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Developers impressed with speed of Intel-based Mac development systems
According to AppleInsider, developers leasing Apple's $999 Intel-based Macintosh development system are quite impressed with the speed of the 3.6GHz Pentium 4-based unit [see full specs] as compared to current, high-end PowerPC-based Macs.
Applications running at 65-70% native speed under the Rosetta translation engine would be rather responsive, given the speed of the development machines. By the time the first Intel-based Macs hit the market (sometime around the middle of next year), however, many if not most core applications will have already been recompiled into universal binaries to run natively on both the PowerPC and Intel platforms. It seems Mac users have much to look forward to in terms of the future performance of their favored platform.
Unable to select DB"It's fast," said one developer source of Mac OS X running on Intel's Pentium processors. "Faster than [Mac OS X] on my Dual 2GHz Power Mac G5." In addition to booting Windows XP at blazing speeds, the included version of Mac OS X for Intel takes "as little as 10 seconds" to boot to the Desktop from when the Apple logo first displays on screen.
. . .
"Taking a universal binary and timing its startup in Intel native speed versus its startup when opened via Rosetta results in a slowdown, but not as much as one would think," said another source. "The apps run at about 65 to 70 percent of their normal speed."
However, some PowerPC-native applications realize little to no speed reductions while running under Rosetta. A source told AppleInsider the current PowerPC version of the popular Firefox web browser loads just as fast under Mac OS X Intel as it does on a high-end dual processor Power Mac G5.
. . .
"Taking a universal binary and timing its startup in Intel native speed versus its startup when opened via Rosetta results in a slowdown, but not as much as one would think," said another source. "The apps run at about 65 to 70 percent of their normal speed."
However, some PowerPC-native applications realize little to no speed reductions while running under Rosetta. A source told AppleInsider the current PowerPC version of the popular Firefox web browser loads just as fast under Mac OS X Intel as it does on a high-end dual processor Power Mac G5.
Applications running at 65-70% native speed under the Rosetta translation engine would be rather responsive, given the speed of the development machines. By the time the first Intel-based Macs hit the market (sometime around the middle of next year), however, many if not most core applications will have already been recompiled into universal binaries to run natively on both the PowerPC and Intel platforms. It seems Mac users have much to look forward to in terms of the future performance of their favored platform.