Developers impressed with performance of Intel-based Mac

People who claimed PowerPC was a lot better for Apple and the company's marketing department were wrong as developers now say the Intel-based Mac systems are impressing.

Apple is renting developers a $999 developer kit for a period of 18 months to get their apps ported to run on the Intel version of Mac OS X. The systems have a 3.6GHz Pentium 4 processor with 2MB L2 cache, 800MHz FSB, 1GB 533MHz DDR2 memory and the Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 900.

A developer claims compared to the dual 2GHz Power Mac G5 system the Intel-based developer kits run Mac Os X lots faster. He says bootup times on the Intel systems only takes 10 seconds.

The developer kit also includes an Applications folder with a mix of PowerPC and Intel-native applications. The early test version of Rosetta, the dynamic binary translator to run old PowerPC applications on Intel-based x86 Mac systems, is simple impressive. The developers claim Rosette works 100 percent seamless and is able to run PowerPC apps at about 65 to 70 percent of their normal speed. Some PowerPC-native programs even realize little to no speed reductions while running under Rosetta.

The first Intel-based Mac system for consumers will likely hit the market by mid-2006, although recent rumours claim Apple may be striving to beat those estimates by a few months. More details at AppleInsider