The people over at Software MacKiev the makers of The Print Shop 2.0 for Mac (I have version 1 which is a very nice program) and 2006 World Book have released free universal updates to a few of their programs.
They also have some benchmarks comparing their universal apps running on an iMac 1.8GHz G5 and iMac 1.8GHz Intel. Their tests show the Intel version anywhere from 1.4 to 3.4 times faster than the G5 version.
I decided to do some simple tests to see how important ram is when runningapplications under Rosetta.What I did was run a few programs under the native binary format and also openedthe ‘get info’ window and checked ‘Open using Rosetta’ then ran the program again.When each program was open I would get the ‘Real Memory’ value for the process fromthe Activity Monitor. Click read more for the results and summary.These tests were run on an iMac 20” core duo with 1 GB of RAM and a PowerMac 933Mhz with 1.5 GB of RAM both running OS X 10.4.4.
| RAM usage (in MB) | ||||||
| QuickTime | 5.13 | 5.34 | 15.14 | x1.04 | x2.83 | x2.95 |
| Comic Life | 40.32 | 59.38 | 89.35 | x1.47 | x1.50 | x2.21 |
| 9.88 | 14.37 | 48.79 | x1.45 | x3.39 | x4.93 | |
| OmniOutliner | 12.05 | 27.79 | 58.7 | x2.30 | x2.11 | x4.87 |
| Safari | 10.74 | 14.18 | 53.52 | x1.32 | x3.77 | x4.98 |
| TextMate | 12.73 | 13.96 | 49.38 | x1.09 | x3.53 | x3.87 |
Notes- The PowerPC test for Mail is probably misleading because that machine had no mail in its inbox.- An interesting observation is that none of the iLife or iWork apps (iTunes,iPhoto,Pages,etc.)have the option of ‘Open using Rosetta’ in the ‘get info’ window. I do not know if this is afunction of Rosetta knowing that it can not run these or a compile time flag that Apple hasset.
If you rely heavily on applications that are not yet universal make sure you load that newIntel Mac up with plenty of RAM as these programs can take any where from 2.21 - 4.98 times theRAM as when they are run on PowerPC Macs.Also note that currently native applications run on the Intel Mac require 1.04 - 2.3 times the RAMof the same application run on a PowerPC Mac. I am betting that this will decrease over time as thex86 version of OS X matures and the compiler is enhanced.
updated on 01/25/2006
- Made the results easier to read.
- Added RAM usage for a PowerPC Mac.
updated on 06/15/2007
- When transferring to new site and blogging software the posting date of the first 11 comments below got lost, sorry.
I was just looking at the Xbench site and someone has uploaded some results for
the new iMac Core Duo 20” 2.0 GHz.
The older G5 iMac gets a higher overall score but if you look at the breakdown
of the Intel iMac you can tell there is some room for improvement. The Intel iMac
seems to suffer from non-optimized floating point libraries and immature graphics drivers. The
Intel iMac should get faster as the software matures, even now it is still pretty fast on the
weak spots and really rips on its strong points (threading,integer math, memory).
I will be retiring my PowerMac G4 Dual 1.25 GHz soon, I ordered a 20” iMac Core Duo and will write more about it once it arrives.
