MacBook Pro vs. Macbook

[Dave Halliday]

As far as I can tell, the Macbook differs from the MacBook Pro in the following ways:

1. Video Card: MB has no Video Card. The Pro has either a 128 or 256 Card.
2. Size: MB is 13". The Pro is 15.4"
3. Card Slot Connector: MB doesn't have it, the Pro does.

Here are my questions:

1. What differences will I see between the MB and the Pro if I'm editing HDV on FC Studio?
2. Will the lack of Video Memory seriously affect realtime HDV playback?

[Dave Halliday]

I guess we won't know this answer until people start receiving the Macbooks...

[Ron Pfister]

The MB is essentially equivalent to the CoreDuo Mac mini. So if anyone has info regarding FCP on the mini, we'll know what the MB will be like. I'm curious to find out myself...

HTH,

Ron

[David Tamés]

Originally Posted by Dave Halliday

What differences will I see between the MB and the Pro if I'm editing HDV on FC Studio?

What a great question, my first thought exactly, so yesterday I stopped by the Apple store near my house to check out how well the MacBook performs with Final Cut Pro and HDV. They did not have FCP installed on any of the new MacBooks, however they said I could schedule a time to take it out for a spin with FCP, so I'll try that next time I can get to the store, but if anyone else has time to do that, would love to hear about it.

I was still curious how the MacBook compared to both the PowerBook G4 and MacBook Pro, so for fun I ran XBench on a sleek black MacBook (2 GHz Intel Duo, 512 MB RAM) in the store to see how it compares to the PowerBook G4 (1.67 GHz, 1.5 GB RAM) and MacBook Pro (2 GHz Intel Duo, 2 GB RAM). Your numbers will vary, this is like measuring EPA gas mileage figures.

The MacBook and MacBook Pro are likely to be reasonable performers compared to the G4 PowerBooks they replace, but it's not going to be a night and day difference. The only reasonable conclusion one can make from this not very scientific test is that the difference beetween the MacBook and MacBook Pro is that overall system performance is not by any means the big difference, the biggest diffrences are in terms of features, not performance. The Intel laptops have a faster memory bus compared to the G4, that's for sure, and the only numbers besides the Open GL numbers that stand out as a huge difference between G4 and the Intel Duo notebooks. Slight differences in numbers are not statistically significant.

XBench uses a 2.0 GHz G5 running Tiger as the 100 point baseline for comparisons.

Test: PowerBook G4 vs. MacBook vs. MacBook Pro
-----------------------------------------------
CPU: 66 vs. 73 vs. 69
Memory: 27 vs. 112 vs. 109
Quartz Graphics: 62 vs. 53 vs. 56
OpenGL Graphics: 81 vs. 215 vs. 139
User Interface: 36 vs. 15 vs. 21
Disk Combined: 33 vs. 24 vs. 28
Sequential Disk: 45 vs. 28 vs. 36
Random Disk: 25 vs. 20 vs. 24

[Dave Halliday]

Test: PowerBook G4 vs. MacBook vs. MacBook Pro
-----------------------------------------------
CPU: 66 vs. 73 vs. 69
Memory: 27 vs. 112 vs. 109
Quartz Graphics: 62 vs. 53 vs. 56
OpenGL Graphics: 81 vs. 215 vs. 139
User Interface: 36 vs. 15 vs. 21
Disk Combined: 33 vs. 24 vs. 28
Sequential Disk: 45 vs. 28 vs. 36
Random Disk: 25 vs. 20 vs. 24


==================
These numbers *can't* be right. The Macbook with 512 MB memory can't possibly outperform the MacBook Pro with 2GB memory on the "Memory" test. I see your caveat about gas mileage numbers but still.... Thats WAAAAAY off. Something's up here.

[Ron Pfister]

Xbench doesn't have the best reputation as a benchmark-suite. Google, and you'll find lots of evidence on that. Convenience doesn't make for quality, unfortunately...

[David Tamés]

Originally Posted by Ron Pfister

Xbench doesn't have the best reputation as a benchmark-suite. Google, and you'll find lots of evidence on that. Convenience doesn't make for quality, unfortunately...

Ron Pfister is right, which is why I qualified it as "unscientific," the only reasonable conclusion you can draw from XBench, or any benchmark for that matter, is where a machine is in the ballpark relative to other machines, and it can points out in what areas one machine may excel over others. Running the same test on different machines only provides a broadbrush comparison at best.

[David Tamés]

Originally Posted by Dave Halliday

These numbers *can't* be right. The Macbook with 512 MB memory can't possibly outperform the MacBook Pro with 2GB memory on the "Memory" test. I see your caveat about gas mileage numbers but still.... Thats WAAAAAY off. Something's up here.

Actually they can, the benchmark is testing the time it takes to move data in and out of memory. The amount of memory in a machine does not have any effect on the actual speed of memory operations, unless the chunks you are working with are larger than available memory, which is not what XBench is measuring. More memory lets you run more processes at a time with less swapping in and out of swap space on the disk, so the speed up in this case is an indirect, not direct effect.