I took possession of a new MacBook Pro (2 GHz Intel Core Duo; 1 GM RAM; 100 GB HD) last Monday. Here’s a week’s worth of impressions and data.
Setup:
Apple simple. I debated whether to do things the IT geek way — perhaps partition the disk and try to run Linux or Windows or something on one partition and Mac OSX on the other, or start with a clean machine and manual set up mail and applications and settings and all that; or just go the George Romero route and hook up my old G4 laptop in Firewire target mode and suck its brain dry.
I opted for the latter approach, and some 3 hour later I had cloned my old Powerbook onto the new Intel beast. In retrospect, perhaps the former approach would have been wiser, as it would have allowed for less hazardous testing of "Boot Camp." As it stands now, I think I will tinker with an external FireWire drive to make that work.
Overall, the setup and transition was seamless. Mac mail didn’t work at first, but that proved to be because I work in a "Network Registration" (NetReg) zone, and I hadn’t yet registered the machine.
First impressions, using a mix of native Intel "Universal" and Rosetta emulated "PowerPC" productivity applications (Mac Mail, Safari, iCal, Oracle Collaboration Suite (Calendar), Preview, TextEdit, BBEdit, iChat) and creative applications (iMovie, iTunes, iPhoto, Front Row, PhotoShop, HandBrake): OK. But just OK.
I haven’t been blown away by any impression of Grande Vitesse. I still see the damned Spinning Wheel of Deadly Color while switch from application to application in the Dock: a gigabyte of RAM ain’t what it used to be, and I suspect a lot of disk swapping is going on. PowerPC applications, as expected, both launch and perform a bit sluggishly.
The best performance gain using Universal software was seen running the least productive and most borderline legal software: Handbrake, A DVD ripping application.
Initial benchmarks
- New Mac is MacBook Pro (2 GHz Intel Core Duo; 1 GM RAM; 100 GB HD) OSX 10.4.5 and 10.4.6
- old mac is PowerBook G4 (1.5 GHz PowerPC G4; 1 GB RAM; 80 GB HD)
- PC is gateway M275 tablet (Pentium 2 GHz; 1 GB RAM)
- Fast (Fst) Mac is PowerPC G5 dual 2.3 GHz G5 2 GB RAM
iMovie test 1: Aged film effect on a 23:21 (MPEG-4) movie clip
New Mac: 150 seconds
old Mac: 180 Seconds
iMovie test 2: 2 minute 53 second (MPEG-4) project exported to iPod happy (700 kbps MPEG-4/H.264/AAC) format
New Mac: 384 seconds
old Mac: 508 Seconds
iMovie test 3: 1 minute 28 second (DV-NTSC) project exported to iPod happy (700 kbps MPEG-4/H.264/AAC) format
New Mac: 135 seconds
old Mac: 180 Seconds
QuickTime Player Pro test 1: 4:42.28 320×240 MPEG-1 file to iPod happy
New Mac: 316 seconds
Old Mac: 384 seconds
PC : 960 seconds
Fst Mac: 220 seconds
QuickTime Player Pro test 2: 01:09 320×240 Motion JPEG (from digital still camera) file to iPod happy
New Mac: 47.2 seconds
Old Mac: 57.1 seconds
QuickTime Player Pro test 3: 04:56 320×240 Motion JPEG (from digital still camera) file to iPod happy
New Mac: 183 seconds
Old Mac: 223 seconds
Fst Mac: 139 seconds
QuickTime Player Pro test 4: King Kong HighDef trailer (1080i) playback
http://www.apple.com/trailers/universal/king_kong/hd/
New Mac: 24 fps, plays great
Old mac: 10-14 fps, with pregnant pauses and stuttering sound
PC : pretty constant 12 fps, no pauses, good sound
Fst Mac: 24 fps, plays great
HandBrake 0.7.1: Rip a 50 minute 36 second DVD Title to 700 kbps AVC/H.264/AAC 320×240 deinterlacesd (suitable for iPod)
new Mac: 27 minutes 44.6 seconds (1664.6 seconds), 43.65 average frames per second
Old Mac: 100 minutes 20.0 seconds (6020 seconds), 12.5 fps
PC : 40 minutes 23.5 seconds (2423 seconds), 29.91 fps
(PC test used Handbrake 0.7.0 Command line interface. The Mac version include CSS decryption,
the Windows version does not; so, for the Windows test the DVD was
first decrypted and "backed up" to hard disk using DVDShrink. This
took another 35m 25s. Point is, new mac did more work in less time)
PhotoShop (PowerPC) Image Resize from 4000×2000 to 11000 x 7300 (approximate)
New Mac: 15.6 seconds
Old Mac: 7.1 seconds
Fst Mac: 2.5 seconds
iTunes import test 1: 55.1 minute audio CD (13 tracks) to 192 kbps MP3 file
New Mac: 6 minutes 47 seconds (407 seconds)
Old mac: 6 minutes 49 seconds (409 seconds)
PC : 4 minutes 08 seconds (248 seconds)
iTunes import test 2: Same 55.1 minute audio CD (13 tracks) to 192 kbps AAC file
New Mac: 4 minutes 11 seconds (251 seconds)
Old mac: 7 minutes 50 seconds (470 seconds)
PC : 4 minutes 06 seconds (246 seconds)
Java VM test 1 : Key Crack http://hewgill.com/rc5/index.html
New Mac : 899234 keys/sec
Old Mac : 779511 keys/sec
PC : 1161692 keys/second
Fast Mac: 851302 keys/second
Java VM test 2 : Linpack http://www.netlib.org/benchmark/linpackjava/
New Mac : 220.035 Mflops/s
Old Mac : 65.855 Mflops/s
PC : 278.516 Mflops/s
Fast Mac: 323.681 Mflops/s
Java VM test 3 : Blt test http://www.javaworld.com/javaworld/jw-03-2001/games/blittest.html
New Mac : FPS=952.381 time=.525 seconds
Old Mac : FPS=373.413 time=1.339 seconds
PC : FPS=1282.05 time=0.39
Fast Mac: FPS=974.659 time=0.513
Unix configure and make test : libogg http://www.vorbis.com/files/1.0.1/unix/libogg-1.1.tar.gz
key: X.XXXu is Total number of CPU-seconds that the process spent in user mode.
key: X.XXXs is Total number of CPU-seconds that the process spent in kernel mode.
key: third number is total elapsed time
key: last number is % of CPU used
New Mac:
configure : 3.690u 7.386s 0:13.24 83.6%
make : 2.922u 2.095s 0:05.82 86.0%
total elapsed time 19.06 seconds
Old Mac:
configure : 3.859u 8.951s 0:18.06 70.8%
make : 5.116u 2.740s 0:09.70 80.9%
total elapsed time 27.76 seconds
