Oct 16

Windows 7 versus Snow Leopard on a MacBook Pro: big cat’s faster, 7 is better for games

Posted in: Apple, benchmark, macbook pro, MacbookPro, Microsoft, operating system, OperatingSystem, os, os x, OsX, Today's Chili, windows 7, Windows7

CNET have taken the 64-bit versions of Windows 7 and Snow Leopard for a spin around a 2008 MacBook Pro, and produced a decent first peek at comparative performance. Of course, there are significant provisos to get through first — it’s only one machine, running on Apple’s drivers, testing mostly Apple applications, and the two systems default to different versions of QuickTime — but we can still glean some indication of where the two heavyweights are relative to one another. Snow Leopard appeared consistently quicker in time-based tests, with faster bootups, shutdowns and MP3 encoding, but Windows 7 showed its muscle in producing better frame rates in games and a significant advantage in Cinebench rendering. Battery life was found to be distinctly better under Snow Leopard, but we’d put that down to the underlying hardware being optimized for OS X. Hit the read link for the full testing procedures and more of those old school bar charts — it should get you well prepped for the forthcoming flood of similar head-to-heads once WIndows 7 officially ships next week.

[Via Apple Insider]

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Windows 7 versus Snow Leopard on a MacBook Pro: big cat’s faster, 7 is better for games originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 16 Oct 2009 14:33:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Oct 05

HP Mini 311 with ION benchmarked: it goes very fast

Posted in: benchmark, HP, NVIDIA, nvidia ion, NvidiaIon, Today's Chili

We’ve already seen the NVIDIA ION-based HP Mini 311 perform impressively during demos, but now that the netbook is hitting reviewers it’s time for some real benchmarks — and according to the crew at Laptop, they’re more than solid. The 311 scored a 1,917 on the PCMark 05 test, almost 500 points above the average netbook, and put up a scorching 1,386 in the 3DMark06 test — 1,200 points over the netbook average, and basically the same score as a MacBook Air. That’s not too surprising, seeing as ION is just a netbook-oriented variant of the GeForce 9400M, but it’s still rather impressive — and combined with 1080p video playback, the potential for some light gaming, and (eventually) ION-accelerated Flash, we’d say the Mini 311 is looking like a real contender.

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HP Mini 311 with ION benchmarked: it goes very fast originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 05 Oct 2009 19:02:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Sep 16

New iPod touch gets a speed test, zips right on by

Posted in: Apple, benchmark, ipod, ipod touch, IpodTouch, Today's Chili, touch

The new generation of the iPod touch, we’ve been told, is roughly 50 percent faster than the previous iteration. Well, the fine folks over at the iPhone Blog have done a bit of information collecting on just that topic — to see if Apple’s latest is actually that much faster. Both Macworld and TUAW did testing which showed a reduction in boot times from 31 to 19 seconds, web page loading (using the New York Times) went from 34 to 15 seconds, while app launching saw time reductions across the board. So — in essence — yes, the newest iPod touch is about 50 percent faster than the previous model in terms of performance. Hit the read link to hear even more tantalizing details.

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New iPod touch gets a speed test, zips right on by originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 16 Sep 2009 11:06:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Sep 07

Intel’s Lynnfield processors now officially official, benchmarked

Posted in: benchmark, CoreI5, CoreI7, intel, processor, processors, Today's Chili

Sure, Taiwan’s been enjoying these chips for almost a month at this point, but it’s taken until now for Intel go official with its announcement of the “Lynnfield” processors, Core i5-750 and Core i7-870. If the early reviews are to be believed, both chips are dominant in their performance and price range, although there are some notable caveats for the tech savvy to take heed of. If you’re in need of the finer details of all these, hit up the read links below for the skinny.

Read – HotHardware
Read – PC Perspective
Read – Tech Report
Read – TweakTown
Read – Official Intel Press release

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Intel’s Lynnfield processors now officially official, benchmarked originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 08 Sep 2009 00:11:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Aug 10

ATI Stream goes fisticuffs with NVIDIA’s CUDA in epic GPGPU tussle

Posted in: AMD, ati, benchmark, NVIDIA, processor, stream, Today's Chili

It’s a given that the GPGPU (or General-Purpose Graphics Processing Unit) has a long, long ways to go before it can make a dent in the mainstream market, but given that ATI was talking up Stream nearly three whole years ago, we’d say a battle royale between it and its biggest rival was definitely in order. As such, the benchmarking gurus over at PC Perspective saw fit to pit ATI’s Stream and NVIDIA’s CUDA technologies against one another in a knock-down-drag-out for the ages, essentially looking to see which system took the most strain away from the CPU during video encoding and which produced more visually appealing results. We won’t bother getting into the nitty-gritty (that’s what the read link is for), but we will say this: in testing, ATI’s contraption managed to relieve the most stress from the CPU, though NVIDIA’s alternative seemed to pump out the highest quality materials. In other words, you can’t win for losin’.

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ATI Stream goes fisticuffs with NVIDIA’s CUDA in epic GPGPU tussle originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 10 Aug 2009 08:57:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Jun 24

iPhone 3GS Trounces Predecessors, Rivals in Web Browser Speed Test

Posted in: Apple, benchmark, iPhone, performance, Today's Chili

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A benchmark test conducted by an iPhone analytics company indicates the new iPhone 3GS is three times faster with web browsing than the iPhone 3G and the Palm Pre.

Conducted by Medialets, the test involved running a JavaScript benchmark called SunSpider using the iPhone 3GS, iPhone 3G, T-Mobile G1 and Palm Pre. (SunSpider tests the core JavaScript language only, and it’s designed to compare different versions of the same browser, or different browsers with each other.)

In summary, the results are as follows:

sunspider-benchmarking-tests-2009-06-22

  • iPhone 3GS running iPhone 3.0 OS completed the test in 16.5 seconds
  • iPhone 3G running iPhone 3.0 completed the test in 48.7 seconds
  • iPhone 3G running the earlier iPhone 2.2.1 OS completed the test in 132.3 seconds
  • T-Mobile G1 running Android 1.5 (Cupcake) completed the test in 91.1 seconds
  • Palm Pre running Web OS 1.0.2 completed the test in 48.6 seconds

Here’s what we find interesting:

  • Even if you don’t purchase the latest iPhone,  downloading the free iPhone 3.0 OS onto an iPhone 3G delivers three times faster web browsing than the iPhone 2.0 OS.
  • The Palm Pre is just as fast as an iPhone 3G running the iPhone 3.0 OS.
  • Before the recent iPhone 3.0 upgrade, the iPhone 2.0 OS was considerably slower than its rivals, taking about 40 seconds longer to complete the test than the T-Mobile G1.

Medialets used a MacBook as the baseline (i.e., the fastest performer for the phones to be compared to). The MacBook took only 1.36 seconds to complete the same test. The iPhone 3GS led the smartphone race, taking only 14 times longer than the MacBook to complete SunSpider.

Given these results, perhaps the iPhone 3GS will quell complaints about issues connecting to AT&T’s 3G network: From my own experience, it makes the slower EDGE network feel much speedier, too.

For full details of the benchmark test, see Medialets’ summary of results.

See Also:

Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired.com
Image: Courtesy of Medialets


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Jun 20

iPhone 3G S and Pre head-to-head benchmarks: iPhone wins

Posted in: Apple, benchmark, iPhone, iphone 3g, Iphone3g, palm, pre, Today's Chili

Now that we know the iPhone 3G S and the Palm Pre share extremely similar 65nm ARM Cortex A8-based internals, it’s time to break out the stopwatches and see how these blood brothers stack up. Anandtech has the first head-to-head tests we’ve seen, and it seems like the 3G S has the slight edge, loading a series of web pages 11 percent faster and a whopping 54 percent faster than the iPhone 3G. Not too shabby, but not exactly a thorough drubbing either — especially when you consider webOS is still 1.0 and there’s likely some optimizations to come. Full results at the read link.

Update: Anandtech had some uncharacteristically bad math going on — the 3G S is actually 21 percent faster than the Pre, which is quite notable considering the similar hardware and WebKit-based browsers.

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iPhone 3G S and Pre head-to-head benchmarks: iPhone wins originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 20 Jun 2009 23:29:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Jun 13

VAIO P gets whole new lease on life with Atom Z550 processor, SSD and WiMAX

Posted in: benchmark, Japan, netbook, sony, SSD, Today's Chili, vaio, WiMAX

A whole new day is dawning for the never-ever-a-netbook Sony VAIO P — those new processor and drive upgrades apparently have the little PC churning through benchmarks at twice the pace of the original. Most of the benchmark help comes from the SSD drive, but the Atom Z550 doesn’t hurt. Meanwhile, Japan is getting a WiMAX version to churn through stereotypically Japanese websites in record time. We’d be jealous if only we lived under 1,000 miles from the nearest WiMAX signal.

Read – VAIO P gets WiMAX
Read – VAIO P benchmarks

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VAIO P gets whole new lease on life with Atom Z550 processor, SSD and WiMAX originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 13 Jun 2009 22:50:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Jun 03

Updated white MacBook gets benchmarked, outperforms unibody counterpart

Posted in: Apple, benchmark, macbook, Today's Chili

The white MacBook may look a little out of place among Apple’s current laptop offerings, but those looking for the best bang for the buck may want to give the newly-updated model some serious consideration, as it actually outperforms its more expensive unibody counterpart. That word comes from the folks at MacWorld, who ran some benchmarks and found that 2.13GHz white MacBook was about five percent faster than the 2GHz unibody MacBook on average. That’s obviously largely attributable to the faster processor, but the speedier 800MHz DDR2 memory didn’t hurt things either, even if it still lags a bit behind the unibody’s 1,066MHz DDR3 RAM. For comparison’s sake, Macworld also found that the 1.8GHz MacBook Air was a full 12 percent slower than the white MacBook, while the 2.4GHz MacBook Pro offered a 10.5 percent performance gain, and displayed an even bigger advantage when its higher-end graphics came into play.

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Updated white MacBook gets benchmarked, outperforms unibody counterpart originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 03 Jun 2009 18:59:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Jun 03

Intel’s Core i7 975 Extreme Edition reviewed, crowned world’s fastest desktop processor

Posted in: benchmark, CoreI7, intel, review, Today's Chili

Surprise, Intel’s top of the line 3.33GHz Core i7 975 Extreme Edition is fast. In fact, based on the reviews by Hot Hardware and PC Perspective, among others, this quad-core proc is the fastest desktop processor ever. While it’s only 4-5% faster across the board than Intel’s previous champ, the Core i7 965, world’s fastest is world’s fastest, right AMD? Better yet, the CPU is suitable for “significant” overclocking — HH took it around the benchmark block at 4.1GHz and found only a “small voltage bump” while hitting a 50-degree C max temperature using Intel’s stock heat sink. Look for the Core i7 975 to hit retail for a $999 list price which explains why the first gaming rigs wrapped around the 975 start at $8,000.

Read — Hot Hardware review
Read — PCPer review

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Intel’s Core i7 975 Extreme Edition reviewed, crowned world’s fastest desktop processor originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 03 Jun 2009 04:33:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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