http://www.ableton.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=79733&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=0

comparison ipod vs zune
http://www.freedownloadscenter.com/Multimedia_and_Graphics/Misc__Graphics_Tools/iPhone_Video_Converter.html

In their defense, producing benchmarks of this kind is difficult. For Logic, they just stack Platinum reverbs together and see when they can’t any more. Honestly, that’s as decent a raw power test as any, and it’s easy enough to do. It’s just not terribly realistic, because it’s sort of one-dimensional, and it’s not something you’d do in the real world. (Well, okay, *I* sometimes make projects that involve stacking absurd number of reverbs, but I’m not very realistic, either.)

It’s not a meaningless number — it actually means a lot. It just needs to be balanced against other tests. And, in the end, it’s the soft, qualitative experience that matters more than the numbers anyway, because that’s what you’re actually buying.

Final Cut Pro turns out to be easier — then they just did a DV encode. Again, it’s just one test, but it tells you something — and, in the real world, you might be staring at a progress bar in that case.

What I found with their Core Duo benchmarks was that, while they were a little exaggerated because they were one-dimensional in that way, they were reflected elsewhere on some level.

I’ll be honest, *personally*, it’s the NVIDIA chip that has me excited, and I was waiting for that card to show up in a computer I wanted, and in a machine that runs both Mac and Windows really does fit the bill. There are some cool things I want to try out with NVIDIA’s shader extensions.

And totally, totally trust Anandtech over me. This requires someone who eats and breathes this stuff to really understand the CPU stuff; just reading Intel’s white papers can be insufficient. I’ll get back to talking about parrots and Monomes. I do have some real machines I can test, and I can comment on that sort of real-world performance. As far as truly understanding the architectural stuff, that’s definitely out of my league.

The other reality is, there’s a certain, practical CPU level that’s useful for audio. The high-end G5s, AMD X2s, Core Duos for me all make the cut. It’s the G4s and, to a lesser extent, older Centrinos where I’ve found people are actually unable to do the sort of basic music stuff they want to do — talking the CPU only.

It isn’t a big deal to me either, but it was one of the more notable features of the platform, completely new, while we’ve seen 4GB before. Although I agree the 4GB thing and the higher FSB could mean potential gains for some people who are working on the edge of their systems currently. Myself, I barely touch the CPU power of my X2 and 2GB RAM.

I just read Anandtech most of the time for this kind of info, they seem to cover everything pretty clearly. I read about Santa Rosa like a year ago, and the only thing that stood out to me at the time was the TurboMemory thing, but even that seems like it’s not so important now, and it’s not included in the MBP update anyway.

And lastly, for Apple’s benchmarks, I wouldn’t trust those for telling anything “real-world”, or even meaningful. They were saying their G5’s were so much faster than Intel’s chips, the they switched to Intel chips and did some other benchmark showing how much better they were than the G5’s. I forget exactly what they did and what they compared, but it was pure marketing nonsense. Don’t even pay attention to those quotes, except for humor’s sake.

1. Dynamic threading: One core gets overclocked for single-thread operations … not sure how often this happens, or what the actual performance gain is. (and that’s on a per-instruction basis? Here’s where I get in over my head.)

2. TurboMemory … do you mean Robson? I guess the question there is whether Apple is adding OS-level support for this Flash memory stuff. Vista has SuperFetch / ReadyBoost / ReadyDrive, of course, but then, while Intel has some impressive numbers, I’ve yet to see a compelling real-world case.

For audio (or video), this stuff to me is less interesting, as you really need a hard disk to get at that data … app loading, etc., is less of a high-priority issue. Maybe I’m missing something there? I’ve mostly heard about this via Microsoft, and it didn’t seem to me a compelling case for overall system performance, once your applications are loaded. :) HDD access there for me is not the big bottleneck … more access to things like video files and large audio samples, etc.

You may know more about these issues than I do; I’m just hitting on what I, erm, think I know, at least, and what I think of it.

We’re just talking 32-bit to 32-bit benchmarks here, and revolutionary as the architectural changes may be on Core 2 Duo, we still can’t look on the Mac at 64-bit performance (and arguably can’t on Vista, either, just because the big device compatibility picture isn’t there). What you’re saying is absolutely right, but I’m just talking about the end-user perspective.

Also, I’m taking into account the inclusion of the NVIDIA graphics chip, which is a big step forward entirely independent of what Intel is doing. (in fact, by contrast Intel is still, naturally, pushing their integrated graphics architecture, which is still at this point inferior to a dedicated chip)

Just to go back to Apple’s original numbers, they said they had a 39% improvement over the Core Duo with Core 2 Duo (2.33 GHz then compared to 2.16), now they’re saying 55% or so 2.4 Core 2 Duo over 2.16 Core Duo, rather than whatever smaller incremental improvement you’d get from Core 2 Duo to newer Core 2 Duo MBP. That’s why Macworld said they were interested in doing the tests of the two most recent generations, as I would be.

So, yes, Santa Rosa is not the step forward from Core2 that Core2 was from Core … what the exact proportion is, you’d have to test. I haven’t actually seen any useful real-world benchmarks there yet; I expect Macworld is on the case.

And you should correct your post above. You say this is a new architecture, but it’s actually a new “platform”, consisting of a CPU and chipset. For this new “platform”, the CPU is the same old Core 2 Duo Merom we’ve had before with the same architecture, just with extended FSB speeds.

Also, one of the significant, but optional, features of the platform is TurboMemory, which apparently Apple is holding until later or completely bypassing

What I was saying to begin with, which you disagreed with, is that Santa Rosa is not a huge step forward like Core2 was from Core. If you can show me some benchmarks showing otherwise I’d like to see them.