Re: Re: Re: Comparing notebooks
Originally posted by Cantab
Could you link to some benchmark results that show the relative performance of the Dell 600M, the ibook and the powerbook?
NOTE: This is not intended as a troll. I like Macs. I buy Macs. I bought a 12" powerbook as a gift not that long ago. I want a new Powerbook, and will buy one once I consider them competitive in the "pro" performance arena.
You asked for performance comparisons. Well, lets get the easy ones out of the way first.
Cost: the Dell is about 1/2 the cost of the 15" 1ghz G4, at current street prices.
Power consumption: 22W for the intel PM, 19W for the moto G4. As a point of interest, the 1.7ghz PM only hits 24.5W. I can get a comfortable 3.5 hours of battery life out of the Dell without turning screen brightness down to almost nothing, etc -- in the Real World, basically.
Graphics: The Dell runs 14.1" to Apple's 15". Both can use the 64mb ATI Radeon 9000 card at AGP4X. The apple display is 9% larger, at 103.8 inches vs. the Dell's 95.4 inches, but the Dell's available screen area is higher at 1.47 megapixels vs. 1.09 for the powerbook. Subjective impression is that the Dell screen is brighter and crisper, this may be because of the dramatically increased DPI.
Memory: The Dell uses 1mb of L2 cache and 512mb of DDR ram on a 400mhz bus. The Apple has a 1mb L3 cache but only 256kb of L2 cache, on a much slower 133mhz bus.
HD: Both use slow 4200rpm hard disks. Dell does offer 7200rpm disks, but not in this model.
Wireless: Both have 802.11b standard. The Dell has options for b/g and a/b/g, the powerbook doesn't. The Dell has bluetooth built in.
CPU: This is trickier. I can't seem to locate a downloadable SPECcpu2000 program (and I'm not willing to put a huge amount of time into it). A quick download of PCMark and the Dell shows an aggregate processor score of 4500, or about 60% that of the typical 3ghz P4 score of 7800. Scaling the
apple measured SPEC scores from
http://www.apple.com/g5processor/ by the same amount (which is crap, but easy), gives fp:400 and int:513, which in turn about compares to a 1ghz G5 on float or a 1.3ghz G5 on integer.
Using the spec.org numbers for the 3ghz P4 to scale gives fp:709 and int:664. These map to approximately a 1.65ghz G5 chip. To be fair, I'll use IBMs numbers for the 970, with fp:1051 and int:937 at 1.8ghz (with a decent compiler). Using these to compare, the PM compares to about a 1.38ghz G5.
Is this very scientific? Nah, not in the slightest. It doesn't include the debatably higher build quality of the Powerbooks (solid, but prone to defects such as warping), or the benefits (nicer, cleaner) of OSX ... or the drawbacks (specific applications, etc) of OSX. Its just some musings on performance.
Either way, anyone still thinking that Apple's laptops still rule the roost is sadly mistaken. Again, the numbers above are for the
slowest Dell 600M currently offered, that I personally bought for $1300 (seen 'em cheaper). The newer 1.7ghz models are available and 30% faster. Don't confuse the PM with the P4M -- these are very different chips.
So, unless I've made a serious mistake, you can expect the PM and the G5 to compete pretty strongly on a clock-for-clock basis. The powerbooks will probably feel faster, especially with factors like QE offloading jobs to the GPU where XP does them with the CPU, but for serious business-application number-crunching, I don't expect to see much of a difference.
That's assuming that Apple can get a G5 powerbook out to compare them to, of course.
-Richard
EDIT:
Significant Ports: The Dell has two USB 2.0, one Firewire (only 4 pin), VGA/SVHS out, and GigE. The Apple has two USB 1.1, one Firewire, VGA/SVHS and DVI out, and GigE.
Size: The Dell is 1.2" thick ( 12.4 X 10.1 ) and weighs 5.3 lbs. The Apple is 1" thick ( 13.4 X 9.5 ) and weighs 5.4 lbs.
Links:
http://www.dell.com/us/en/bsd/products/model_inspn_inspn_600m.htm
http://www.apple.com/powerbook/specs.html
