Apple's Mac Pro - A True PowerMac Successor

Rosetta Performance (or lack thereof)

With no Universal Binary versions of Adobe or Microsoft applications, you're bound to run into something that isn't native on the Mac Pro.  Of course if there's performance to be lost, we're there to benchmark it. 

First off, let's look at our Word HTML conversion test.  Note that this test used to crash on earlier builds of OS X, but Apple has thankfully fixed the problem so it now completes.  The only other problem is that it takes a long time to complete:

The fastest Mac Pro configuration we tested took about three times as long to complete this test as the PowerMac G5, and that's about how things feel when you're running a Rosetta application.  The application is always bearable, but it feels like everything takes 2 - 3x as long as it would if it were native. 

Next up we ran PSBench under Photoshop CS2 and came away with some more interesting results:

The PowerMac G5 is still faster, overall it completed all of the tasks about 32% faster than the dual core Mac Pro 2.66GHz but comparing it to the shipping quad core configuration closed that gap even more.  There were even some tests that the non-native Mac Pro could complete quicker than the PowerMac G5, which bodes well for how fast the Mac Pro will be when Photoshop CS3 eventually comes out. 

Overall, Rosetta has gotten better in terms of stability, but performance is still no where near native G5 performance on average (nor did anyone expect it to be).  You can get by using Rosetta, but it will irritate you especially if you're using any Universal Binary applications on a regular basis as the difference in performance is fairly apparent.