| Apple's Developer Transition Kit features a Pentium 4 660 processor running at 3.6 GHz, according to various online reports. Engineers said the Pentium 4 660 would not be used in any production Mac. Rather, one should look to Intel's roadmap for an idea of what future Macs might include. The Developer machine uses DDR-2 RAM at 533 MHz, SATA-2, and Intel GMA 900 integrated graphics. Production Macs will likely ship with off-the-shelf PC video cards. Manufacturers such as ATI and nVidia must simply provide drivers for the cards. The test machines support 64 bit extensions, but Apple's software does not yet support that technology. The developer units include FireWire 400 and USB 2. USB 2 booting is supported, but FireWire booting is not. 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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