[Ti] The Benchmarks

[Greg Chapel]

>The good news: most of these benchmarks don't mean shit in the real world.
>
>These over-clocked pentiums, or centrinos, or whatever, are a case in
>point. Let's see how they do after not being rebooted for a couple of
>weeks, (very theoretical now, given Windows' penchant for reboots)
>and give them some full-screen (external monitor 22", millions of
>colors... 'full') and let 'em take a whack at 18 hours of d-e-e-p
>Photoshop and PhotoRetouch Pro renders.

Look, I support Apple as much as the next guy. I love my TI 800 even though
it isn't the speediest machine in town. These tests were put up by barefeats
who also love Apple products. Nobody was trying to turn this into a Windows
vs. Mac, lets jump all over Microsoft romp!

However, the Centrino package of hardware includes the new Pentium-M. You
have to give intel credit on this particular chip. It is cheap. It is clock
cycle per clock cycle as fast or faster than the G4 PPC. It is extremely low
power and cool. This is a good chip.

Windows has nothing to do with the hardware. If I had a Pentium-M based
laptop, I would probably run Linux or FreeBSD.

My comment was that the Pro-line of laptops really could use the boost from
a high performance 64 bit G5 chip. The G4 has just become to slow and
expensive to be used in future pro-line machines.

Right now, according to these few bench marks, the low-end Centrino at 1.3
Ghz was keeping up with and beating the pro-line Apple 1.33 Ghz 17"on cpu
related tasks.

Make of it what you will, but I would think that most pro-line users are
also performance oriented and they expect pro models to perform better than
low-end entry level doorstop machines.

Greg