Intel-inside Mac benchmarked with mixed results

Posted on 8 Jun 2005 at 11:58

Mac developers have already begun testing the performance of Apple's limited edition Mac based on a 3GHz Intel Pentium 4 processor.

The Xbench tests show the performance of PowerPC software running in the Rosetta environment. The resultant cores of between 65 and 70 are a long way behind the 200+ rating achieved by the fastest Power Macs, though since Rosetta does not support Altivec instructions - there being no Altivec processor in the Intel machine.

Overall, ThinkSecret reports, the Intel Mac's performance was well behind the Power Mac. However those results are largely what you would expect: Apple's own developer documentation noted under Rosetta applications that have intense computing needs aren't compatible with Rosetta, while applications that have a lot of user interaction and low computational needs, such as a word processor, are quite compatible.

Graphics performance on the Intel machine exceeded the Power Mac's, although the nature of the graphics card in the Intel box was not known.

While all this is interesting it tells us little more than what we could already assume: if you are planning to run powerful applications on an Intel Mac then you will need compatible versions of your software. Moreover we can only expect that over the course of the next 12 months Apple and Intel will improve Rosetta's performance.

The Intel Mac is available to selected developers for testing purposes and must eventually be returned to Apple.

Author: Simon Aughton

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