On Jun 27, 2006, at 9:23 PM, R. D. Preston wondered: > For any and all with new Intel processor machines, what differences > are there that you notice, if any, aside from the speed improvements > out of the Intel processors?
I have a dual core Intel Mini, and it is a very nice little machine. The first thing to say about it is that there really isn't any way to tell from the screen whether you're running on an Intel or PowerPC processor. Mac OS X on Intel is still the Mac OS X to which we've all grown accustomed. I switch back and forth between the Mini at home and a 2 GHz dual G5 machine in my office. The machines both feel about the same, with different winners for different tasks. When you're reading benchmarks about the speed of the two machines, you really have to be careful about what they're testing. If you're using lots of floating point arithmetic, the PPC machine wins every time. The situation is reversed with integer arithmetic. In graphics, the Mini has a very low end graphics system, so the PPC will blow it away on games. A higher-end Intel machine, with a better graphics card, is certainly faster to the screen than the PPC machine. But, again, you have to be careful. The graphics benchmarks where the Intel iMacs blow away the high end PPC machines are not using vector graphics. The PPC has built-in vector graphics routines not present on the Intel processors, so they can do many different types of graphics and transform routines a lot faster. (This may be why the high end Adobe programs aren't going to appear on the Intel Macs until 2007, after the 64 bit dual core Intel chips are shipping and may also be why the new Microsoft and Sony game consoles are PPC- based.) For the programs I use a lot, here's what happens: Mathematica -- the PPC machines are often much faster with what I do TeXshop -- the Intel machines are noticeably faster Firefox -- the Intel is a lot faster Safari -- the Intel is a little faster Perl scripts -- Intel is noticeably faster With most programs, there isn't very much difference because most of the time the program is just sitting there waiting for you to do something. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://www.math.louisville.edu/pipermail/macgroup/attachments/20060628/25a140e0/attachment.html -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: smime.p7s Type: application/pkcs7-signature Size: 2398 bytes Desc: not available Url : http://www.math.louisville.edu/pipermail/macgroup/attachments/20060628/25a140e0/attachment.bin
