[TriLUG] new notebook with linux

[Ed Hill]

On Sat, 2003-12-20 at 15:54, David R.Matusiak wrote:
> there is only one ring of power
> 
> http://www.apple.com/powerbook/
> 
> world's slickest OS included.  other free/OSS options available.


I'd like to offer an actual data point in this discussion based upon my
personal experience:

  Laptop A: 2yo IBM ThinkPad A22p (2629-Y1U) w/ 900Mhz PIII
    http://www5.pc.ibm.com/us/products.nsf/$wwwPartNumLookup/_2629Y1U
    Note: upgraded to the maximum 512MB RAM and running Red Hat 9

  Laptop B: Brand-new (as of November) 15" 1.25GHz PowerBook G4
    http://manuals.info.apple.com/Apple_Support_Area/Manuals/specs/ \
      powerbook/L29921A_EN.pdf
    Note: upgraded to the max 2GB RAM and running the factory-
      loaded OS X
 
  Test: GCC (specifically, g77) compilation and runs of the 
    MITgcm (http://mitgcm.org/testing.html) verification suite.  
    Sure, its an esoteric thing but its what I do repeatedly in 
    a normal work day.  And its something I'd like to see 
    happen faster.

  Result: Laptop A beat Laptop B by an average of 19% (+/-2% over 
    multiple runs).  Yes, the 2yo PIII soundly beat the brand new 
    G4.  If you don't believe me, you're free to repeat it -- all 
    the software is publicly available.

  Conclusion: While care was taken to shut down all other 
    applications on both machines, this was not a rigorous 
    benchmark.  Rather, it was a quick and very informal 
    side-by-side test of two machines that we had on-hand 
    that day.  That said, the Mac performance was not 
    inspiring.  As a developer who is constantly building 
    and testing (most often with GCC), the Mac seemed *anemic*.
    Perhaps things will improve with the G5 and ongoing GCC 
    optimizations.  But in this case, x86 hardware running 
    Linux is a much "slicker" answer.

Of course, YMMV.

Ed

-- 
Edward H. Hill III, PhD
office:  MIT Dept. of EAPS;  Room 54-1424;  77 Massachusetts Ave.
            Cambridge, MA 02139-4307
email:   eh3 at mit.edu,  ed at eh3.com
URL:     http://web.mit.edu/eh3/
phone:   617-253-0098
fax:     617-253-4464
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