Report: Intel Macs Significantly Slower

Published on June 8, 2005 By Island Dog In Personal Computing

Developers at the 2005 Worldwide Developer Conference in San Francisco have submitted benchmark reports of programs running under Rosetta -- the emulation layer that will help smooth the transition between PowerPC and Intel -- and early results show that quite a bit of work is still needed to bring the software up to speed.

At his keynote Monday, Apple CEO Steve Jobs demoed Microsoft Word and Adobe Photoshop running under Rosetta. To make it work, the program converts PowerPC to Intel code as needed in the background. Jobs says on faster systems, the user will barely notice a difference in performance.

Link

Comments

JesseJ

on Jun 08, 2005

Well of course anything running under an emulator would be slower. Take note that what you have quoted is PPC software running under the emulator Rosetta on an Intel based Mac. Only software compiled to run natively on Intel should be used to test the difference in speed.

Kevin_C

on Jun 09, 2005

Well said JesseJ, that article is really nothing more than someone trying to get people riled up over nothing. It's a great way to point out the obvious but nothing more. Does this mean a MAC will be slower with Intel chips? Highly unlikely considering that MAC's have been losing their supposed performance advantage to PC's for quite some time now. What it will mean to MAC users is the ability to see what gaming is really supposed to be like. I'll admit that I have only spent maybe 10 hours on a MAC in my entire life, but I do know that was enough to know it's not for me.

I won't even touch the fact that the supposed "benchmark" compared a single 32-bit P4 to a Dual 64-bit MAC system. Gee, that seems like an apples to apples comparison to me. Next we'll have someone colling the Corvette slow because it can't hang with a Mclaren F1.

John Hamp

on Jun 30, 2005

I think this is a case where we'll have to wait until we can compare apples and apples.

Welcome Guest! Please take the time to register with us.
There are many great features available to you once you register, including:

Richer content, access to many features that are disabled for guests like commenting on the forums.
Access to a great community, with a massive database of many, many areas of interest.
Access to contests & subscription offers like exclusive emails.
It's simple, and FREE!