Buying an Imac

markfc

Registered
Hi,

I'm purchasing an Imac and was wondering if I should get the G5 or the Intel Core Duo. From what the apple site says, it looks like the new Duo is a lot faster, although I've been told that the Duo is not a 64bit Processor.

Is MacOS x for Intel 32 bit?

Sorry really confused guy here moving from Windows!

Thanks

Mark
 
I agree with Burns. You'd be hard pressed to find anyone who disagrees, really.

True, the Core Duo is a 32-bit processor, whereas the G5 is 64-bit. But that really amounts to very little. Virtually all OS X programs are 32-bit anyway. As of now, OS X is not a fully 64-bit OS, no matter what processor it's running on. And even if it were, it wouldn't make all that big a difference. There are only a handful of programs, like Mathematica, that really make use of the G5's wider pipe.

And once those apps are optimized for the new machines, it's quite possible that they'll be faster anyway.

You might say that 64-bit is the future (it's inevitable, really), but Intel is the more relevant future. I imagine that the iMac G5 will become obsolete because it's PPC-based a lot sooner than the Core Duo will become obsolete because it's 32-bit.

If I were to buy an iMac, I'd get the Core Duo, and I wouldn't think twice about it.
 
no-one really knows just yet. i wouldn't have thought that the intel mac would be faster than a ppc mac running pshop just yet though.
 
The test looked pretty fast, though. I guess it's down to a real-world test by ArsTechnica or someone else who gets their hand on an iMac soon with Photoshop CS 2 installed.
 
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