Intel iMac -vs- dual G5 performance continued.

I recently cleaned up an old video project that has been awaiting attention for almost a year. It was pretty simple footage and required only a few snips, clips and fades in iMovie to be considered “done.” While waiting for my shiny new iMac Core Duo to render the fades, a memory surfaced.

When using the dual G5 systems to edit video, the system would render fades and transitions in only a second or two. In fact, on long segments where lots of fades and transitions were necessary, think of a Ken Burns movie full of photos, the dual G5 could render them as fast as I could drop them into the pasteboard. It was difficult to “stack” a few renders to keep the dual G5 busy.

Fast forward to yesterday as I waited almost 10 seconds for iMovie HD to render a fade. iMovie HD is already a Universal Binary. Because of how snappy nearly everything other Universal app is on the Core Duo, I expected similar results in iMovie. Reality proved to be quite different and I have to guess that there is quite a bit more that can be done with software optimizations within Apple’s video apps. I would not be surprised if it takes at least another year before iMovie is a snappy on Intel as on a G5 system.

In preparation for this trip, I installed Route 66, a non-Universal app on the Core Duo. Yikes. Rosetta is quite usable for many apps but calculating our route from Dallas to Seattle is quite a bit slower on the Core Duo than on my 1.5GHz G4 PowerBook. That was not what I expected. Based upon these and other observations, I predict that PowerPC G5 systems will remain the performance champions for video and other high end graphics tasks for at least the next one, and quite possibly two, years.

Even when the new Conroe processors from Intel become available later this year, it will not make up for this difference in performance. It will take until next year before all the pro apps (Photoshop, Final Cut, Dreamweaver) arrive as Universal Binaries and I predict it will be another year of optimizations beyond that before the Universal versions are performance competitive with todays PowerPC versions running on high end G5s. Sometime after Final Cut goes Universal, and then gets Intel specific CPU optimizations, those tweaks will trickle down to iMovie.

What I find quite ironic is that I am comparing computer CPU and future software performance to a benchmark that is already a year old, and predicting when it will catch back up. The dual G5s truly do have their niche, and in that niche they are the kings of their domain. Long live the king! … sort of. 😉