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Leopard % Increase In Speed

C

czeluff

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Oct 23, 2006
272
2
Hello to all,

Honestly, I'm curious to know the speed boost gained from running Leopard vs Tiger. My MBP is in the sig below, and it's a Merom (64-bit). Two questions regarding things that could potentially increase OSX's speed:

How much faster is a 64-bit OS in actuality? (I know this is a bad example, but I remember seeing zero speed increase between XP 64-bit and standard XP)

How much faster will it run, simply because the OS will no longer be a "port" from PPC to Intel? (recall that Tiger was written for ppc chips).

cz
 
The version of Tiger you're running now is not a port, it was completely written in Universal Binary to accommodate the Intel chips.

64 bit performance won't be noticed in regular activities, but only Apps optimized for 64 bit architecture. 32-bit applications wouldnt perform slower than a 32 bit CPU would run them, thus you wouldnt notice the difference in speed.
 
We have no idea how much faster it will run. We are sure it will run faster as the years progress and PPC fades away.

Tiger may have been originally written for PPC, but it was also written for Intel. Steve Jobs made a big deal about it, he put it on the OS Timeline, (Jaguar, Tiger, Tiger on Intel, Leopard).
 
Considering that Apple have more than a year of real world experience with the Intel version of Mac OS X, I'd say that Leopard will be quite a bit faster but don't expect it to be 100 %, if history tells us anything.

The rather poor performance in Tiger is more about the poor version of gcc that Apple use. I'm sure that Apple have tweaked the compilers to provide faster code. They've already mentioned some improvements on the Leopard preview pages.

The only place where native 64-bit support in an operating system could help speed things is where an application has been faking 64-bit memory space. Having that same application use system support instead will remove problematic code and that could speed up the application.

I've seen large operating systems gain in performance from being 64-bit in all areas but those are systems that support thousands of users, not desktop systems.
 
sry

sorry, port was a really bad word choice.

I've just noticed that my buddy's Powerbook runs Tiger faster than my MBP after a clean install. "Better optimized" would have been better

cz
 
czeluff said:
sorry, port was a really bad word choice.

I've just noticed that my buddy's Powerbook runs Tiger faster than my MBP after a clean install. "Better optimized" would have been better

cz
Click to expand...

It is better optimised after 5+ years on PowerPC machines. For the machine's capabilities, it doesn't do well on Intel machines right now but that will improve.

Still, even with all of the flaws, the Intel machines are a lot faster.
 
It is very rare for a new OS to run faster on the same hardware. The new OS usually does more and needs more resources, as the programmers assume that average hardware is more powerful than when the previous version came out. If you are not upgrading your hardware, you'll get more features at the price of a slower system. I doubt the case would be different for Leopard.
 
theBB said:
It is very rare for a new OS to run faster on the same hardware. The new OS usually does more and needs more resources, as the programmers assume that average hardware is more powerful than when the previous version came out. If you are not upgrading your hardware, you'll get more features at the price of a slower system. I doubt the case would be different for Leopard.
Click to expand...

How long have you been a Mac OS X user?

Almost every release has been faster than the one it succeeded on the same hardware, though PowerPC improvements are likely to be minimal, unless Apple would go to a commercial compiler.
 
czeluff said:
sorry, port was a really bad word choice.

I've just noticed that my buddy's Powerbook runs Tiger faster than my MBP after a clean install. "Better optimized" would have been better

cz
Click to expand...

Im sure if they done a clean install on his MBP it would run a lot faster than your PowerBook. My Intel Mac mini runs a lot faster than my PowerBook.

What ever the speed increase it will be in the realms of single digits probably 5%
 
64-bit (in theory) can even slow things down.
Click to expand...

In the real world we see a 20% hit for using 64 bit when you don't need it. This is using Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.0 and running anything from communications software to small databases.

If you really need the memory space, you either have to jump through hoops with 32 bit or use 64 bit.

The real difference in performance is when that extra memory can be used to avoid disk and network I/O.

Life should get interesting next year, since they are starting to merge the Xeon and iTanium technologies.
 
http://www.thinksecret.com/news/0702leopard9a343gallery.html

These a brief reference to speed in the Thinksecret article.

Thanks to Leopard's many under-the-hood improvements, users can expect to see signficant gains in performance and responsiveness under Mac OS X 10.5, especially on recent Macs. Window resizing relative to different System Preference Panes, for example, is now instantaneous and completely smooth, without that half-second delay found in previous Mac OS X releases.
Click to expand...
 
of cource we all know nothing about it, but consider the CPU power of today, I would predict 10% at most.
 
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