I’m getting a bit frustrated by all the news reports and reviews on the new Intel based Imac’s. They all claim that the machines ain’t as fast as Jobs promised. They all say that the speed increase isn’t 2x but more like 10%. Like the test described in details in the report from MacWorld.com. But what I notice in all the test I read is that they only test one application at a time. As far as I now those applications aren’t build for multi processor environments. Which means they don’t really take advantage of the extra processor available, like the pro applications that run on the Dual or Quad Power Mac like for instance Final Cut Pro.

I think a better test would be to test more than one application at the same time, running on the same Imac to get a better comparison of the speed increase. Because if you are rendering in iMovie you can’t really do anything else on a single G5, while on an Intel Core Duo you have another processor left over to do other things for you.

This is all a theoretical thought excercise as I don’t have any Imac to test my thesis on but I do hope that someone who has access to both machines will give this a try and get some real world numbers.

Update:
Found a test on ArsTechnica where they tested an universal binary of Xbench on both types of Imac’s. There you can see in the Xbench results that the increase in speed is more like 2x than the 10% claimed in the test by Macworld indicated above.

Update:
Just heard on the Maccast podcast that MacSpeedZone.com agrees with me. They tested running parallel apps as I suggested and the results awesome.