Saturday, February 2, 2008

Mac OS X 10.5.1 Slow on Intel Macs

So, the Intel Core 2 Duo CPUs, and the new architecture are supposed to be so much faster and better than the old Power PC G5s.  I am still not sure, what I am seeing, at least with my MacBook 2 GHz, 2 GB of RAM as compared with my iMac G5 2 GHz, 2 GB RAM.


Leopard is far faster, and seemingly more stable on the G5.  The only thing I can think of is that the OS isn't optimized for the Intel chips, meaning the SIMD extensions.  Apple has had years of optimizing their code / compilers for AltiVec.  I know what the benchmarks say, and I know how the machine performs with Windows.  Leopard is definitely slower.  I guess I'll have to wait until x.5.2 comes out, hopefully we'll see some performance gains.

The other thing is that looking at the TDP of Intel's new chips, I don't really see the huge energy savings over Motorola's chips.  It looks like at 3.2 GHz they are as bad as the old P4 Extreme Edition chips.  I'm beginning to wonder what the real motivation was behind the switch, probably profit. 

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