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Intel indicators At the end of last month we mentioned that we would love to hear from anyone out there with a new Intel Mac who has tried out our software. One of our users with a shiny new 2 GHz MacBook Pro was kind enough to run Magic Dice on his new system and send us the usage log. Thanks to the built-in benchmarking in framework we now have some data on how our current non-universal applications compare on the new Macs running under Rosetta vs. running natively on a 2 GHz PowerPC based iMac G5. We started by comparing the time it takes Magic Dice to launch. This is broken down into two values. The first is the time it takes for the framework startup processes to complete. On the iMac G5 this happens in approximately 2.31 seconds. On the MacBook Pro it happens in approximately 3.54 seconds. The second is the time it takes for the application-specific setup to complete. On the iMac G5 this takes about 0.23 seconds, on the MacBook Pro about 1.37 seconds. So all in all a 1.23 second difference on the framework startup and 1.14 seconds on the application-specific setup for a combined total of 2.37 seconds. While only Magic Dice is currently built on framework and can provide such data, it is likely that there is a similar difference for our other applications as well. Next we moved on to the help system. First we compared how long it takes for the help window to open and display the help topics. The iMac G5 handles this in just 0.05 seconds. The MacBook Pro isn't far behind at 0.06 seconds. Then we decided to compare how long it would take to search the help content for the word "shareware". Remember, the help system in framework searches as you type. For this reason we'll show the individual results of the search of each character that was typed as well as the combined total. On the iMac G5 the results were: 0.09, 0.06, 0.04, 0.04, 0.03, 0.05, 0.03, 0.03 and 0.04 for a combined total of 0.41 seconds. On the MacBook Pro the results were: 0.10, 0.09, 0.09, 0.08, 0.08, 0.08, 0.09, 0.07, and 0.07 for a combined total of 1.15 seconds. Finally, we closed the search and waited for it to display the full list of help topics again. On the iMac G5 this takes 0.03 seconds. On the MacBook Pro it takes 0.05 seconds. Overall, we're pretty impressed with the speed of our applications in Rosetta on the Intel Mac based on these results. Of course, your mileage may vary. Even in our own tests here we found minor variations of the iMac G5 results if we launched the application a few more times and opened help and ran the same search. The above is simply provided to offer a general sense of what new Intel Mac users can expect to see as a speed difference in our current applications. If you have a different Mac and want to see how these results compare to your machine, you can download a copy of Magic Dice, open up the Mac OS X console utility, and then launch Magic Dice and find out for yourself. |
February 2006: |
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