Apple's Mac Pro - A True PowerMac Successor

iLife '06 Performance with iPhoto, iMovie HD and iDVD

One of the benefits of OS X and Apple's application suites is that most of the applications are already properly threaded. Even though you wouldn't expect it, iPhoto is threaded quite well and thus our import photos test gets a speedup from going to quad cores.

The test is simple; we timed the import of 379 photos into iPhoto which, believe it or not, is quite CPU intensive and not as I/O bound as you'd think. After we got the time we divided it into 379 to get the number of pictures imported per second. We included the performance of a hypothetical dual core Mac Pro in addition to the native quad offerings in order to provide a good point of comparison to the dual processor PowerMac G5s.

Although there's a slight performance boost when going from dual to quad core (6.9%), this test is largely dependent on clock speed within a single microprocessor architecture. Comparing the Woodcrest based Xeons to the older G5s is no contest, at 2.0GHz the Mac Pro is already 14% faster than the 2.5GHz PowerMac G5; even if we account for the dual vs. quad core comparison, the 2.0GHz Mac Pro is still noticeably faster than the G5.

The next application we looked at was iMovie HD. 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. We focused on the latter, measuring the time it takes to render the most CPU intensive transition and video effect in iMovie HD.

Our Macs have gotten a little too fast for the billow transition test, as the Mac Pro 2.66GHz can now complete the test in 3 seconds flat. All of the Mac Pros here are faster than the PowerMac G5s, which is what we'd expect given what we learned in the iMac Core Duo vs. iMac G5 article.

Rendering the "Electricity" Video FX sees no benefit going from dual to quad cores, but the Mac Pro doesn't need it as the 2.0GHz configuration is already 26.5% faster than the PowerMac G5 2.5GHz.

Finally we've got 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 our 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. This workload is multithreaded.

The benchmark gets just under 11% thanks to the 4 cores in the Mac Pro, but even without them the Mac Pro 2.66GHz is able to outperform the PowerMac G5 2.5GHz by just under 13%. The Xeon seems to scale much better with clock speed in this test than the G5.