06/09/2005, 10:30am, EDT
Thursday, June 9th
Apple Intel Mac prototype specs, performance numbers
The machines run Microsoft Windows without issue. The Intel Macs use standard Intel chipsets which make running Windows XP possible with just a few driver installations.
The machines also feature a standard Phoenix BIOS rather than Open Firmware. Apple does not specify how to access the system BIOS. However, users at the World Wide Developers conference report gaining access to the BIOS by "mashing keys" at startup. The BIOS is fully functional, featuring the same settings as any standard PC.
Native Performance
Very little information is available on performance of native Mac OS X Intel applications, because few exist. However, those who have used the Developer Transition Kit report performance equal to or exceeding a G5 Mac.
Rosetta Performance
Benchmarks performed on the Developer Transition Kits measure Rosetta performance, not native application performance. Rosetta is Apple's emulation technology for running PowerPC applications on Intel Macs. It emulates a G3 processor and does not support Altivec.
Intel Macs scored between 65 and 70 with Xbench running under Rosetta. A dual-2.5GHz Power Mac G5 scored above 200 on the same test. In the CPU test, where G5 systems score between 100 and 200, the Intel Mac only reached the high teens.
The Intel Mac scored 82 on the Thread test, compared to 225 for the G5 machine. In the Computation Thread test, the Pentium machine scored 110, trailing the G5 by only 45 points.
In both the Lock Contention and Memory tests, the G5 significantly exceeded the performance of the Intel Mac, with scores of 420 to 66, and 378 to 214. The Intel Mac managed to exceed the G5's Stream Memory Test score: 351 to 319. The system memory test, however, is a different story. The G5 beat the Intel machine, scoring a 464 compared to 154.
The Intel Mac scored a 125 on the Interface Test, compared to a 380 for the G5, according to one report. Another report claimed the Intel prototype beat a G5 Mac.
The Intel Mac scored well in both the Quartz graphics and OpenGL graphics tests -- matching or exceeding dual-2.5GHz G5 score.
More information can be found at Think Secret or Accelerate Your Mac.
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These are the G5/Xbox360-like set ups.
Though if i can get all but the logic board at newegg, the would be slick!
T
Are they snappy?
Apple has 18 months or so to design a world class motherboard/chipset which I am sure they can do. I hope they get rid of the bios, will probably go back to ROM, but that is just a guess.
Since Rosetta is translating instructions and then caching them (as opposed to emulating each instruction), it could be that the benchmarks on their initial run suffered from being translated on-the-fly, and subsequent runs (after the code had been translated and cached) would have very different results. And it's sounding like system API calls -- including Quartz 2D, OpenGL, etc. -- are handled by the processor-native code, so it's really only the CPU-dependent portions of an app that would see any difference, and it's sounding like a pretty safe bet that most major CPU-dependent apps will have universal binaries by the time Intel-based Macs appear for the general public.
Since the OpenGL and Quartz test tap right into these frameworks, the results will likely yield native speeds. Anything else that gets executed that is contained within the PPC app will have to be emulated. Since Xbench runs all the tests (with the exception of Quartz and OpenGL) with its PPC code, it's only normal that the results will show slow speeds for everything and high speeds for the calls made to outside libraries.