macworld.com — Macworld Lab?s tests do show that the new Intel-based iMac is faster than the iMac G5 when running native applications. However, we found that those improvements are generally much less than what Apple claims is a 2x improvement in speed.
Jan 18, 2006 View in Crawl 4
paulmetzgerJan 19, 2006
oh my god, stop the presses! Real world performance isn't as good as raw number crunching using an optimized build? whooda thunkit?
chetmanciniJan 19, 2006
Now who thought that the iMac would be 3x faster? In the keynote it was obvious to anyone watching that those were for integer and float calculations, completely different from real world performance benchmarks.
ggriffitJan 19, 2006
Yeah well, this is good news. It's a hair faster than the G5 which was SUPER fast.Think of how great the difference will be when they put it right next to a PowerBook G4. I'm running a 1.33 and they'll probably compare it to the newest 1.67 (which is a bit faster than mine.) I'm really excited!
gohepcatJan 19, 2006
"You are obviously not much of a gamer if you think that a game would put any serious load on the MAIN PROECESSOR. They just dont."rOhh man. That's going to bite you in the ass. Games stress the main processor just as much as they stress the GPU (more if you are playing at lower resolutions). This is obviously coming from a Mac person with no grasp on modern gaming. A simple look at Tom's Hardware, HardOCP, Thresh's, or any other gaming site will back this up.
wingsJan 19, 2006
"...most of these tests are single threaded" isn't true. All the iLife apps that I've run on my Quad show ALL FOUR processors humping along at full tilt when doing anything intensive. I don't have a Duo in front of me but I'm sure that those apps are using both cores as well.
dracula7Jan 20, 2006
right, this was apples choice (and a good one at that). time warp to 7 months ago:<a class="user" href="http://news.com.com/Apple+to+ditch+IBM,+switch+to+Intel+chips/2100-1006_3-5731398.html">http://news.com.com/Apple+to+ditch+IBM,+switch+to+Intel+chips/2100-1006_3-5731398.html</a>
Closed AccountJan 30, 2006
Well it's more like 1.3 to 1.4x faster a far cry from the 2x faster apple claims and that's vs the single G5 2.1GHz .Hardly impressive and not worth the cost of buying a new machine and enduring a platform switch.The core duo is two pentium M cores not one I saw a pic of the accual chip so yes it's rather unimpressive a two core chip beating a single core chip by 40% and thats with a much better graphics card handling the quartz GUI. Apple laid an egg on the processor choice as they could have used a low volt version of the P4 6xx series , the sempron 64 or the athlon 64 mobile all of which are powerful yet cool running chips.I'd wait until the next version on the imac since the core duo is very much dead how much longer will IA-32 be supported ?I find it inexcusable since even semprons and celeron Ds are 64 bits now apple could have made progress If they skipped completely over IA-32 and went with X86-64 from the start .From a software engineering stand point avoiding ia-32 altogether would have given them advantage over Microsoft's windows vista in not having to support the 32bit instructions etc as X86-64 fixed many of the problems that existed in IA-32 such as registry shortages 16 vs 8 and cleared much of the cruft from the old days .
notforgamesMay 16, 2006
This was hilarious the first time around. Now it's just annoying.I honestly thought that most of you were joking when you started mentioning gaming on Apple Computers.Macs are meant for people that do real work on a computer. Gaming is for 15 year-olds, not grown peoplewho have a say in what kind of computer they are going to buy. When you buy a Mac, you are buying a workhorse; a reliable computer that will put up with a pounding. These computers are built for professionals,video and audio editors, and for people that know the value of a superior machine when they see it. For gaming, I would suggest buying a P.C. Run Windows, have a ball, but when you get tired of hitting control-alt-delete, and feel like taking out your rage through poorly worded comments on this thread, take into account that there are people in here that use computers for work, not play. Also take into account your argument, because arguing that games run poorly on a Mac is like arguing that Gasoline runs poorly in a Diesel engine. In all, I think this stupid rivalry between Windows users and Mac users needs to end. I have a good bet running that Windows is soon to become a new version of OS X.