C
Clive Huggan
Dear all,
If you're considering using Office on an Intel-powered Mac, you'll find a
lot to interest you in the MacTECH article at
www.mactech.com/articles/mactech/Vol.22/22.05/Office2004Benchmark/
It's a very thorough article. Some clips:
"It appeared to us that the more modern the application, the better it did
under Rosetta. Furthermore, the more that something used the underlying Mac
OS, the better it did as well. For example, Entourage did very well with
networking related items. Raw imports and opening did significantly better
especially when a faster disk was involved.
And, the more times you did a function, the better it performed especially
on the second iteration of a command. While it's difficult to confirm, this
is due to a combination of code working smarter with caches, both in Rosetta
as well as within the Office code base. An obvious benefit for those tasks
that are most sensitive to time: the repetitive ones."
....
"WORD
.... for productivity tasks, Word on MacBook Pro performed at 82% of the
speed of a PowerBook G4, and on an Intel iMac at 92%. In a real life
scenario, these numbers put Word at working pretty well. There's not much a
perceptual difference for most tasks.
The end result is that while there are a couple of areas that a user may
notice it's slower, Word works well on a MacBook Pro; and, on the Intel
iMac, it works very well, under Rosetta."
....
This was the comment on the Intel-powered Mac models:
"The one thing that we did see across the board is that the Intel iMac is
consistently faster than the MacBook Pro. Since the iMac had slightly less
RAM, and the processor and front side bus speeds are the same, we looked
further inside. The iMac has some pretty serious sub-systems design to make
it a screaming machine (see
<http://developer.apple.com/documentation/HardwareDrivers/Conceptual/iMac_06
Jan/>. When you take into account that an iMac has SATA (instead of ATA), a
faster hard drive (a 7200 vs. the MacBook Pro's 5400 rpm), and a variety of
optimized sub-systems that would be more difficult to implement on a laptop,
it's easy to see why the iMac is faster.
It's important to realize that many of the actions that users do when using
these applications are so fast already, that even a degradation of 50% may
not even be noticeable for most tasks. And in the non-repetitive tasks, they
are nearly irrelevant. For example, if when launching an application, you
have to wait several seconds, many users will notice, but it won't matter to
their overall productivity.
Other areas, like repetitive tasks or editing actions, are far more
important, and speed makes a great deal more difference in not only
perception, but in productivity."
Cheers,
Clive Huggan
Canberra, Australia
(My time zone is 5-11 hours different from the US and Europe, so my
follow-on responses to those regions can be delayed)
============================================================
If you're considering using Office on an Intel-powered Mac, you'll find a
lot to interest you in the MacTECH article at
www.mactech.com/articles/mactech/Vol.22/22.05/Office2004Benchmark/
It's a very thorough article. Some clips:
"It appeared to us that the more modern the application, the better it did
under Rosetta. Furthermore, the more that something used the underlying Mac
OS, the better it did as well. For example, Entourage did very well with
networking related items. Raw imports and opening did significantly better
especially when a faster disk was involved.
And, the more times you did a function, the better it performed especially
on the second iteration of a command. While it's difficult to confirm, this
is due to a combination of code working smarter with caches, both in Rosetta
as well as within the Office code base. An obvious benefit for those tasks
that are most sensitive to time: the repetitive ones."
....
"WORD
.... for productivity tasks, Word on MacBook Pro performed at 82% of the
speed of a PowerBook G4, and on an Intel iMac at 92%. In a real life
scenario, these numbers put Word at working pretty well. There's not much a
perceptual difference for most tasks.
The end result is that while there are a couple of areas that a user may
notice it's slower, Word works well on a MacBook Pro; and, on the Intel
iMac, it works very well, under Rosetta."
....
This was the comment on the Intel-powered Mac models:
"The one thing that we did see across the board is that the Intel iMac is
consistently faster than the MacBook Pro. Since the iMac had slightly less
RAM, and the processor and front side bus speeds are the same, we looked
further inside. The iMac has some pretty serious sub-systems design to make
it a screaming machine (see
<http://developer.apple.com/documentation/HardwareDrivers/Conceptual/iMac_06
Jan/>. When you take into account that an iMac has SATA (instead of ATA), a
faster hard drive (a 7200 vs. the MacBook Pro's 5400 rpm), and a variety of
optimized sub-systems that would be more difficult to implement on a laptop,
it's easy to see why the iMac is faster.
It's important to realize that many of the actions that users do when using
these applications are so fast already, that even a degradation of 50% may
not even be noticeable for most tasks. And in the non-repetitive tasks, they
are nearly irrelevant. For example, if when launching an application, you
have to wait several seconds, many users will notice, but it won't matter to
their overall productivity.
Other areas, like repetitive tasks or editing actions, are far more
important, and speed makes a great deal more difference in not only
perception, but in productivity."
Cheers,
Clive Huggan
Canberra, Australia
(My time zone is 5-11 hours different from the US and Europe, so my
follow-on responses to those regions can be delayed)
============================================================