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February 16, 2006
Intel iMac Performance
I can describe this in one phrase: it sucks.
Big time.
The marketing waffle about 2-4 times faster is an absolute crock.
How do I know? Well me employer has supplied me with a beautiful 20" iMac CoreDuo with 2Gb of memory. The first thing I did was copy some data off my antiquated PowerBook G4. It took forever. In fact it was sooooooo slooooow that I gave up, copied the data to an external firewire drive and then plugged that into the iMac so that I could keep working on the PowerBook.
The copy to the drive was quick (thanks to SuperDuper) but the copy onto the iMac over firewire was abysmal. The key problem was not the *time* but the side effects. Two folders copied in parallel effectively stopped the finder from updating anything anymore. Files downloaded via firefox were completely invisible to the finder. Changes made in finder windows just didn't happen (although you could see the changes in a terminal window with ls). Basically, it looks like the Finder suspended all graphical updates until after the 45 minute copy had finished - not a very promising start.
Over the next few days, I will include more information as it comes to hand but right now I would suggest hanging onto your G5s and waiting until some of the performance issues have been addressed.
Posted by Ozguru at February 16, 2006 06:00 AM
