The Performance Edge: How Does
A 20% Clock-Speed mprovement Turn Into A 40% Performance Improvement?
- The iBook G3/500 vs The iBook G3/600
Sunday,
December 2, 2001
On the surface of things, it would appear that
there is very little difference between the previous 500 MHz
iBooks and the current crop of 600 MHz ones. They are basically
the same. Same form factor, same graphics card, same optical
drives, same memory amount & memory sub-system. Sure there
is a modest speed bump of 100 MHz, to the same G3 processor
found in both iBook generations. This should, however, yield
about a 20% performance improvement. Then why in many of our
test results below are we seeing close to a 30% - 40% performance
gain? The answer, we believe, can be laid at the feet of one
more change Apple made. In the place of the 66 MHz System
Bus (read "pathway") between the processor
and main memory, there is now a 100 MHz one. This allows data
to pass more quickly between main memory, the processor and
other memory sub-systems. This is true on all the new iBooks,
with the exception of the low-end CD only model, which has
the old 500 MHz processor and a 66 MHz bus.
It also appears that the drives in these new
iBooks are not only more spacious, but also perform better.
The tests below are from our suite of real
world application tests. These tests feature a diverse
selection of applications commonly used by the Mac community.
The test suite was designed to render an accurate and well
rounded picture of a machine's performance. All of the tests
below (with the exception of the Quake III & CineBench
2000 tests) were timed with a stopwatch. The times were then
converted to percentages relative to the previous iBook G3/500,
which is set to 100%. For all scores, higher numbers are better.
Finder Tests
Seems that hard drive performance is somewhat
improved. The top score is probably helped more by the faster
processor speed
AppleWorks 6 Tests
Again the faster processor speed and speedier
bus is the factor here
Quake III Tests
These scores are relative.
At 'fastest' setting the processor plays a
bigger role. Both machines have the same graphics card
Most, if not all, of the processing is taking
place in the graphics sub-system
Photoshop 6 & Other Data Crunching Tests
Again almost a 40% speed improvement from
a 20% clock rate increase
All Photoshop filter tests are run completely
in RAM, so the drive is not a factor
This is pure, raw data crunching
This is a processor intensive task
This is a combination of both processor and
graphics card performance
Encoding/Decoding Tests
Heavy duty crunching going on here
The DVD/CD-RW drive in both iBooks burns CDs
at 4X - not the fastest in the world
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