Apple Mac OS X on x86: a first test

Introduction	Performance and power consumption	Conclusion
Installation	The Mac OS advantage	Image gallery

Performance and power consumption
Since Mac OS X x86 is still at a relatively early stage of development, the performance and the power consumption results reported here should be treated with caution. Final versions are generally considerably faster and less resource-hungry than beta versions.

All of which makes the current test results for Mac OS X x86 more remarkable. Clearly, essential components of the power-saving functions in the Pentium M processor (in our testbed Toshiba Portégé M300) are already supported. There can be no other explanation for the fact that the power consumption of Mac OS X x86 is on a par with Windows XP running on the same notebook computer. Mac OS X is even a little faster than Windows XP at starting up, while the two operating systems shut down at about the same speed. As far as resource hunger is concerned, Apple's OS is a little less demanding: after loading, Mac OS X x86 leaves 324MB of RAM out of 512MB free, while XP releases only 290MB.

Mac OS X x86 looks less impressive in the application-based test using iTunes (version 4.8). Windows XP is clearly faster here, taking 20.7 seconds for the MP3 transformation test compared to 61 seconds for the Apple operating system. Even when installed on a high-end dual core Athlon 64 X2 4800+ system, Mac OS X x86 takes longer (28 seconds) than Windows XP running on the 1.2GHz Pentium M notebook (20.7s) -- and iTunes uses both cores of the Athlon processor when transforming the MP3 file. iTunes on Mac OS X x86's slower speed in this test is actually due to the Rosetta emulation environment, under which this PowerPC application (among others) runs.