Free and easy cross platform benchmarking tool

While your new Powerbook will be far from "SOOOOOO slow", a P4 2.2Ghz will be a good deal faster than a G4 1.25ghz. Yes, the Mhz myth is true, yet people seem to think that Apple mhz = 2x PC Mhz - which is so false. Unless your friends laptop has a Celeron, you can pretty much guarantee that it'll be faster than your powerbook.

Now with that said, there is a lot more that can determine speed than just the processor alone. The new powerbooks come with a Radeon 9600 mobility, which is the top of the line as far as portables go. This chip will eat alive any PC that comes with "Intel extreme graphics", which most cheap PC's these days come with.

As for an unbiased cross platform benchmark, thats going to be a bit tricky. Performance of a program can range wildly from something as simple as the compiler used. Cross platform means not only is the compliler different, but the actual processor instructions are completly different, especially comparing PPC to x86. In other words, its impossible to get a true unbiased benchmark across platforms. Many people will instantly point out Photoshop, but in my opinion, thats a pretty boring thing to test a computers speed with.

Cinebench 2003 is a pretty good crossplatform benchmark that tests a variety of things, and its free!
Also, you might want to try out Quake3 benchmarking.

try ubench

Hi. You can try ubench at http://www.phystech.com/download/ubench.html. Eventhough it's very basic, it still gives you an idea of how your hardware performs. Get the source at http://www.phystech.com/download, open a terminal-window, descend into the ubench-folder and type './configure'. This will create a Makefile, edit this file and change the line 'CFLAGS = ' to CFLAGS = -O2' (capital letter O and digit 2). Save your changes and type make at the command-prompt. Type './ubench' and it will perform some 'pointless' aritmetics in six minutes.

When done you will get CPU and RAM numbers. My Dual G4 @ 1.25 Ghz and 768 MB RAM said:

Ubench CPU: 151389
Ubench MEM: 150447
--------------------
Ubench AVG: 150918

This should compare to a dual Xeon @ 2.4 Ghz on a FreeBSD 4.4 stable, which - if the benchmarks con be converted to real-life performance - is pretty impressive.

regards
Claus

well according to tests done by apple (yeah i know) the 1.25 powerbook processor is 40% faster than a 3.0ghz non centrino processor. I know that the fastest centrino is slightly faster than the 1.25 powerbook according to that testing on an independant website. (its something feet.)
-Excalibur313