On Oct 23, 2008, at 5:48 PM, Simon Royal wrote:

> A mate of mine has an 867Mhz PowerBook G4, the minimum for Leopard  
> and it
> runs a dream on it. It should run more than fine on a 1.67Ghz.

The highest XBench score for a PowerBook 867 MHz running Leopard was  
28.68. The corresponding highest Tiger score was 44.18. If XBench is a  
reliable metric, Tiger is 54% faster on average than Leopard. Whatever  
advantages Leopard may have, I don't think they're worth a 54% speed  
penalty.

> Whatever you run it on, if you had Tiger on it previously you will  
> notice a
> difference. My Intel iMac originally came with Tiger and it smoked  
> along, I
> put Leopard on it and upped it from 1GB to 2GB RAM and it still  
> smoked, but
> Leopard does require a lot of RAM to get the best out of it.

The Intel iMac is the Mac used to standardize XBench 1.3, so under  
Tiger, which was the standard OS for XBench 1.3 the Intel iMac scores  
exactly 100.00. Some users ran XBench on their iMac under both Tiger  
and Leopard on the same day. Most of the Leopard scores were similar  
to user "J's iMac", which was 154.56 for Leopard. If the XBench scores  
are to be believed, the Intel iMac INCREASES in speed by 54% from  
Tiger to Leopard, while the 867 MHz G4 PowerBook DECREASES in speed by  
54%. What a dramatic swing.

This seems to cement my observation that Leopard is optimized for  
Intel, and perhaps even purposefully slowed down for PPC? The PowerMac  
G5 scores seem to echo this PPC slowdown. For a Late 2005 Quad 2.5GHz  
G5 the highest Leopard score I see is 172.11, but the highest Tiger  
score is 208.22. Not quite as bad as the G4, but still a DECREASE in  
Leopard for all PPC CPUs compared to an INCREASE in speed for all  
Intel CPUs. I'm suspicious. This sounds exactly like the "AMD vs  
Intel" lawsuit where code compiled on Intel compilers runs slow on AMD  
CPUs and fast on Intel CPUs. Something seems fishy here to me.


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