“According to most of the folks who have actually benchmarked Rosetta, it’s speed hit is… in the 50% range, give or take a few, and sometimes worse,” Gene Steinberg writes for The Mac Night Owl. “Now I haven’t actually attempted to confirm these published results, but they are sufficiently widespread and come from enough authoritative sources to accept at face value. It means that your spanking new MacBook Pro with a 2GHz Intel Core Duo processor, acts more like a computer with a 1GHz duo core processor when you uses Microsoft Office or Adobe Photoshop. This may sound disappointing, but it really shouldn’t be.”
“Just what kind of Mac are you replacing? Forgetting the various differences between the PowerPC and Intel chips, if your computer was rated at less than 1GHz, you’re still getting a speed boost on your emulated software. And it’s just a stop gap. You can rest assured that both Office and Photoshop will go Universal some time in the next year. Other applications are being updated nearly every single day. Sure, the sooner the better, but I can’t see typing in Word any faster than I do now, so I wouldn’t consider emulation a significant turnoff unless I was working on lots of large documents with embedded documents,” Steinberg writes.
“There are things you can do to enhance Rosetta performance, however, and the first is to max out RAM. According to Transitive, its technology typically exacts a 50% memory overhead on an emulated application. In the real world, if Photoshop, for example, needs 128MB of RAM to run efficiently, add another 64MB for Rosetta to do its thing. When you factor in the requirements of Mac OS X for Intel, and any other applications you might run simultaneously, you can see that a 512MB MacIntel is apt to bog down in virtual memory land before long,” Steinberg writes. “Also don’t forget one thing that commentators have largely ignored, and that is that Rosetta is at version 1.0 for all practical purposes. Over time, it’s quite possible that Apple and Transitive will find ways to make it run faster, and don’t be surprised if one of the main features of Mac OS 10.5 Leopard is a 10 to 20% performance boost for PowerPC emulation.”
Full article here.
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Related article:
Increasing RAM improves Mac OS X’s ‘Rosetta’ performance? – January 25, 2006
In other news, the Sun still sets in the West.
I’m very impressed by Rosetta. As someone who has used Classic in the past I can only stress that this is completely different. Photoshop on my Macbook Pro runs pretty much as it did on my iMac G5.
Coming from an 800mhz iBook G4, Photoshop and Office run noticably faster on the core duo iMac with 1.5GB of RAM. Yes, rosetta is slower for all the reviewers comparing it to a 5 month old iMac, but I don’t think most people are upgrading a 5 month old machine…
That being said– I can’t wait till Photoshop and Office are Universal!!
add more ram, who knew?
thanks captain obvious
I just can’t wait to get my hands on my new 2.0 GHZ MacBook Pro that I just ordered. I will be replacing a 500 MHZ (G3) Pismo, so I look forward to a speed increase even under Rosetta.
Anyone went through a change like the one I mention above? Waht’s your feedback?
“if Photoshop, for example, needs 128MB of RAM to run efficiently,”
LOL. Try at least 1 Gig. Photoshop uses about 4 – 10+ times the memory of the size of your graphic you are using. You got a 200 MB file you need lots of RAM.
cedreca- Anyone went through a change like the one I mention above? Waht’s your feedback?
It´s just one laptop (now slow) to a faster laptop. What´s the change?
Buying a Mactel now is a serious buying mistake.
1: You can’t use most of your old PPC software
2: Ones that can run under Rosetta is slow
3: There is hardly any native Mactel software.
4: Professional versions of software are being rolled out with new, expensive updates. So it takes years to do that and they will be buggy when released.
5: When that software is finally released, your MacTel would already be obsolete and the software won’t run as fast as a new MacTel.
6: You have to outlay a lot of cash because your updating hardware and software a the same time.
Your best course of action would have to been to stick with your PPC machine and nurse it for the next couple of years, save up your money and wait for a stabilized hardware/OS/software to arrive.
Buy then of course a version of Vista will be running native on Mactels, so you might as well wait for that.
MacDude – I agree.
I am waiting – it will be 2007 (or later?) until I buy again.
“if Photoshop, for example, needs 128MB of RAM to run efficiently,”
Where did this guy get this info? Out of his fscking @SS?
Listen to me and I’ll tell you a secret.
For best Photoshop CS2 speed you need a 64 bit PPC Mac, Tiger and lots of RAM, like 4.5 GB or better.
Photoshop needs 2 GB, Mac OS X need about 500 MB, then you need some RAM for file manipulation. Nothing else running either.
Anything less than 3 GB or non- 64bit or non-Tiger and you will have Photoshop swapping RAM to disk, yea, your slow boot hard drive. Beachball City.
Unless you got a RAID O pair of 36, 74 GB 10,000 RPM Raptors or 150 GB 10,000 RPM RaptorX (Quad only) as a boot drive or scratch disk, your going to suffer serious Photoshop performance degradation.
“I wanna´ buy a new Mactel so my pro software programs will run at least 50% slower and I can´t run my old PPC software!”
What are people thinking? (What was Apple thinking in releasing these computers?)
I guess the early buyers fall into two categories:
a) early adopters that want to say they have the newest.
b) people that never use anything more than what comes with the computer.
c) their currnet mac died or is so old it won´t run anything.
c) all of the above.
Why don’t you just PISS OFF back into your Winbox swamp MacDude…
macdude , fuck off , you dumb zero talent trolling douchebag prick
i’ve gone from an imac g4/800 to an imac dual core 2 ghz and it REALLY moves
impressive stuff
the first time you run a rosetta program it’s slow but it speeds a lot up as it’s loaded into ram and the mac can delve into cache
I find my MacBook Pro is quite a bit faster than my poor old PB G4 867 12″. With Universal apps, it just flies, such as Safari, which I think everyone can appreciate.
The screen is MUCH brighter. It has a more refined finish, a bit less granular. This thing is FUN too with the built-in camera.
The new Macs are simply FUN for old and young. My kids went nuts. My father couldn’t leave him new iMac alone.
Video conferencing with Grandma. The future is here. Thank you Apple.
i’ve gone from an imac g4/800 to an imac dual core 2 ghz and it REALLY moves
Not in Photoshop CS2 it won’t.
impressive stuff
Only as impressive as the width of your @ss.
the first time you run a rosetta program it’s slow but it speeds a lot up as it’s loaded into ram and the mac can delve into cache
Making excuses already?
You don’t know the meaning of the word speed unless your running a tricked out PowerMac with RAID O as boot.
Oh I got a iMacTel sitting right here, it’s a TOTAL SLOW COW.
So fsck off.
MacDude, have you actually tried an Intel Mac yet? I was very impressed with the speed of PowerPC apps. Obviously they don’t run as fast as they would on a G5, but for the most part, with the exception of Pro apps like Photoshop, etc, the apps don’t run much (if any) slower than they would on a G4 Mac Mini. Much faster than emulating Intel on PowerPC…
Any more of that , my son , and I shall tell all the nice people here about your secret fetish.
MacDude:
You talk the talk – but most of it is complete drivel. I work in an advertising studio manipulating 100-200MB CS2 files on a daily basis All our machines are dual 2.5GHz G5s with 2.5GB of RAM. There is no redraw lag, Gaussian blur and Vanishing Point retouching is pretty damn fast.
And Illustrator 3D rendering is exceptionally quick too – as is our FCP 5.0/Motion and Logic Pro workstation.
Oh yeah, the ‘nothing else running’ part of your comment made me smile… it shows you know little about PPC G5s memory allocation requirements.
Please…. leave it out. You’re clearly talking crap.
Why are you people responding to this macdude person? If no one pays attention he/she will get bored and go away. When you get all upset about his/her comments you are feeding him/her exactly what he/she wants. It’s the same thing as giving into a child’s temper tantrum. You just don’t do it. If he/she feels that his/her computing platform is so inadequate that he/she must try and bring others down to make him/herself feel better then that is his/her problem. Besides it’s probably one of those people that think neon lights on the inside of their computer is really cool. As the rest of us look at it and just think it’s tacky.
And guess what…Photoshop runs faster on Windows.
System 68k, System PPC, OS X, Intel, Rosetta, I wonder: what will be next?
MacDude:
The guts of the Intel Mac mini are socketed, not soldered. What does this mean? Upgradability.
The CS2 suite works great on my Intel Mac mini (1 GB memory, 80 GB HD). Final Cut Pro is solid on it, too.
It also has a digital audio in for my keyboard and guitar. Once I get a proper S-video cable, Front Row will rule on my 42″ HDTV.
MW: Your mommy should take away your posting privileges UNTIL you show marked improvement in your troll-fu, kid.
Time for some debunking:
“1: You can’t use most of your old PPC software”
With the exception of Classic apps, all repeat ALL of my older PPC stuff works seamlessly.
“2: Ones that can run under Rosetta is slow”
Slow relative to what? From personal experience, PPC apps on an iMac Core Duo 2.0 do feel a hair slower than on a dual 2.0 G5. But when comparing consumer machines in emulation against pro machines running native, I hope the pro ones ARE faster!
3:
4:
5:
yadda yadda yaddda
“6: You have to outlay a lot of cash because your updating hardware and software a the (sic) same time.”
I just updated. The only software I had to upgrade was a KeySpan driver, which was free.
“Buy then of course a version of Vista will be running native on Mactels, so you might as well wait for that.”
Vista for Macs is as vaporous as the smoke from your bong.
Anyway you’re welcome to wait for it. For the rest of us there’s Mac OS X.
This has been established a hundred thousand times since the intel macs came out…