More Intel iMac Benchmarks (Native and Rosetta)

MacCentral reviews and benchmarks the new Intel iMacs released at Macworld Expo.

MacCentral's tested both Universal applications as well as PowerPC applications on the new 2.0GHz Intel iMac and compared them to the 2.1GHz iMac G5.

Of the Universal Applications tested, they focused on iMovie, iPhoto, iTunes, iDVD, iSquint, BBEdit and Zip Archiving. In these native applications, the Intel iMac was up to 1.82x as fast. Average increase however was closer to 1.2-1.3x, with one test coming in slightly slower (.91x) than the G5 iMac.

Meanwhile, PowerPC applications were tested using Rosetta emulation. They tested iTunes (PowerPC), Photoshop CS2 and Word. The tests showed the Intel iMac to be running .34-.48x as fast as the iMac G5. The performance penalty is expected due to the Rosetta emulation layer allowing PowerPC instructions to be run on the Intel processor.