boot-bench

People have been loading OS X on netbooks without Apple’s consent for a while now, and it turns out the operating system runs surprisingly well on many Intel Atom-powered mini-laptops. Sure, an MSI Wind U100 isn’t going to be able to outperform a MacBook Pro with a dual core CPU, but it turns out the Intel Atom N270 handles most tasks about as well as the PowerPC G4 processor in a 4 year old iBook. Or at least, that’s what AppleDifferent decided after running a series of benchmarks.

Basically, the test involved pitting an iBook G4 and a MacBook Air against an Advent 4211, which is a rebranded MSi Wind U100. In several benchmarking tests, the Advent 4211 outperformed the iBook G4, although it didn’t come close to touching the MacBook Air. In real world tests, the results were more mixed. The netbook booted OS X more quickly than the iBook, and launched programs faster. But when it came to CPU intensive tasks like unzipping files or applying complex image filters in GIMP, the iBook took the lead.

So what have we learned today? The Intel Atom N270 chip may have only come out half a year ago, but it’s about as powerful as a 4 year old processor. Which is no surprise, since that’s pretty much what Intel was going for. That’s why the Intel Atom line of processors is a lot cheaper than a Core 2 Duo CPU or other modern high performance chips.

via Blogeee

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5 replies on “Today’s netbooks run OS X about as well as a 4 year old iBook g4”

  1. I found out quickly that I wouldn’t be able to install OSX on my 2133 due to the via chip. 🙁 Oh well. I was only going to use it to make fun of people who actually bought Apple products, not actually because I wanted to use it.

  2. Interesting stuff.

    Today I have been setting up 3 netbooks on os x side by side. An advent 4211 (msi wind), a gigabyte m912 and an Olevia x10a (a sotec s101). I just ran a few applications and watched user interface stuff and it was interesting that they do not seem to run things at the same speed. The Olevia machine seems a lot snappier to use. Animations, mouse movement, expose and load times are all much better. I will run some benchmarks this week to see what the differences are. Apart from the hard drives in them they should be all pretty identical hardware.

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