new intel macs but old apps

Z

zoranb

Registered
What happens with the perforrmance of the older apps, Pshop, Illu etc when running on an Intel iMac?
 
by all accounts, acceptable. i mean we're not talking blinding benchmark thrashing, but actually really quite usable performance, it would seem. many people are still using G4/450mhz etc for intensive graphics work, and they get along fine. these new intel macs would probably rival G4's in the 500-900mhz range, i would guess, but you would have to take into account it would be a G3 667mhz, for example. it wouldn't have all the altivec extension capabilites etc.

workable.
 
Older, PowerPC-only applications will run in an emulation layer called "Rosetta" which is completely transparent to the user. They will run slightly slower than they would on a native PowerPC machine.

By all means, though, they will be very usable. If you use PhotoShop in a production/professional environment, I don't know if Rosetta will cut it, but for casual use of PowerPC programs, it will be just fine.

To say that one application will run at precisely 86% of its native speed and another application will run at 76% of its native speed is just impossible to do. You can't put an exact number on Rosetta and make a blanket statement like "all apps running under Rosetta will run at 85% of their native speed." The speed hit will vary from application to application, but Rosetta is great technology and will run older PowerPC applications at a usable, decent speed.
 
zoranb said:
in fewer words then? (workable is not acceptable)
Click to expand...


yes it will work. yes you will be able to work on it. you will not be able to thrash someone in a race of photoshop actions, as it just isn't that good. but it is very impressive technology, that invisibly decompiles the PPC code and recompiles as it as intel code.

the truth is though that no-one on here really knows what it's going to be like. noone's used it. i would expect it to work as well as an old emac. we had old emacs in uni (1ghz i think), and they worked a charm. i did all of my early uni work on them, quite happily.
 
We can only guess for now.

My best guess is that all PPC apps will be slower on these new Intel machines than on the machines they replaced. That's pretty safe to say.

There are several kinds of apps to consider, though, and the performance will vary. Apps optimized for G4s will suffer a greater performance hit, because Rosetta emulates the G3 only.

And I have not heard anything about if/how Rosetta handles multiple processors/cores. It's possible it'll use the two cores on the new Intel chips just like it would on a Mac, which would help the Intel Macs make up the speed difference, since the Macs they replaced had only one core each. But it's also possible it won't use the second core at all. After all, there's no such thing as a multi-processor G3 system. Also, most apps that are really optimized for multiple processors/cores are optimized for G4s and G5s, so I'm not sure how that would translate anyway. Time will tell. My guess is that Rosetta will use the second core; however, it's possible apps like Photoshop are written to use single-core routines when they detect G3s, which would make the point moot. Again, time will tell.

Bottom line: We'll have to wait until users and review labs get their hands on these things and do REAL tests. Apple has not offered any benchmarks on this stuff. They've only said that Office runs well (and that's to be expected).
 
Mikuro said:
There are several kinds of apps to consider, though, and the performance will vary. Apps optimized for G4s will suffer a greater performance hit, because Rosetta emulates the G3 only.
Click to expand...
Not true -- it was announced on Tuesday that Rosetta has AltiVec optimizations.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top