I should receive my new iMac tomorrow, so my tests were done on my DTK. Several sites have done performance tests showing the Intel iMac to be slower than a G5. However, anyone using a G4 (as I am) will see a big speedup with an Intel mac. I use a PowerBook as my primary system, so I’m forced to use a lower-performance G4. If and when I get a MacBook, it will outperform my PowerBook by a huge margin.
I did some very crude tests running a small command line program that writes some system information to a file and timing it using time. Even running in emulation, the DTK is faster than my PowerBook.
[mike: Development]$ time ./inventory >/tmp/invreal 0m0.642s
user 0m0.006s
sys 0m0.046s
On the DTK, native version:
[mike: Development]$ time ./inventory >/dev/null
real 0m0.031s
user 0m0.005s
sys 0m0.012s
Emulated version on the DTK:
[mike: Development]$ time ./inventoryppc >/tmp/inv
real 0m0.368s
user 0m0.090s
sys 0m0.045s