This is the first I had heard of Parallels, so I thought I would ask. I had read a somewhat negative review of Boot Camp.
The reason I asked is because of the following article from www.macintouch.com Boot Camp Apple caused quite a stir when it released Boot Camp, a utility that makes it easy to install Windows XP on an Intel Mac. Providing Windows drivers, a utility to make a Windows-compatible partition, and step-by-step instructions, Boot Camp appears to have made the Mac a viable multi-OS platform. MacInTouch has been deluged with questions about Boot Camp's performance. Chief among the questions is how well Boot Camp runs Photoshop for Windows, from those considering using a Mac Pro or MacBook Pro as a Windows Photoshop platform until Adobe releases a Universal version next year. We used Boot Camp to install Windows XP Home Edition (service pack 2) on our test Mac Pro. Compatibility appears good in our limited testing; the Mac was indistinguishable from any other Windows machine... ...except it was slow. Very, very slow. For example, the Kaleidoscope Photoshop test that took 20 to 30 seconds on our other machines (including a Dell 9150) took over five minutes in Boot Camp Windows! Some research quickly turned up Boot Camp's Achilles heel: hard drive access. Windows XP does not support the modern EFI firmware used in Apple's Mac Pro, only Windows' twenty year old BIOS system. (Microsoft's latest Vista beta doesn't support EFI, either.) So, Apple wrote a compatibility layer for EFI to emulate a BIOS - the "Compatibility Support Module". The Mac Pro hardware implements very high performance disk modes known as AHCI and NCQ, but Boot Camp's BIOS emulator doesn't put the disks into this mode, instead using an older, slower mode that omits AHCI, NCQ or even direct memory access mode. This effectively cripples Boot Camp's performance. [Thanks to Brian Williams for getting to the bottom of this. See his post in the Apple Discussion Forums, linked below, for more technical detail.] Did Apple intentionally cripple Boot Camp? We don't know - but it does appear that the route Apple chose was easier, so there may be technical difficulties to getting Windows XP to run with the Mac Pro's modern firmware and drives at full speed. What this means, practically speaking, is this: While Boot Camp is excellent for general compatibility purposes, it is unable to run Photoshop at any sort of competitive speed. (We don't have a pile of PC games on hand to test, but we suspect gaming performance also may be sub-par, which would be a pity, since the Mac Pro's hardware is excellent and should make a fine PC gaming machine.) We have recently been sent instructions for getting full SATA performance out of Windows XP under Boot Camp. When weÍve had a chance to test this, weÍll update our Windows benchmarks and this report. One final performance note: Assuming disk performance is fixed by Apple or is not the bottleneck for your application, those wishing to maximize Windows performance should install Windows XP Pro, because XP Home Edition only supports one processor, not both of the Mac Pro's Xeon CPUs. (However, XP Home does support both processor cores in one Mac Pro CPU or the one Core Duo CPU used in the iMac and MacBook models). _______________________________________________ Unsubscribe or switch delivery mode: <http://www.realsoftware.com/support/listmanager/> Search the archives of this list here: <http://support.realsoftware.com/listarchives/lists.html>
