{"id":430,"date":"2006-04-07T13:20:55","date_gmt":"2006-04-07T17:20:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.uvm.edu\/~waw\/blog\/?p=430"},"modified":"2006-04-07T13:20:55","modified_gmt":"2006-04-07T17:20:55","slug":"new-intel-mac-benchmarks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/waw\/2006\/04\/07\/new-intel-mac-benchmarks\/","title":{"rendered":"New Intel mac Benchmarks"},"content":{"rendered":"

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.<\/p>\n

Setup<\/span>:<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

The best performance gain using Universal software was seen running the least productive and most borderline legal software: Handbrake, A DVD ripping application.<\/p>\n

Initial benchmarks<\/span><\/p>\n