My turn to geek it up: An unscientific and subjective speed comparison between OSX on Intel and PowerPC • By Mike

My roommate just got a 17" Intel iMac (1.83 GHz, 1 GB RAM) and I recently spent some time with it. The following are my perceptions of its speed compared with the two Macs I use regularly - a 20" 1.8 GHz G5 iMac with 1.5G RAM, and a 12" 1.25 GHz PowerBook with 1.5G RAM. (All machines are running OSX 10.4.5). This obviously isn't a comprehensive test, just my musings on how the new iMac compares with what I'm used to.

The surprising thing I noticed was that at its worst, the Intel Mac is no slower than my PowerBook. And at its best, it's considerably faster than my iMac.

Finder:
Feels much faster on the Intel, especially window resizing. This fills me with immense joy because resizing a window with a PowerPC is pathetically slow. Pretty much every universal application resizes smoothly on the Intel, with the exception of GarageBand, although it's still about 50% faster than on my iMac. Spotlight and scrolling are about the same.

Safari:
Launching is much faster, before the first dock bounce. Apple-N also launches new windows much quicker. Page loading is only slightly faster than my iMac - I'd say around 10% faster. Flash content finally runs as smooth as on Windows XP, and I no longer get a spinning beachball when I'm opening an MPG in a browser window.

Firefox:
Not yet universal, so felt pretty slow - about as fast as my PowerBook.

Preview:
Still about as sluggish as my iMac when viewing / zooming / scrolling the complex NYC subway map. Overall about the same as my iMac.

Google Earth:
Even though it's not universal, it's very usable. Felt like it was on my PowerBook.

GarageBand:
Felt around 50% faster overall, including dragging new instruments onto the timeline, changing their order, adding / removing effects, and previewing samples.

Lightroom Beta 2:
I was very impressed. This is the only universal application that I've spent considerable time with on my iMac and I was excited to try it out on the Intel. And it didn't disappoint. I'd say it was about 60% faster, which is great because a lot of the program involves moving sliders back and forth based on how they're effecting your image. Importing, editing, and exporting felt much faster as well.

Photoshop 7:
Most importantly, it didn't feel "crippled" like I thought it would. I opened up a 200 Meg file and was able to zoom in and navigate around, make modifications, and export files about as quickly as I could on my PowerBook. An interesting note is that scrolling through the layers palate was painfully slow until I'd reached the very bottom. After that, it was back up to regular speed. I suppose that has something to do with Rosetta's code caching. Pretty interesting.

That's pretty much it. Hope you found this useful.
~Jeff's Brother