Apple Makes the Switch: iMac G5 vs. iMac Core Duo

iLife '06 Performance with iPhoto, iDVD and iWeb

With iPhoto, Apple has really created an excellent digital photo album application that is extremely robust.  Steve Jobs is always demonstrating how iPhoto can handle tens of thousands of pictures without a problem, but given that I am testing iMacs with 512MB of memory, I'll stick to our paltry 379 photos as the data for this next test. 

The test is simple; I timed the import of all 379 photos into iPhoto which, believe it or not, is quite CPU intensive and not as I/O bound as you'd think.  After I attained the time, I divided it into 379 to get the number of pictures imported per second.  Like many operations in OS X, the iPhoto import process is multi-threaded, giving the Core Duo an inherent advantage over the G5. So, I've included Core Solo performance in the chart below as well:

Once again, we see absolutely staggering performance from the Intel based iMac, performing 51% faster than the iMac G5.  But pulling the second core out of the picture shows us that a great deal of the performance advantage comes from the dual core nature of the chip, as the G5 can outperform the Core Solo at 1.83GHz by a healthy 10.5%. 

Next up is iDVD, an application that you can use to create DVDs that are playable on any consumer DVD player.  There are, once again, two aspects to performance in iDVD: video encoding performance and menu encoding performance.  Since we've already looked at video encoding performance with Quicktime, this test is predominantly limited by how long it takes to encode the menu system in my test DVD.  There is a small 13-second iSight video and audio that's encoded in the process, but it adds a matter of seconds to the overall time.  The image is written to disc instead of sent to the DVD burner for obvious reasons.  The results are expressed in seconds, lower being better.  And once again, we are dealing with a multi-threaded workload, so both the Core Duo and Core Solo are present in the chart:

Here, the performance is extremely close between the G5 and Core Duo, with the latter completing the test 5 seconds quicker than the G5.  The Core Solo loses some ground, taking another 41 seconds over its dual core counterpart. 

A newcomer to Apple's iLife suite is iWeb, a web publishing application.  I haven't had much time to play with the application, but I did use it as a benchmark - measuring the time that it took to publish a site with a handful of pages, 10 blog entries and 10 podcast entries.  This test was mostly single-threaded, although there were a few moments where the second core did get some action, so I included both the Core Duo and Solo:

Here, we have one of the few situations where the Core Duo wins completely based on its architecture, as even the Core Solo holds a huge performance advantage over the G5.