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Apple Releases New iBooks

Core Image Compatible

I just got off the phone with an Apple Rep and they told me that the new iBooks will be able to support core image...YAY!! we get to see the ripple affect
 
Jimmery said:
If anyone has received the updated ibook, would you mind saying how it performs?
Click to expand...

Yep. I'll be getting one and benchmarking it on just about every conceivable thing. Any particular benchmarks you want to see?

Meanwhile, check out http://ladd.dyndns.org/xbench/ for benchmarks of new world Macs.

Questions like "How responsive is the GUI?" are 110% subjective. The only way to get the right answer is to see it in the flesh.
 
Mine was surprisingly shipped today! I guess because I ordered before the upgrade, and I was one of the first to get upped to the new model. Yes, I should have it by Monday. I'm so excited.
 
JonMaker said:
Yep. I'll be getting one and benchmarking it on just about every conceivable thing. Any particular benchmarks you want to see?

Meanwhile, check out http://ladd.dyndns.org/xbench/ for benchmarks of new world Macs.

Questions like "How responsive is the GUI?" are 110% subjective. The only way to get the right answer is to see it in the flesh.
Click to expand...
Thanks JonMaker! No, I don't have anything in particular I would want to see... I'm looking forward to what you are able to come up with.
 
Ati Radeon 9550 32MB Potential

Im looking to get a 12" Ibook soon

Given that i will be using tops 800x600 in games (probs 640x480 because of the screen size) and the GPU has only 32Mb of RAM...is it possible to play latest games in good detail at these low resolutions on the Ibook?

Secondly, if a game specifies minimum 64Mb VGA requirement, by reducing the resolution and detail..can it be played on the Ibook's 32MB chip?

Thanks
 
Jimmery said:
If anyone has received the updated ibook, would you mind saying how it performs?
Click to expand...

Just got mine today. It replaces my iBook 1.2 (yes, it doesn't seem like much of an upgrade, but I really want the CI capable GPU and internal BT, plus the Student Union iPod rebate deal makes the price very, very attractive).

I don't know what you'd want to know about the CPU performance (it performs like you'd expect a G4/1.33 to perform...fast enough for anything that most people do, but it's not going to be an awesome Photoshop or Cinema 4D machine, nor are you going to get good framerates in Doom 3).

But for those who are worried about the screen, I can definitely say that it is significantly brighter than the one on my iBook 1.2. Not that I had a big problem with the old screen, but I know that some have complained wrt the brightness of the old one. To put it another way, it's not longer as blindly obvious (in terms of brightness) when I switch between my new iBook's screen and my Hitachi 17" desktop LCD monitor. Hope that helps.
 
macrumors12345 said:
Just got mine today. It replaces my iBook 1.2 (yes, it doesn't seem like much of an upgrade, but I really want the CI capable GPU and internal BT, plus the Student Union iPod rebate deal makes the price very, very attractive).

I don't know what you'd want to know about the CPU performance (it performs like you'd expect a G4/1.33 to perform...fast enough for anything that most people do, but it's not going to be an awesome Photoshop or Cinema 4D machine, nor are you going to get good framerates in Doom 3).

But for those who are worried about the screen, I can definitely say that it is significantly brighter than the one on my iBook 1.2. Not that I had a big problem with the old screen, but I know that some have complained wrt the brightness of the old one. To put it another way, it's not longer as blindly obvious (in terms of brightness) when I switch between my new iBook's screen and my Hitachi 17" desktop LCD monitor. Hope that helps.
Click to expand...

Could you please Xbench your system and post the results?

http://www.xbench.com/

I'm a PC->Mac->PC revert, and I'm thinking about reconverting back to Macs. If the new iBook performs better than the old one (i.e., more than 10%), then I'll probably go for it.
 
Is the new Ibook with 512MB ram powerful enough to run the following things at the same time?
  • X Windows
  • Web browsers
  • Eclipse

or
  • VNC
  • Web browsers

Thanks.
 
I heard that should be enough, but it will start to lag probably, i'd at least have 768MB in my machine, hence what i ordered mine with. If you have the money though, by all means max it out.
 
Motion compatibility tester

Actually, here's one to settle the question asked a few pages back (as to whether Final Cut Studio would work on a new iBook) -

Can someone who has just got the new iBook try the Motion Compatibility Checker (http://images.apple.com/motion/pdf/Motion_Checker_v1.0.2.dmg.zip) to see if the iBook supports Motion (being the most demanding program in FCS)?

By way of comparison, the original 17 inch Powerbook (with a 64MB nVidia GeForce4 440 Go) can't run Motion, whilst the Radeon 9600 in the new Powermac and iMac G5s can.
 
I think the iBooks remain a great value.

I agree with the posters who felt that Apple needs to at least offer different displays. I am a big fan of the reflective screens when it comes to reviewing photos - the contrast is much greater. Blacks just don't look as black on my Powerbook display. For text, I prefer the non-reflective type screens. What I want is choice. Choice of higher resolution would also be nice. I personally find the resolution on the 12" iBook and all PBs to be optimal for their size, but would like a higher-res screen on the 14" model. Others of course vary in their opinion. Would it cost Apple that much to give us choice here? Even without widescreen, I think that if the 12" iBook had an option for a similar display to my wife's 12" Dell 700m, many would be interested.

Despite this issue, I am still a fan of Apple's entire line of iBooks and PBs, recommend them to friends/family, and am really psyched about my recent PB purchase.
 
davidwong said:
Is the new Ibook with 512MB ram powerful enough to run the following things at the same time?
  • X Windows
  • Web browsers
  • Eclipse

or
  • VNC
  • Web browsers

Thanks.
Click to expand...

My PB felt a bit sluggish doing about that with 512MB RAM. It wasn't bad, but more does help.
 
The minimum for Tiger is 512MB to be anywhere efficient. I am ordering mine with 1GB just to make sure it is going to run smooth for every day use.
 
I am ordering my 12" stock standard, then buying 1GB stick from Crucial, so that I can set myself up with 1.5GB of RAM to help me run frequent Dreamweaver, light Flash, and light Photoshop. I am also going to buy myself a 160-250GB external HDD to give myself extra room to grow. Then, when I want to bring the computer with me, I can simply unplug everything. :)
 
wrburns said:
Could you please Xbench your system and post the results?

http://www.xbench.com/

I'm a PC->Mac->PC revert, and I'm thinking about reconverting back to Macs. If the new iBook performs better than the old one (i.e., more than 10%), then I'll probably go for it.
Click to expand...

Okay, here goes. I am going to give you three sets of benchmarks. First, iBook 1.33. Then, iBook 1.33 with Quartz 2D Extreme enabled (via Quartz Debug app, since it's not enabled by default yet in Tiger). Finally, iBook 1.2 (Quartz 2D Extreme is not enabled because iBook 1.2 does not have a video card that supports Quartz 2D Extreme/Core Image).

A couple of notes:

(1) I did not run the disk test. Both machines have 4200 rpm drives, but they are filled to different levels, have different amounts of fragmentation, etc. It would not be a very informative test. (plus it takes a long time to run!)

(2) It might seem unfair that the 1.33 has 1 GB of RAM and the 1.2 only 256 MB. However, the iBook 1.2 Ghz is NOT hampered by the 256 MB RAM. XBench does not require much free memory to run at full speed. I rebooted both machines to make sure that there was a maximum amount of free memory, and no extra processes were running. I also checked my virtual memory stats after the XBench run. The iBook 1.2 had ZERO pageouts, i.e. it never had to hit the disk to swap pages in virtual memory, so extra memory would not have changed its scores at all. For all intents and purposes wrt these tests, you can assume both machines had the same amount of RAM.
 
iBook 1.33 WITHOUT Quartz 2D Extreme

Results 130.76
System Info
Xbench Version 1.1.3
System Version 10.4.2 (8D37)
Physical RAM 1024 MB
Model PowerBook6,7
Processor PowerPC G4 @ 1.33 GHz
L1 Cache 32K (instruction), 32K (data)
L2 Cache 512K @ 1.33 GHz
Bus Frequency 134 MHz
Video Card ATY,M12
Drive Type FUJITSU MHV2040AT
CPU Test 158.80
GCD Loop 153.00 5.98 Mops/sec
Floating Point Basic 159.02 575.08 Mflop/sec
AltiVec Basic 161.61 4.69 Gflop/sec
vecLib FFT 162.33 2.52 Gflop/sec
Floating Point Library 158.38 6.34 Mops/sec
Thread Test 109.51
Computation 81.83 1.10 Mops/sec, 4 threads
Lock Contention 165.48 2.08 Mlocks/sec, 4 threads
Memory Test 104.32
System 117.45
Allocate 735.45 479.73 Kalloc/sec
Fill 152.56 1214.40 MB/sec
Copy 56.72 283.62 MB/sec
Stream 93.84
Copy 91.93 671.99 MB/sec [altivec]
Scale 93.04 686.64 MB/sec [altivec]
Add 96.29 616.24 MB/sec [altivec]
Triad 94.20 575.56 MB/sec [altivec]
Quartz Graphics Test 135.35
Line 108.96 2.77 Klines/sec [50% alpha]
Rectangle 114.75 8.07 Krects/sec [50% alpha]
Circle 127.13 2.93 Kcircles/sec [50% alpha]
Bezier 152.03 1.65 Kbeziers/sec [50% alpha]
Text 217.15 3.54 Kchars/sec
OpenGL Graphics Test 115.11
Spinning Squares 115.11 80.55 frames/sec
User Interface Test 208.57
Elements 208.57 67.08 refresh/sec
 
iBook 1.33 WITH Quartz 2D Extreme Enabled


Results 141.74
System Info
Xbench Version 1.1.3
System Version 10.4.2 (8D37)
Physical RAM 1024 MB
Model PowerBook6,7
Processor PowerPC G4 @ 1.33 GHz
L1 Cache 32K (instruction), 32K (data)
L2 Cache 512K @ 1.33 GHz
Bus Frequency 134 MHz
Video Card ATY,M12
Drive Type FUJITSU MHV2040AT
CPU Test 159.85
GCD Loop 155.86 6.09 Mops/sec
Floating Point Basic 159.50 576.82 Mflop/sec
AltiVec Basic 159.83 4.64 Gflop/sec
vecLib FFT 159.71 2.48 Gflop/sec
Floating Point Library 164.57 6.59 Mops/sec
Thread Test 114.07
Computation 81.85 1.10 Mops/sec, 4 threads
Lock Contention 188.11 2.36 Mlocks/sec, 4 threads
Memory Test 104.48
System 117.16
Allocate 583.13 380.38 Kalloc/sec
Fill 158.82 1264.22 MB/sec
Copy 56.83 284.17 MB/sec
Stream 94.27
Copy 92.59 676.83 MB/sec [altivec]
Scale 95.27 703.11 MB/sec [altivec]
Add 96.29 616.27 MB/sec [altivec]
Triad 93.03 568.39 MB/sec [altivec]
Quartz Graphics Test 191.35
Line 185.14 4.71 Klines/sec [50% alpha]
Rectangle 202.16 14.22 Krects/sec [50% alpha]
Circle 242.41 5.59 Kcircles/sec [50% alpha]
Bezier 146.32 1.59 Kbeziers/sec [50% alpha]
Text 207.37 3.38 Kchars/sec
OpenGL Graphics Test 120.55
Spinning Squares 120.55 84.36 frames/sec
User Interface Test 237.18
Elements 237.18 76.29 refresh/sec
 
iBook 1.2 (GPU does not support Quartz 2D Extreme)



Results 118.11
System Info
Xbench Version 1.1.3
System Version 10.4.2 (8C46)
Physical RAM 256 MB
Model PowerBook6,5
Processor PowerPC G4 @ 1.20 GHz
L1 Cache 32K (instruction), 32K (data)
L2 Cache 512K @ 1.20 GHz
Bus Frequency 134 MHz
Video Card ATY,RV280M9+
Drive Type TOSHIBA MK3025GAS
CPU Test 141.80
GCD Loop 135.94 5.31 Mops/sec
Floating Point Basic 148.33 536.42 Mflop/sec
AltiVec Basic 146.58 4.26 Gflop/sec
vecLib FFT 136.14 2.11 Gflop/sec
Floating Point Library 142.96 5.72 Mops/sec
Thread Test 100.21
Computation 72.18 974.36 Kops/sec, 4 threads
Lock Contention 163.86 2.06 Mlocks/sec, 4 threads
Memory Test 99.30
System 106.84
Allocate 536.01 349.64 Kalloc/sec
Fill 118.67 944.59 MB/sec
Copy 56.22 281.09 MB/sec
Stream 92.75
Copy 91.73 670.58 MB/sec [altivec]
Scale 94.23 695.40 MB/sec [altivec]
Add 94.43 604.32 MB/sec [altivec]
Triad 90.73 554.34 MB/sec [altivec]
Quartz Graphics Test 120.45
Line 91.56 2.33 Klines/sec [50% alpha]
Rectangle 95.91 6.75 Krects/sec [50% alpha]
Circle 108.06 2.49 Kcircles/sec [50% alpha]
Bezier 133.27 1.45 Kbeziers/sec [50% alpha]
Text 293.68 4.79 Kchars/sec
OpenGL Graphics Test 102.53
Spinning Squares 102.53 71.75 frames/sec
User Interface Test 177.18
Elements 177.18 56.99 refresh/sec
 
bottom line:

CPU test is about 12-13% faster
Memory test is about 5% faster (must be CPU effect?)
Quartz graphics test is about 13% faster right now and 59% faster when they start enabling Q2DX by default
UI test is about 18% faster right now and 34% faster when they start enabling Q2DX by default
 
trackpad

Has the trackpad changed it's feel now that it does the dual finger thing?
(is the surface like the PB surface?)
 
macrumors12345 said:
bottom line:

CPU test is about 12-13% faster
Memory test is about 5% faster (must be CPU effect?)
Quartz graphics test is about 13% faster right now and 59% faster when they start enabling Q2DX by default
UI test is about 18% faster right now and 34% faster when they start enabling Q2DX by default
Click to expand...

Sweet! I really appreciate it. I'd say that's "significantly" faster. :) You're the first guy I know of who's posted Xbench results for the new iBooks - congrats. So far, so good.

Do you have any game benchmarks you could share with us, like the UT 2003 demo? I'm sure everyone would love to see how the Mobility Radeon 9550 performs.
 
1. What is this Quartz Extreme mode and how do I know if it is on?
2. Also how would you enable it?
3. Does it cause any damage to the computer?
 
http://ladd.dyndns.org/xbench/merge.xhtml?doc1=122877

iBook 1.33GHz versus PowerBook G4 1.67GHz. Dead smack even, except in disk performance.

I'm intrigued by this 9550. From what little we've seen, it seems to be just as fast as the 9600 in raw computing power. This is as it should be, since the 9550 is supposed to be just an underclocked version of the 9600. However, the lack of apparent performance difference makes me wonder if the 9600 in the PowerBook was underclocked to begin with... The extra 32MB will give the PB a huge advantage in real-world games, though.
 
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