chao's clips tagged benchmarks

Rosetta versus Native Adobe

chao — Sat, 15 Apr 2006 01:22:26 -0000

Clipped by chao to decide if I should buy a MacBook Pro

Adobe Apps Languish on
Intel Macs

Posted March 31st, 2006, by rob-ART morgan, mad scientist

I've been asked often to characterize the performance of Adobe applications like Photoshop and After Effects running under Rosetta on the Intel based MacBook Pro and iMac Core Duo. You see, only Adobe's Lightroom Beta runs in Universal Binary.

So to illustrate relative performance of Adobe apps running under Rosetta, we tested Photoshop CS2 and After Effects 7 on three systems.
GRAPH LEGEND:
MacBook Pro CD/2.0 -- Apple Intel MacBook Pro with 2.0GHz Core Duo and 2GB of memory
PowerMac G5/2.0 -- Apple Dual Single-Core G5/2.0GHz Power Mac with 2GB of memory
PowerBook G4/1.67 -- Apple PowerBook G4/1.67GHz with 2GB of memory

MacBook Pro 2.0 versus PowerBook, iMac Core Duo, and Power Mac

chao — Wed, 22 Mar 2006 00:24:52 -0000

Clipped by chao to decide if I should buy a MacBook Pro

GRAPH LEGEND:
Dual Core G5/2.0 -- Apple Dual Core G5/2.0GHz Power Mac, 2GB of 533MHz memory and GeForce 6600LE with 128MB VRAM
iMac Core Duo 2.0 -- Apple Intel iMac with 2.0GHz Core Duo, 2GB of 667MHz memory and Radeon 1600 GPU with 128MB VRAM
MacBook Pro 2.0 -- Apple Intel MacBook Pro with 2.0GHz Core Duo, 2GB of 667MHz memory and Radeon X1600 Mobility GPU with 256MB VRAM
MacBook Solo 2.0 -- Apple Intel MacBook Pro with 2.0GHz Core Duo (with one core disabled using C.H.U.D.), 2GB of 667MHz memory and Radeon X1600 Mobility GPU with 256MB VRAM
PowerBook 2.0 -- Apple PowerBook G4/1.5GHz with 2.0GHz 7447A upgrade from Daystar Technology. Includes 2GB of 333MHz DDR memory and Radeon 9700 Mobility GPU with 128MB VRAM.

(NOTE: Adobe Photoshop CS is NOT Universal Binary and therefore performs "weakly" on the Intel Core Duo machines. This will be true of any non-UB application you will be using on an Intel Mac. Some non-UB applications won't work at all. This includes Apple's Final Cut Pro, Motion, and other Pro apps -- which are supposed to go UB by the end of March 2006.)

Compare how the G4 PowerBook does in comparison to the MacBook Pro on both Photoshop graphs.

NOW FOR SOME GRAPHICS INTENSIVE APPS....
CORE IMAGE TESTS

3D OPENGL APPS

NON- UP 3D OPENGL APPS (Note how poorly the MacBook performs when the 3D game is NOT Universal Binary. The PowerBook G4 beats it.)

ArsTechnica review

chao — Fri, 03 Mar 2006 07:56:56 -0000

Clipped by chao to decide if I should buy a MacBook Pro

MacBook Pro Geekbeched at Geek Patrol

chao — Fri, 24 Feb 2006 19:15:22 -0000

Clipped by chao to decide if I should buy a MacBook Pro

e’re using the baseline scores (not the raw scores) from each benchmark, so in all cases a higher score is better. We’ve computed the MacBook Pro’s score as a percentage of the PowerBook G4’s score, and again, higher is better.

It’s worth mentioning that Geekbench is a universal binary and does not measure Rosetta performance at all.

Results

Benchmark	Threads	PowerBook G4	MacBook Pro
Emulate 6502	1	76	161 (211%)
Emulate 6502	4	75	344 (458%)
Blowfish	1	232	292 (125%)
Blowfish	4	186	556 (298%)
bzip2 Compress	1	82	129 (157%)
bzip2 Compress	4	81	244 (301%)
bzip2 Decompress	1	69	120 (173%)
bzip2 Decompress	4	67	255 (380%)
Mandelbrot	1	67	124 (185%)
Mandelbrot	4	67	277 (413%)
Latency	1	79	520 (658%)
Read Sequential	1	43	277 (644%)
Write Sequential	1	71	140 (197%)
Stdlib Allocate	1	171	141 (82%)
Stdlib Allocate	4	171	143 (83%)
Stdlib Write	1	31	134 (432%)
Stdlib Copy	1	38	166 (436%)
Stream Copy	1	29	113 (389%)
Stream Scale	1	29	115 (396%)
Stream Add	1	19	183 (963%)
Stream Triad	1	19	169 (889%)

Conclusion

The MacBook Pro outperformed the PowerBook G4 in almost every benchmark (especially the multi-threaded benchmarks). Since all of the MacBook Pro’s baseline scores are over 100, it even outperformed our baseline system, a Power Mac G5 1.6GHz! The only benchmark where the PowerBook G4 outperformed the MacBook Pro, Stdlib Allocate, depends more on library performance than raw hardware performance.

chao's clips tagged benchmarks

Rosetta versus Native Adobe

Adobe Apps Languish on Intel Macs

MacBook Pro 2.0 versus PowerBook, iMac Core Duo, and Power Mac

ArsTechnica review

More benchmarks

MacBook Pro Geekbeched at Geek Patrol

Results

Conclusion

Adobe Apps Languish on
Intel Macs