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OS Performance — Snow Leopard, Windows 7, and Ubuntu 9.10

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the but-how-do-they-run-as-vms dept.

BeckySharp writes "With the nearly simultaneous release of Apple's Mac OS X 10.6 'Snow Leopard' (available right now) and Microsoft's Windows 7 (available Oct. 22), you get the inevitable debate: Which is the better operating system, Windows 7 or Snow Leopard? To help determine that, Computerworld's Preston Gralla put both operating systems through their paces, selected categories for a head-to-head competition, and then chose a winner in each category." Relatedly, Phoronix has posted Snow Leopard vs. Ubuntu 9.10 benchmarks. They ran tests from ray tracing to 3D gaming to compilation. Their tests show Ubuntu 9.10 winning a number of the tests, but there are some slowdowns in performance and still multiple wins in favor of Snow Leopard, so the end result is mixed.

47 of 688 comments (clear)

  1. Dock/Taskbar design by alain94040 · · Score: 5, Informative

    The most thoughtful article I read that truly explains what the technical tradeoffs are with dock/taskbar design: here.

    On a similar topic, if you want to work on the home page GUI for Android, there is an on-going project as well.

    The good news for consumers is that both Windows 7 and Snow Leopard are great-looking OS. Computerworld is just wrong to give a point to Apple on price :-)

    1. Re:Dock/Taskbar design by Kratisto · · Score: 1, Informative

      30 bucks... Plus you have to put it on a Mac computer, which is marked up at least ten percent compared to a comparable computer from any other manufacturer. Some brands are even offering free upgrades to Windows 7 from Vista if you buy a computer from them now rather than waiting for the OS switch. That price tag looks less appealing when you consider those attached strings.

      --
      Conscience is the inner voice which warns us that someone may be looking.
    2. Re:Dock/Taskbar design by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

      Well, the price of either is a matter of what you already have :).

      If I have the immediate previous version of the software:
      Leopard-->Snow Leopard: $30.
      Vista Home Premium-->Win7 Home Premium: $120 (if you want Ultimate, then $220)

      If I have the second-previous version:
      Tiger-->Snow Leopard: $170 (bundled with a couple other items)
      XP-->Win7 Home Premium: $120 (Ultimate is $220)

      Even earlier version (rare):
      Mac: you're SOL
      Windows: $200 ($320 for Ultimate)

      If I have a very recent computer:
      Leopard-->Snow Leopard: $10
      Vista (any) --> Win7 (same): $0

      If you're getting a new computer:
      Generally bundled; pricing delta is defined by hardware prices of Apple vs any OEM that will bundle Windows, which in turn depends on your precise needs.

      If your current computer is anything other than a Mac: you need to buy a Mac to be legal, or do hackintosh (at which point you could throw in that you can get illegal copies of either OS free, but maybe your personal ethics permit a breach of law in one case but not the other).

    3. Re:Dock/Taskbar design by Mononoke · · Score: 5, Informative

      Don't forget that Apple charges for it's service packs

      No. They. Don't.

      --
      NetInfo connection failed for server 127.0.0.1/local
    4. Re:Dock/Taskbar design by jimmyfrank · · Score: 1, Informative

      Ah, so 2000+ if you don't have a mac and want to switch to a fully decked out one...

    5. Re:Dock/Taskbar design by caerwyn · · Score: 4, Informative

      Tiger->Snow Leopard does not actually require the bundle- it's been confirmed that the $29 SL upgrade installs just fine.

      --
      The ringing of the division bell has begun... -PF
    6. Re:Dock/Taskbar design by commodore64_love · · Score: 4, Informative

      Not really. It wasn't a fair fight. QUOTE: "Windows 7 Ultimate.....with 1GB of RAM and Snow Leopard.....with 2GB of RAM." I have no great love for either MS or MAC, but we all know Windows on just 1 gig is going to lots of hard-drive caching and slower performance. He should have either upgraded the Win-PC to 2 gig, or downgraded the Mac to 1 gig, in order to make the test as identical as possible.

      --
      "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
    7. Re:Dock/Taskbar design by mikael_j · · Score: 2, Informative

      You're missing the point, you're focusing entirely on the technical side by arguing that a process on Windows can run just fine without a winform, and that just wasn't what the article was about.

      The article was about design philosophies and the implications of choosing an application-centric or a document-centric GUI design.

      /Mikael

      --
      Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4
    8. Re:Dock/Taskbar design by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

      Then there is this shiny bit:

        The common response is to use the notification area (often incorrectly called the "system tray") to provide ready access to these running-but-windowless applications.

      Orly? You DO know that the it was called the "system tray" up until Windows XP, don't you? It was even instantiated by a process called systray.exe. Even MSDN is littered with its own references to it being the "system tray", like here.

      That's wrong.

    9. Re:Dock/Taskbar design by toleraen · · Score: 2, Informative

      It installs fine but it violates the EULA/TOS/whatever the agreement is.

    10. Re:Dock/Taskbar design by walshy007 · · Score: 2, Informative

      fully decked out mac pro (just added hardware bits on their customize section AU country though) comes to $26,199 AU (around $22,100 USD) for that much cash I'd be expecting a shit-tonne better system.

      Base mac pro here is $4.5k with one quad core processor. 3gb ram, etc, still a nice machine, but you can make something better for about a grand and a half, and flickiestrife's $600 machine is better than it (includes a monitor even).

    11. Re:Dock/Taskbar design by shutdown+-p+now · · Score: 5, Informative

      Win7 actually runs fine on 1Gb - like Vista, it will use the RAM that is there, but unlike Vista, it doesn't insist on it.

      Anyway, this is pretty irrelevant here, because the comparison wasn't about performance at all (despite the title of the Slashdot summary). It was just one person's very subjective opinions on certain aspects of OS X and Win7, without any attempt to quantify. There's not a single objective measure in the whole review.

    12. Re:Dock/Taskbar design by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

      Obviously your G4 PowerMac will run 10.4.9. (I'm not sure if you were including the 10.4.x updates.)

      Is it lower than 867 MHz? If not, it'll run 10.5 and all updates officially.

    13. Re:Dock/Taskbar design by SBrach · · Score: 3, Informative

      From Apple; A quad core 2.93 GHz Nehalem with 8GB of Ram, 4TB of storage, an ATI Radeon 4870 512mb Graphics card, and a DVD/CD burner is $4,500.
       
      From newegg; a quad core 2.93GHz Nehalem with 12GB of Ram, 4TB of storage, an ATI Radeon 4870 1GB Graphics card, and a A CD/DVD/Bluray burner is $2700.
       
      I think I can get a pretty bad ass case and power supply with that $1800 difference. Plus I get 4GB more ram, twice the video ram and a bluray burner. Oh wait, sorry, $1,700 after the OEM Win7 license.

    14. Re:Dock/Taskbar design by MrCrassic · · Score: 1, Informative

      I believe he was referring to the notification icons on the right hand side of the Windows start bar. There was indeed a systray process in Win9x and earlier WinNT operating systems that handled this, as observed in this really quick Google search.

    15. Re:Dock/Taskbar design by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

      He is completely correct given the context. If an app doesn't interact with the user, it isn't an application; it's a service. If it does want to interact with the user, it has to use a form/window to do it. There are ways to hack together a piece of software that runs like a service in the background, and occasionally interacts with the desktop to notify the user of something, but they're just that: an ugly hack. Windows was never designed to allow a program to behave that way out of the box, and the official approach for many years has been to litter the notification area with what amounts to tiny, minimized windows.

      You can argue semantics of systray vs notification area all you want, but the author clearly understands the underlying issue and architecture a lot better than you do.

    16. Re:Dock/Taskbar design by ceoyoyo · · Score: 4, Informative

      "An application doesn't need a window AT ALL. For ANY REASON. Windows are used for GUI I/O, and occasionally, message passing."

      You write that an application doesn't need a window, at all, for any reason (in all caps yet), then immediately give two reasons why an application needs a window.

      Yeah, I know what you mean. I can decipher it if I try. But you're being needlessly dense regarding what the author was getting at too. An app in Windows needs a window for another reason - to display a menu bar. An app in OS X does not - the menu is displayed at the top of the screen. So when you start Word in Windows it pops up an empty window (or a window filled with useless stuff) just so it can give you a File | Open menu. On the Mac it doesn't need to open a window until it's got a document to display in it.

    17. Re:Dock/Taskbar design by DannyO152 · · Score: 5, Informative

      I would add that past costs, having been paid, are irrelevant. No matter whether you sunk $1,000, $500, $5,000 into that system, it will cost you $29 to upgrade that Mac and $100 to upgrade that Windows system. Let us not forget that while one may find Wintel pcs that have a lower price than a Mac, one can also find ones that are more expensive. Let's assume that there's an implicit basic satisfaction with the system's value if its owner is considering an upgrade.

      That said, here's my bone to pick. I've been using Photoshop CS2 on Leopard. My $29 upgrade will mean either no Photoshop or another few hundred bucks additional cost in order to get CS4. Only Thursday did we start to get reports of incompatible software and, of course, all the reviews overlooked real world considerations in favor of revealing the same features we could have seen on Apple's web site. Nothing was really said with regards to the real reason we run operating systems: so we get stuff done with the software that runs on top. I don't care whether OS X boots faster than Win7 - I've made my choices. But if an upgrade means purchase of hardware or software, than that is a lot more important to me than the interface of QuickTimeX.

    18. Re:Dock/Taskbar design by commodore64_love · · Score: 2, Informative

      >>>the implications of choosing an application-centric or a document-centric GUI design.

      The implication is that when I'm using my Mac and I close a window, I think the RAM has been freed, but in reality the application is still running in the background. That's kinda annoying.

      --
      "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
    19. Re:Dock/Taskbar design by mrcaseyj · · Score: 2, Informative

      While the author of the page you linked to was trying to say that it's not called the tray, one of the commenters fired up spy++ and found that in fact the Microsoft named window classes down there still (as of 2003) have names like "Shell_TrayWnd", "TrayNotifyWnd", and "TrayClockWClass". Microsoft might not like it to be called the tray, but even Microsoft is stuck using the name themselves.

    20. Re:Dock/Taskbar design by xigxag · · Score: 2, Informative

      The previous poster's linked article specifically addresses that concern and dismisses it. "systray" was an app that ran in the notification area and displayed a few specific system-related icons, (hence "system" tray) but it wasn't the notification area, which as we know displays both system (MS Windows) and non-system (3rd party) icons.

      --
      There are two kinds of people: 1) those who start arrays with one and 1) those who start them with zero.
    21. Re:Dock/Taskbar design by babyrat · · Score: 2, Informative

      You could easily say the same of many of the upgrades in OS X point releases.

      But we're not talking about many of point releases of OSX. The article and comments are specifically comparing Snow Leopard and Windows 7.

    22. Re:Dock/Taskbar design by Achromatic1978 · · Score: 2, Informative

      You miss my point - the GP comment said "So what about Win 7... there's almost nothing new from XP that I couldn't get from either third party software or 'core'." - my remark was merely that based on that logic, there's "almost nothing that you couldn't get from Snow Leopard that you couldn't somehow get from Jaguar with third party software".

    23. Re:Dock/Taskbar design by ducomputergeek · · Score: 2, Informative

      But can you run Final Cut Studio on the machine you buy from new egg?

      But anyone who buys high end macs know you don't buy RAM from Apple. You go to Crucial after market. When I bought my last PowerMac (Quad-core G5), I spend about $4500 on the machine and had it shipped with 512MB of ram. Even got a call from Apple making sure that was the config I wanted. Went to Crucial the same day and got 8GB of Ram for around $1800. Apple wanted $4k for the RAM. Don't forget another $2k for the HD Cinema display.

      I used the unit to do video editing as Final Cut wasn't going to be Intel ready at that time for at least another year. During that year I made about $70k editing HD videos as I was one of the few with all the HD equipment in the area. So I rented out the cameras and did the editing for other when their clients wanted HD video of a wedding or corporate event until they upgraded/HD equipment came down in price.

      Recently that machine got destroyed after my house was damaged from a storm and the room got flooded. I've got the insurance money, but since I don't do video production on a regular basis anymore, I've not replaced it. And when I do, it will likely be with an iMac. My 13.3" iBook has been perfect for what I've needed.

      --
      "The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
    24. Re:Dock/Taskbar design by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

      If by $2700, you mean $3,869.99 - sure. Or are you seriously comparing buying parts to a complete system?

    25. Re:Dock/Taskbar design by parlancex · · Score: 3, Informative
      And what does DirectX 11 offer over DirectX 10, or even 9?

      The first and foremost thing to mention is that no DirectX 11 class hardware actually exists at retail right now, and might not be for some time. DirectX 11's major new features are new pipeline stages that make it better suited to GPGPU-style processing without trying to make your algorithms fit into the vertex and pixel processing pipelines. CUDA and OpenCL are both existing technologies that allow developers to do this, and (especially recently) integration of GPGPU using CUDA / OpenCL into a graphics application is efficient and relatively easy. DirectX 11's exclusive features are some marginal optimizations and changes to the ROP stage of the pipeline that at least theoretically should make some kind of performance difference (just like DirectX 10 was way faster than 9!), and even these will be available as OpenGL extensions from the get-go.

      On top of this I'd say it's a reasonable expectation that driver support, especially initially will be bad for both performance and stability as seen in Vista / DirectX 10, and the new features may end up with an implementation that is so inefficient in the driver it may make them worthless for almost anything but a handful of applications (just like geometry shaders in DirectX 10). On top of that you could list the games that actually have any DirectX 10 exclusive features whatsoever on one-hand and 10 has been around for quite a while already, and 11 will probaby be the same for that or worse.

    26. Re:Dock/Taskbar design by Gr8Apes · · Score: 4, Informative

      >>>Don't upgrade if you don't think it's worth it!

      You can't do that with Macs. They'll stop running the latest software. For example I wouldn't be able to run Firefox 3 or 3.5 on my G4 Mac's original OS (10.1). I had to upgrade.

      I'd like to run Office 2008 on WinME... wait, I can't. Not in Win2K either. Oh no!!!! How about that DX10 game on XP? Nope, can't do that either.... Gosh darn it!

      FYI - there were major changes in OS APIs between 10.1-10.6. Something designed for 10.6 won't run on 10.3 or before. A little thing about binary compatibility due to physical architecture and system API support.

      --
      The cesspool just got a check and balance.
    27. Re:Dock/Taskbar design by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

      The Mac Pro is a Xeon. Your newegg config is almost certainly a Core i7. Nehalem is an architecture codename, not a single product. Intel prices accordingly.

      Nice troll though.

    28. Re:Dock/Taskbar design by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

      Agreed. I've just installed Win 7 on my 7 years old laptop, which has a single core P4 2.0 Ghz and 1 GB of RAM. Windows 7 seems to be running better than Windows XP was, I'm really amazed.

      Of course I don't get the fancy Aero graphics, but it is still a great experience to be able to run the latest OS, (which happens to be very polished and stable) on a hardware that's 7 years old.

    29. Re:Dock/Taskbar design by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

      Except for that OSX has exceptional memory management. I'm not saying Windows doesn't, but OSX does... for sure.... big time. Having apps open in the background is NEVER a problem. And you never have to wait for all those apps to open again when you want to open a document.

    30. Re:Dock/Taskbar design by iamacat · · Score: 2, Informative

      2009 called and said there are now $600 Macs and $999 apple notebooks. True, you can still find significantly cheaper Dells, and if you don't see any difference in software and hardware quality you should be all means save money.

    31. Re:Dock/Taskbar design by rdnetto · · Score: 2, Informative

      The good news for consumers is that both Windows 7 and Snow Leopard are great-looking OS.

      So can Linux users. Mint is a Ubuntu derivative that is one of the most aesthetically pleasing, IMO. KDE seems to have way too much crap, but Mint actually looks really good with just Gnome, and seems comparable to Vista in terms of GUI.

      --
      Most human behaviour can be explained in terms of identity.
    32. Re:Dock/Taskbar design by XDirtypunkX · · Score: 2, Informative

      Unlike D3D10, D3D11 is actually backward compatible all the way to D3D9 shader model 2.0 hardware. That is, you get a lot of D3D10/11 features that give you big speed boosts (like the D3D10 style resource management/buffers and D3D11 deferred device contexts) on D3D9 hardware. In fact, except for XP support there is no reason to write anything but D3D11 code any more once it's released (with different shader paths).

      Deferred contexts allow you to build up a list of commands on a separate thread, shunt them to kernel space in a single call (very low thunking overhead) and then render them on the main thread in a single call. In terms of distributing the CPU cost of rendering over multiple cores and going further to avoid CPU thunking costs, this is a huge feature (and like I said, it's available on D3D9 hardware).

      Finally D3D11 is pretty almost a strict super-set (as is the updated WDDM) of Direct3D 10 at driver level. If you have the March DirectX SDK, you can run D3D11 applications on D3D9/10 hardware on Vista now at almost full speed (obviously, D3D11 itself isn't fully optimized yet as this is pre-release). So your driver concerns are pretty much unfounded.

  2. To summarize the phoronix benchmark... by ultrabot · · Score: 2, Informative

    It pretty much shows Ubuntu 9.10 beating Snow Leopard most of the time.

    Yay, we've come a long way. Unfortunately Karmic also displays a few significant regressions from Jaunty, hopefully someone is trying to do some profiling for those...

    --
    Save your wrists today - switch to Dvorak
  3. Performance, where? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    The article linked to in the quote block is a terrible little summary of Snow Leopard and Windows 7, split unnecessarily over 5 pages, with nary a benchmark to be seen. Most of the comparisons are subjective, vague, and really not very useful to anyone.

  4. Re:Machines arn't even remotely comparable by BondGamer · · Score: 3, Informative

    It sounded like a performance comparison from the Slashdot article title ("OS Performance -- Snow Leopard, Windows 7, and Ubuntu 9.10"). I didn't read past the system specifications because of this. While the review wasn't based on performance it would be a good idea to match both machines anyway.

  5. Re:30? Try 130. by bonch · · Score: 5, Informative

    Its only 30 if you forked out 130 for the last one, so you could really call it 160.

    Apple has confirmed that you can install the $30 upgrade version on top of Tiger.

  6. Re:30? Try 130. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    At an Apple store I asked if the $30 dollar was an upgrade or a full install disk. I was told it was a full install disk and no copy of leopard or even tiger was required. I installed it successfully on my sisters computer AFTER wiping it clean (Read: no previously purchased OS installed.) It is a full blown OS for only $30 (not an upgrade disk.) They do sell a more expensive copy that comes bundled with iLife and iWork.

  7. Re:This leads me to wonder... by Zerimar · · Score: 2, Informative

    I think intel's Core 2 architecture jump, coupled with the plummeting memory prices, have really changed the upgrade cycle. I got the upgrade bug since my machine is 2 years old, but the component I ended up upgrading was to an IPS monitor. Next might be an SSD drive - my Core2Quad Q6600 is still handling all my needs otherwise. Even games don't force you to upgrade anymore because of two reasons:

    1. Valve, Blizzard, and EA (with the Sims franchise) showed there is a lot more money to be made if you cater to the low end of midrange computers.
    2. The Xbox 360 is so old that cross platform games can generally be ported over to mainstream class PCs with decent developers.
  8. Re:I love this quote by Major+Blud · · Score: 3, Informative

    I usually don't respond to AC's but since I did RTFA:

    Page 5, under "Conclusion"

    "Windows 7, on the other hand, remains the corporate standard, and nothing in Snow Leopard is likely to change that. And it's still a more tweakable operating system (although its critics may say that tweaking is mandatory in order to get it running right)."

    douche.

    --
    If you post as Anonymous Coward, don't expect a reply.
  9. The problem is by Sycraft-fu · · Score: 4, Informative

    Apple doesn't have an in between system. You have their all-in-one, but if you want to go past that, the next thing is a high end workstation. So suppose you want a quad core with a reasonable graphics card. Bare minimum price from Apple is $2700 for a quad with 3GB RAM, a 4870, and a 640MB HD. So if you want a similar thing from Dell you get a Core 2 Quad, 4GB RAM, a 4870 and a 750MB HD for $1150, less than half the price. Now you'd be correct in pointing out that the Mac Pro has hardware the Dell doesn't, like a second CPU slot. Ok, but what if you don't need that? Well too bad, you have to pay for it anyhow.

    That is a big problem you get in to with Mac prices. In a very large segment of the market, they have no good offerings. You have to buy much higher end hardware which drives the price way up. You can argue all you like that it isn't "equal" it doesn't matter. If those extra features aren't needed or wanted, then all you are doing is driving the price up.

    1. Re:The problem is by log0n · · Score: 4, Informative

      Apple does have an in-between system, it's the iMac. It may not be your desired in-between system, but in that case Apple really isn't catering to you.

      Mac Pro CPUs are Xeons, not Core 2. Spec a Dell w/ Xeons and you've got Mac Pro price. Spec a Dell w/ Core 2 and an LCD, you've got iMac price.

      Most people who buy Macs don't want to futz around w/ tweaking or repeatedly adjusting their system - they just want it to work well and reliably. For a high end user, you get that w/ the Mac Pro. Vis a vis, the iMac with it's intermediate audience.

      Build a hack if you really want a system that caters exactly to your wants.

  10. Re:GCC comparison by TheRaven64 · · Score: 2, Informative

    It's not just Linux, and Apple. FreeBSD is adopting Clang for the base system and keeping a fork of an old version of GNU binutils because they don't want any GPLv3 stuff either. OpenBSD is aiming to use PCC as the system compiler, so they too will ditch GCC.

    --
    I am TheRaven on Soylent News
  11. Re:30? Try 130. by Ma8thew · · Score: 4, Informative

    Under section C.

  12. Re:whiletrueprintfFUD by commodore64_love · · Score: 2, Informative

    >>>the response time for 10.5 leopard was the same on all the machines from the mac pro towers in the media labs to the 1998 imac net nodes tucked away in obscure corners
    >>>

    I don't believe this story. I don't think you intentionally misled us, but you probably didn't realize you can Not run 10.5 on 1998 iMacs. They don't meet the 866 megahertz minimum requirement. Perhaps they were running 10.4 just like my PowerMac runs, the latest version available for its speed.

    --
    "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
  13. Re:whiletrueprintfFUD by VGPowerlord · · Score: 3, Informative

    Another expense with Apples is the inability to run new OSes on old hardware.

    my school used various generations of macs on campus. the response time for 10.5 leopard was the same on all the machines from the mac pro towers in the media labs to the 1998 imac net nodes tucked away in obscure corners of the more neglected lecture halls.

    anyone who has tried to make xp run on hardware dating from a similar time period would fall asleep from boredom waiting for "ye olde exe" to launch.

    You are aware that the oldest Mac that will run Snow Leopard (the version discussed in this article) was made in 2006...?

    No? Well, consider yourself informed.

    --
    GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
  14. Linux is doing the same thing. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    Linus is doing the same thing with the Linux kernel.

    Trying running the latest Ubuntu, Fedora, Slackware, etc on your 9 year old (PC).
    He'll thrash, cry and beg to get XP back. In short it runs like crap.

    You can interpret that both ways.

    There must be a reason RedHat is still running old kernels.

    Hey Torvaulds!

    stfunoob