apple news/media reports
03/28/2006, 4:25pm, EST
Tuesday, March 28th
Apple commits to Windows benchmarking
Apple has become a member of BAPCo, the industry-standard Windows benchmarking consortium, according Gearlog. BAPCo oversees the SYSmark 2004SE and MobileMark benchmark suites used by computer industry trade magazines such as PC Magazine for testing PCs and it also produces the webserver test WEBmark for server-oriented testing. Gearlog reports that the consortium includes other big computer industry names such as AMD, Intel, ATI, nVidia, Dell, HP, Toshiba and Microsoft as well as other media outlets such as Ziff Davis Media and CNET. The companies work together to determine and develop testing methodologies, using industry standard programs such as Microsoft Office, Adobe Creative Suite, and 3ds max, while SYSmark and MobileMark benchmarks are used as performance tests by media outlets, corporations, and government agencies, according to report.
"This is significant because it means that Apple has now committed to Windows-based performance testing, and it will influence industry-standard testing methodologies going forward, possibly including Mac OS X testing," wrote Gearlog's Joel Santo Domingo. "We speculate that Apple will now develop Windows drivers for Intel Macs like the iMac, Mac mini and MacBook Pro with Intel Core Duo processors. You will probably still need to buy your own copy of Windows XP (or Vista), but this is exciting stuff."
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If Apple can show how well Mac OS X performs on Apple's hardware when compared to Windows running on comparable hardware with reasonable and useful benchmarks it is a win for Apple.
I believe I read that Adobe Photoshop in XP (on a MacBookPro & a Dell) ran faster on the MacBookPro.
Also consider Virtualization, which is rumored to be a feature in 10.5. That could mean more business for Apple. Lets not forget that Apple makes it money from hardware sales.
Support this effort. It is the future. Not a panacea, but 95% of one.
My fear is that any solution that allows Windows apps to run on X will not work properly with these apps/games, but will work well enough to give M$ and Adobe an excuse to stop development of MacOS X native software...
I'd much prefer to see Apple push Yellow Box for Windows.. Write in XCode, deploy in MacOS X PPC, MacOS X Intel, and Windows XP/Vista w/ Yellow Box for Windows installed...
A write once solution would attract more developers to MacOS X, the opposite of the potential loss when XP apps run in MacOS X.
Just my $0.02US
jwd
Being on the appropriate committees helps make sure that their strong points get into the benchmarks. Perhaps more importantly, if there are areas of the benchmarks that the MacOS does poorly on, but that do not represent something realistic, then they get a chance to argue for a different benchmark.
Scott
No need for support, just let it run Windows without the need for a hack.
The hardware can't run windows now, anymore then it could/couldn't before. Apple doesn't care about running windows, for if they did, they would have done something simple like adding BIOS support to the EFI, like all those other companies that use the tech do.
If Wine/DarWine/RedBox/Virtualization comes to MacOS X 10.5, I hope that it will be 100% compat. with games and the sw for hacking moto phones...
Not going to happen. Nothing is 100%, and to try to get it close, they'd have to do a lot of hacking to the OS, just like MS has had to do.
My fear is that any solution that allows Windows apps to run on X will not work properly with these apps/games, but will work well enough to give M$ and Adobe an excuse to stop development of MacOS X native software...
Well, duh. And it doesn't matter if its 100% or not. The second there's an integrated windows emulator, there goes a lot of mac apps. Esp. for those companies that barely provide mac support now.
I'd much prefer to see Apple push Yellow Box for Windows.. Write in XCode, deploy in MacOS X PPC, MacOS X Intel, and Windows XP/Vista w/ Yellow Box for Windows installed...
Hahahahaha! That's funny. Apple killed that years ago. Why, if it wasn't good then (when it would've made sense, as it would give developers the reason to redesign their software for OS X), why do it now? Just because there's an intel processor underneath.
And, while it might be good for some Mac-only apps to migrate to windows, cross-platform developers aren't going to scrap all their code to jump on Apple's "Today its here, tomorrow - who knows?" ship. Those already burned once won't switch. And if there's also a WINE going on, then they just might as well kill the windows version as switch it all to XCode.
A write once solution would attract more developers to MacOS X, the opposite of the potential loss when XP apps run in MacOS X.
Its been tried. To death. A myriad of developers have tried the "Use our framework, and you can deploy to all these different platforms". I don't recall them taking the programming world by storm. Hell, this was the thought on Java, and its still hard to write a program once, run it everywhere.
And don't discount MS porting their .Net framework to OS X. If Apple tries to make inroads into the windows developer world, MS can just go the other way. The entire framework, along with applications, etc, is all designed to work on multiple OSes. They just never bothered supporting anything else.