| Saturday, February 9, 2002 |
13:06 - There's nothing to worry about...
http://www.apple.com/powermac/
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I was in Elite Computers yesterday over lunch, oogling over the one display iMac they have until they start shipping in quantity (around the end of the month) and I can take one across the street for my new desk machine.
They did, however, have one of the dual-1GHz PowerMacs on display, with a Cinema Display and all the trimmings; I thought I'd fiddle around with it and see how well it trotted. Forget Quake frame-rates and so on, I want to know how fast it loads apps and switches windows and stuff.
Well, DDR RAM or no DDR RAM, this thing is a monster. I didn't have a stopwatch or anything, but I got a good subjective idea of how it moves-- I'm used to my single-450 G4 at home, where in order to launch IE, it goes "click"... 2 seconds, then "title card", then two seconds, then full browser up and ready. Not unusably slow, but I've certainly seen better. (A fair comparison on Windows, by the way, would be launching Netscape from a cold start-- because IE is now effectively a kernel process, meaning that it launches as instantly as a folder window.)
So on the dual-1GHz box, from click to title card to ready, takes about as much time as it takes to say "click-titlecard-ready" as fast as intelligibly possible.
Launching QuickTime? "click...up". Launching Sherlock? "click...up". Launching iTunes? "click....up."
This thing's a frickin' beast, and it will definitely hold its own until the G5s are here-- at which time the 400MHz system bus will make even DDR seem slow. (Imagine, DDR RAM on a 400MHz bus-- 800MHz RAM...)
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