I recently bought some Sun servers. My colleagues told me they were "very slow", but since I had a loaner pair in-house, I decided to benchmark them just for a "baseline".
I benchmarked them, and found that these new machines were the fastest I could buy in class.
Were my colleagues wrong? The answer is no - its just that their benchmarks were useless for my application. Their application's needs were quite different than mine. Their app was FP intense, and mine was memory i/o intense.
I ended up buying the machine they didn't buy. They passed them up because they were slow. But I bought them because they were fast.
This is really Apple's huge hole in their product lineup and has been for years now. If you want a replacement for your G4 or even a G5 Powermac tower you're shit out of luck unless you want some huge beast with 8 cores that is setup for being a server, a laptop with a 24" monitor attached to it, or a laptop without a screen or keyboard (bring your own!).
Oh, alternatively you can just buy a Macbook or Macbook Pro laptop and have laptop performance with a smaller screen than the iMac. All they need to do is release a tower "Mac" (drop the Pro even) with standard non-Xeon Intel processors (Intel quad-core Core i7 920 would be perfect), and a *nice* video card lineup option of either low end, medium end, and a high end gamer video card option. Throw in a 640GB or 1TB SATA option, 4GB of memory standard, and so on and you'd have a smoking desktop system. Sadly, Apple will not release this so even though my next system will have these specifications, it will not be a Mac. I'll happily run Windows 7 on it.
Yep, and those $1000 PCs will NOT be using high-end Xeons or ECC RAM. You're comparing commodity parts to a workstation-class machine. Not even close. That and you can BTO better video cards into the machines if you want to.