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Intel iMac and Benchmarks

Wednesday, January 25, 2006

With all the hoopla going around the inter-web about how the new Intel iMacs aren't '2x as fast' as the G5 version is I thought I'd through in some anecdotal evidence to the contrary. We just spent an afternoon vectorizing (read: altivec'ing) some pretty intense image processing code with some interesting results. Granted, the benchmarks I'm about to post are using floats which Intel has always had an edge on, but it shows just how powerful the new iMacs are.

Processing a 6.6 MB image (no, I'm not going to get into the details of how it's processing) the results are:

Dual 2.0 Ghz G5 = 0.175325 seconds
Dual Core 1.83 iMac Intel Core Duo = 0.029800 seconds

That's almost a 6x speed increase on a 'slower & less powerful' machine. Color me impressed.

NOTE: Updated figures based on new more accurate measurements. The Intel still has a marked improvement.

cheers, will

comments posted at 1:59 PM

Comments:

Reply by Online Degree : 3:12 PM

Congratulations on making it as a "blog of note".

Reply by Online Degree : 3:14 PM

Oh, and thanks for the benchmark on the new Intel iMac... pretty cool.

Reply by tech jedi : 11:57 PM

Hi ES,

I work in Australia in IT in an organisation which has 300+ macs and several x-serves. Its very interesting about the benchmarks I was hoping it was true and I believe you have the intel to prove it. Great! Check out my blog and let your audience see it if you will, you can all leave your experiences its amazing to all the mac and other techo's and technos out there check it out... www.phenomenajedi.blogspot.com

Graeme Kelly
IT Services
Australia

Reply by Anonymous : 2:02 AM

Posted on Emzen.com

Reply by Speed42 : 10:16 PM

anecdotal, btw, not antidotal, unless it's poisonous or something.

Reply by Chad Smith : 10:33 AM

I love the new IntelMacs - I hope to get one myself soon. And as soon as I do - I'll put GIMPShop on it.

Reply by Chad Smith : 10:34 AM

OOps - oh yeah, and OpenOffice.org too, since NeoOffice doesn't work on IntelMacs yet.