New 800 MHz iBook--How fast Is It?

Last week Apple released faster iBooks and PowerBooks, increased hard drive size, added features to some and reduced their prices. Wow, what a deal! The iBooks' G3 processor now tops out at 800 MHz for both the 12.1" and 14.1" screen models. Only the entry-level $999 12.1" iBook runs at 700 MHz, the speed of the previous top-end models. All iBooks, including the entry model, get a 100 MHz system bus and the fast ATI Mobility Radeon 7500 graphics of the previous PowerBook models. The $999 iBook gets 16 MB of video RAM like the previous models while the others get a boost to 32 MB. So, except for the G3 CPU, the new iBooks may rival the previous G4 PowerBooks in processing and graphics speed. Just how fast are they?

Last Friday we got our hands on the new 800 MHz iBook, a 12.1" model, and ran our usual set of speed tests. We've dropped two benchmarking applications, CocoaBench and SpeedRun, because of inconsistent results under Mac OS X 10.2.1. The new iBook was running Mac OS X 10.2.1 (Build 6E62). For comparison, we re-ran our speed tests on our 700 MHz 14.1" model iBook with Mac OS X 10.2.1 (Build 6D52). The 800 MHz iBook had 128 MB RAM versus 256 MB in our 700 MHz iBook which may have influenced the tests some. 128 MB of RAM is adequate for Mac OS X but barely so, especially if running multiple applications with multiple windows open. In our tests we ran only one application with one window open at a time to minimize any RAM effect. All networking was turned off and the screens set to thousands of colors. We also ran the tests on our former top-of-the-line 800 MHz Powerbook G4 running Mac OS X 10.2.1 with 768 MB of RAM.

Here are the results:

Action	iBook 800	iBook 700	TiBook 800
Skidmarks GT, Integer	72	64	80
- Floating Point	84	74	80
- Vector	-	-	80
Altivec Fractal (GFLOPS)	0.55	0.47	2.80
Let1kWindowsBloom (sec)	50	59	53
AppleWorks Scroll 100p (sec)	21	21	11
Acrobat Reader Scroll (sec)	51	51	36
Quake III Arena (fps)*	43	31	58

Skidmarks GT is an Apple application that measures CPU speed relative to a Power Mac G4 1 GHz processor. It comes with Apple's Developer Tools. The new 800 MHz iBook averages 13 per cent faster than the 700, slightly less than the 14.5 per cent faster clock speed. There is no vector measurement since the iBook's CPU is not a G4.

Altivec Fractal also measures CPU speed in FLoating OPerations per Second. It measures the new iBook at 17 per cent faster than the previous model. Looking at the TiBook column, one can see the huge advantage that the G4 CPU has with Altivec-aware applications.

Let1kWindowsBloom measures the time in seconds it takes to open and close 1000 Finder windows. The new iBook with faster graphics as well as a faster CPU is 15 percent faster. The new iBook is even faster than the 800 MHz PowerBook G4 at this operation.

AppleWorks Scroll measures how long in seconds it takes to scroll through a 100-page document in AppleWorks 6.2.4. The new and previous top-level iBooks took identical times but nearly twice as long as the PowerBook G4.

Acrobat Reader Scroll measures how long in seconds it takes to scroll through the PDF file manual for Virtual PC 4.0 using Adobe Acrobat Reader 5.1. Again, the new and former top-level iBooks scored the same. The 800 MHx PowerBook G4 was 30 per cent faster than both.

Quake III Arena v1.32t5, a popular 3D game, is used to time the average number of frames per second for a demo segment. Here the 32 MB of video RAM, faster ATI Radeon 7500 and faster CPU of the new iBook teamed up to improve the FPS by 39 per cent.

The 800 MHz processor with the faster ATI Mobility Radeon 7500 32 MB graphics found the the last generation PowerBooks represent a nice speed boost for the new G3-based consumer portable. The new iBook doesn't reach the speed of the 800 MHz PowerBook G4, especially with applications that use the Altivec, or "Velocity" engine of the G4 CPU. Still, it's a very nice machine. At $1299 for the 12.1" screen and $1,599 for the 14.1" screen and an additional 128 MB of RAM, the new top-level iBook is an incredible bargain.