As I'm wrting this, I'm waiting for my macbook pro to be delivered. Now everyone's probably read one or two or three articles on how fast the new Macs are compared to their Power-processor siblings. Even weird comments that the new Macs may be more vulnerable to viruses now that they've transitioned to Intel. Its time to dispel all this!
What makes a computer a computer? You could probably say its the processor, stupid! well that may have been true in the past, (and i use may in the heaviest sense) but today's screaming babies, require a symphony of all the parts--- ram, hard drive, system bus i/o, graphics card and Operating System to produce a well built machine. yet we still get stuck with the ghz question. every machine with a faster clock speed is deemed good. yet we have seen benchmarks of amd64s out pacing intel p4s.
lets look at the mac, because thats what we've set out to do. is it really conceivable that the G5s are slow? what was all that hoopla that the g5 was the best processor on the planet (at least when it was born having won a microprocessor award way back when). Yet we have benchmarks from macworld and from so many others that say the dual-core cpus of the new iMacs best or at the least equal the performance of the single core G5 (a 64-bit machine).
its hard to compare apples-to-apples when Core Duo is a 32-bit, dual core processor and the G5 is a 64-bit, single core machine (on the iMac). Not to mention, Core Duo is x86 and G5 is PowerPC. they're two very distinct species.
We can also argue that OSX for the G5 was compiled to run both 32-bit and 64-bit code while for OSX for x86 (at least the core duo version) was compiled with dual-core and 32-bit code. If you've ever tried to build your own Operating System i.e. compiled Gentoo Linux on multiple platforms (AMD64 and Intel) you would know that you can optimize for each distinct processor family using the C compiler you've got. Hence that benchmarks comparing the two machines are not very scientific.
That said, we can argue that user perception is always superior. After all, does the average faithful care if you have better floating point performance on one processor than the other or that you run on an Intel rather than a PowerPC? Steve Jobs said it in last year's developer conferrence (2005), it's OSX that people love. Its what Mac users love about their macs. the Hardware underneath makes it possible for Apple to give the user a distinct, powerful, user experience because they don't have to worry that multiple hardware must work with OSX like Microsoft does.
[off topic: Which leads to the question whether OSX will ever run on other intel machines. it probably wouldn't because the cost of maintaining code for different drivers would drive apple to be like microsoft. ]
So what do these benchmark tell us? That the Core Duo machine will equal or slightly exceed the performance of a single core G5, at least in raw speed. hence that iMac G5 you bought before christmas, is still good and will still do the job, two years down the road. That Quad Mac is still the fastest kid on the block. That these new machines, will just give life to people who need new mobile macs and that the good stuff is yet to come. OSX still rules.
As for viruses and such now that OSX has moved to Intel, viruses, trojans and so many other security breaches are Operating System-level problems. They're vulnerabilities in Windows, in Linux, in Unix and yes, OSX. It got nothing to do with which processor your OS is running on.
People write in windows viruses and such because a) a lot of machines are on windows so more people have access to them, hence the probability of more trash, b) windows was never designed for the network in the first place so security wasn't a major issue that they had to address which they are doing so only now, c) its much more difficult but not impossible to exploit vulnerabilities in Unixes like Linux and OSX and when we say vulnerabilities we're not limiting ourselves to operating system/kernel level flaws but applications as well (which should be separated btw).
i ordered the new macbook pro because i need a new machine, a unix based machine that will let me do my work in peace and in full power as well as have good multimedia features like iTunes, which gentoo doesn't have sadly. people who need new machines now would probably get them but those who can wait probably should for the better toys sure to come (we speculate by reading the Intel roadmap which tells us what ought to come in the next few months).
So what does Intel on Macs mean for us ordinary people? its OSX that makes the difference. so unless you buy a Mac, on Intel or Power--- nothing.
What makes a computer a computer? You could probably say its the processor, stupid! well that may have been true in the past, (and i use may in the heaviest sense) but today's screaming babies, require a symphony of all the parts--- ram, hard drive, system bus i/o, graphics card and Operating System to produce a well built machine. yet we still get stuck with the ghz question. every machine with a faster clock speed is deemed good. yet we have seen benchmarks of amd64s out pacing intel p4s.
lets look at the mac, because thats what we've set out to do. is it really conceivable that the G5s are slow? what was all that hoopla that the g5 was the best processor on the planet (at least when it was born having won a microprocessor award way back when). Yet we have benchmarks from macworld and from so many others that say the dual-core cpus of the new iMacs best or at the least equal the performance of the single core G5 (a 64-bit machine).
its hard to compare apples-to-apples when Core Duo is a 32-bit, dual core processor and the G5 is a 64-bit, single core machine (on the iMac). Not to mention, Core Duo is x86 and G5 is PowerPC. they're two very distinct species.
We can also argue that OSX for the G5 was compiled to run both 32-bit and 64-bit code while for OSX for x86 (at least the core duo version) was compiled with dual-core and 32-bit code. If you've ever tried to build your own Operating System i.e. compiled Gentoo Linux on multiple platforms (AMD64 and Intel) you would know that you can optimize for each distinct processor family using the C compiler you've got. Hence that benchmarks comparing the two machines are not very scientific.
That said, we can argue that user perception is always superior. After all, does the average faithful care if you have better floating point performance on one processor than the other or that you run on an Intel rather than a PowerPC? Steve Jobs said it in last year's developer conferrence (2005), it's OSX that people love. Its what Mac users love about their macs. the Hardware underneath makes it possible for Apple to give the user a distinct, powerful, user experience because they don't have to worry that multiple hardware must work with OSX like Microsoft does.
[off topic: Which leads to the question whether OSX will ever run on other intel machines. it probably wouldn't because the cost of maintaining code for different drivers would drive apple to be like microsoft. ]
So what do these benchmark tell us? That the Core Duo machine will equal or slightly exceed the performance of a single core G5, at least in raw speed. hence that iMac G5 you bought before christmas, is still good and will still do the job, two years down the road. That Quad Mac is still the fastest kid on the block. That these new machines, will just give life to people who need new mobile macs and that the good stuff is yet to come. OSX still rules.
As for viruses and such now that OSX has moved to Intel, viruses, trojans and so many other security breaches are Operating System-level problems. They're vulnerabilities in Windows, in Linux, in Unix and yes, OSX. It got nothing to do with which processor your OS is running on.
People write in windows viruses and such because a) a lot of machines are on windows so more people have access to them, hence the probability of more trash, b) windows was never designed for the network in the first place so security wasn't a major issue that they had to address which they are doing so only now, c) its much more difficult but not impossible to exploit vulnerabilities in Unixes like Linux and OSX and when we say vulnerabilities we're not limiting ourselves to operating system/kernel level flaws but applications as well (which should be separated btw).
i ordered the new macbook pro because i need a new machine, a unix based machine that will let me do my work in peace and in full power as well as have good multimedia features like iTunes, which gentoo doesn't have sadly. people who need new machines now would probably get them but those who can wait probably should for the better toys sure to come (we speculate by reading the Intel roadmap which tells us what ought to come in the next few months).
So what does Intel on Macs mean for us ordinary people? its OSX that makes the difference. so unless you buy a Mac, on Intel or Power--- nothing.
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