Apple's MacBook Pro: Using it as a Mac and a PC
by Anand Lal Shimpi on April 13, 2006 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Mac
Turning to the iLife suite of applications, we've got a subset of the tests I ran in my iMac Core Duo article:
"...iMovie HD, a part of the newly announced iLife '06. There are two primary focuses for performance in iMovie HD, video import speed (if you are dealing with a non-DV or non-iSight video source) and effect rendering speed. I focused on the latter, measuring the time it takes to render various transitions and video effects in iMovie HD."
The MacBook Pro's performance in CPU intensive iMovie HD effects is light-years ahead of the PowerBook G4, much like what we saw with the iMac Core Duo vs. the iMac G5. The Electricity video effect renders in less than half the time on the MacBook Pro than it does on the PowerBook G4. Since the iMovie HD effects aren't multi-threaded, there are no Core Solo performance numbers to report as it performs the same as a Core Duo.
Exporting our test movie to iDVD for creation, we've got the same iDVD test I used in the iMac Core Duo review:
"Next up is iDVD, an application that you can use to create DVDs that are playable on any consumer DVD player. There are once again two aspects to performance in iDVD, video encoding performance and menu encoding performance. Since we've already looked at video encoding performance with QuickTime, this test is predominantly limited by how long it takes to encode the menu system in my test DVD. There is a small 13 second iSight video and audio that's encoded in the process but it adds a matter of seconds to the overall time. The image is written to disc instead of sent to the DVD burner for obvious reasons. The results are expressed in seconds, lower being better. Once again, we are dealing with a multi-threaded workload, so both the Core Duo and Core Solo are present in the chart"
The performance advantage here is nearly 22% in favor of the MacBook Pro; even the Core Solo does a good job of outpacing the PowerBook G4.
Finishing off the iLife benchmarks is my iPhoto test, also taken from the previous article:
"The test is simple; I timed the import of all 379 photos into iPhoto which, believe it or not, is quite CPU intensive and not as I/O bound as you'd think. After I got the time I divided it into 379 to get the number of pictures imported per second. Like many operations in OS X, the iPhoto import process is multi-threaded, giving the Core Duo an inherent advantage over the G4 so I've included Core Solo performance in the chart below as well"
The numbers speak for themselves; the MacBook Pro is over twice as fast as the PowerBook G4 here, and with those types of performance increases you can most definitely tell by just using the system. The MacBook Pro is not only more responsive but it just gets everything done a lot quicker than the PowerBook G4.
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Calin - Thursday, April 13, 2006 - link
This could be thanks to slower drivers in BootCamp Windows XP, or slower hard drive access/speed. Everything else is a disadvantage for VM: one more level of indirection in disk access, less memory, running the OS X behind the VM.Could you do some disk speed comparation between VM and native XP?
BigLan - Thursday, April 13, 2006 - link
I think it's going to be hard drive speed throwing off the benchmarks. The BootCamp partition is going to be at the outer edge of the disk, with much slower speeds than the VM client virtual drive which is on the faster Apple partition.I'm not sure if it's possible to assign the entire HD to a windows partition using Bootcamp, but that's about the only way i can think of to level the playing field.
Calin - Friday, April 14, 2006 - link
To nitpick, it would be at the center of the hard drive, not at the outer edge :) (ok, based on sector numbers, which starts at the edge).Near the "end" of the hard drive, the transfer speed is reduced (there are fewer bytes on a full circle).
jimmy43 - Thursday, April 13, 2006 - link
Excellent Review. This may be my first laptop purchase, seems to have everything I could possibly want.monsoon - Thursday, April 13, 2006 - link
Hello Anand,...i'm waiting for Parallels to finalize their VT release and maybe Merom Macs too...
I was wondering if the ONE CORE only VT tech is to be the final result of their virtualization software or just a middle-step.
Seems to me it's rather poor a solution ( ok, it's the best out there for now ) to use a dual-core computer to run both OS on a single core
=/
Better would be smart distribution of tasks to the CPU depending on which OS is actually under load...
...any thoughts / info on that ?
Thanks for your nice review !=)
plinden - Thursday, April 13, 2006 - link
Looking at CPU load while running Parallels VM, I see the load spread evenly over both processors (usually < 10% total CPU except at boot, when it reaches 150% CPU). It's just that the VM itself sees itself as running on a single processor.
shuttleboi - Thursday, April 13, 2006 - link
I've read that the ATI X1600 in the Mac can run games well, but only IF you overclock the GPU. I can't imagine the Mac getting any hotter than it already supposedly is, and the idea of overclocking an already hot laptop is not appealing.JoKeRr - Thursday, April 13, 2006 - link
Overall I enjoyed it.Would have been nice to see a comparison of screen brightness, as apple claimed 67% brighter!
And also, the slowness in windows, could it be related to chipset driver stuff?? And what's the gaming experience so far like?? Would it be similar to a desktop 6600 or 6600gt??
Thank you.
rolls - Friday, April 14, 2006 - link
Very interesting numbers all round.35% improvement in iTunes when comparing a single core 1.5GHz 7447 with the old slow bus etc, and a new 33% faster dual core intel CPU. 50% improvement in H.264 encoding etc. These numbers suggest that had Apple stuck with Freescale and moved to e600 core based systems, performance figures could have been off the scale. If only...
JarredWalton - Thursday, April 13, 2006 - link
On paper the X1600 Pro desktop cards actually look pretty decent. 12 pipelines at 500 MHz, with 800 MHz RAM. I would have thought they would at least give the 6600GT a run for the money, given how X1800 compares to 7800. Amazingly (to me), the X1600 gets completely stomped by the 6600GT. What's worse, the cards I have can't even overclock worth a darn on the memory side - 800 is stock, and they get unstable at even minor changes. (Could be an issue with the overclocking tool, though?)Anyway, for now I would say X1600 Mobility is going to be somewhere in the realm of 6600 (non-GT) performance, maybe slightly faster. That means gaming is definitely possible, but you will want low-to-medium detail levels for any recent titles. Just a guess, of course, and Anand will have to run benches to get any final confirmation. Really, though, this laptop isn't intended as anything more than a light gaming solution.