Anyway, I don’t want to end up with a bunch of software that won’t work or that runs poorly simply because manufacturers haven’t yet released versions that run on the Intel chips. I’m getting tired of not getting responses from distributors.
Does anyone know if there is a website containing a list of popular Mac software and it’s Intel-ready status? Even if it isn’t comprehensive, anything would be a good start and I’m not having much luck on my own.
From the little bit of playing that I’ve been doing on VMWare under Linux (note: this is not sanctioned and I violate a lot of things doing it; but my curiosity is satisfied) I don’t think you’ll have a lot of problems with even Rosetta stuff. It’s fast!
Basically, everything that I’ve installed runs under Rosetta faster than on my real Mac! For benchmarking, my “real Mac” is a 933MHz G4, and the VMWare box is a Sempron 2800+. Photoshop is faster. Safari (in properties, select “Open Using Rosetta”) is faster. VirtualPC doesn’t run at all, so in a way it’s faster. It’s really impressive, even running in the virtual environment (although in such an environment the video is slow as heck).
It kind of peeves me that my crappy, generic Sempron box is faster than my native system. But on the other hand, I’m waiting with extreme eagerness for the new PowerMacs (or whatever they’ll be called).
An aside: PC processors have gotten really wacky lately, and I don’t know a thing about them. My Sempron 2800+ at 1.6Ghz replaced my Celeron 1.7GHz when the mobo fried. Since it’s just a FreeCell box, I replaced it with the cheapest mobo/chip combo there was at the CBW store – $99 for 'em both. The thing is, it’s really quite a screamer. The 933Mhz G4 ran circles around the 1.7 Celeron, and emulated it in VPC at almost the same speed. But this Sempron! Wow! How does it compare to the Core Duo 2.0 that may possibly ship in a new PowerMac? Yeah, two cores, but I don’t do a lot of multitasking, so feel free to compare a Core Solo with the AMD. I’m starting to see that there are so many fans of AMD out there. And also why Apple moved to the current line of Intels if they’re at all comparable. Oh, yeah, the Sempron is the crappy version of the AMD line.
The Core Duo processors are based on the Pentium M line, and thus have much higher performance per clock than the Pentium 4 based chips like the Celery you had, which is basically a castrated P4 in that it had a 128kb of L2 cache, instead of the 512kb found in that speed grade Pentium 4; note that Semprons are similarly Athlon 64’s with less L2 cache, but due to design differences (shorter pipeline, integrated memory controller, among other things), it doesn’t nearly have the same performance reduction.
The older P4 based Celerons (before the Celeron D) had terrible performance per clock; on most benchmarks a 1.6ghz Duron (AMD’s old budget chip, based on the Athlon XP’s, but with only 64kb L2 cache) would easily beat a 2.6ghz Celeron.
Overall, the Core Duo and Pentium M seem to offer about the same performance, clock for clock, as the Athlon 64x2 and Athlon 64 chips. So each core on the Core Duo should be a fair bit faster than the Sempron you are using now, depending on the clockspeed of the Core Duo, of course.