Comments on: Leopard Beta Performance (June 2007)

By: Primate Labs Blog : Leopard Performance (October 2007)

Primate Labs Blog : Leopard Performance (October 2007) — Sat, 27 Oct 2007 06:15:57 +0000

[...] decreased slightly from Tiger to Leopard. I’m not sure why this is the case, since pre-release Leopard benchmarks showed Leopard performing better than Tiger (at least in some areas). What’s not surprising [...]

By: mlang

mlang — Mon, 25 Jun 2007 06:32:43 +0000

Very little code is required to activate the multithreading ability of Leopard…

Check out these videos. World of Warcraft beta with multithreading code gets a FPS SCORE of 160 while the non multithreaded version can only get to 40 FPS.

Apple WWDC Demo of World of Warcraft on Leopard OSX 10.5
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PM6s59OPJbk&mode=related&search=

Apple 32bit Vs 64bit WWDC demo OSX 10.5
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gezP5g48fSU

By: Cubert

Cubert — Thu, 21 Jun 2007 21:27:08 +0000

I just think Leopard is not optimized completely yet. Weren't there similar results with Tiger vs. Panther? I thought I remember significant benchmark improvements in Tiger from beta to release.

The developer blogs report a generalized feeling of a quicker and more responsive OS, although I do believe the Intel Macs will see more of a benefit in Leopard than PowerPC Macs.

Also, Thej, not all of us are going to be running 64-bit apps AND multi-core Macs. I want Leopard to fly for 32-bit apps and single processor Macs (G4 and G5).

By: Sam

Sam — Wed, 20 Jun 2007 20:18:43 +0000

I'm not privy to the pre-release builds, I doubt there are any "debugging processes" that would affect streaming and memory benchmarks. I suspect Leopard may just really be slightly slower than Tiger. It's not unusual for newer releases to do more and be a little slower-- 10.0 through 10.4 was more an exception that people came to depend on (in part Apple got away with it because 10.0 was so incredibly slow).

It's also not that unusual to trade better multi-core/parallel performance for slightly worse linear performance. It's possible the buffering, locking, synchronization, etc., are more tuned to the multiprocessing case. (More synchronization can allow more parallelism at the expense of higher overhead.)

In other words, the real test will be real-world usage. Not having to wait for drives to mount or the Finder not locking up when accessing a share will more than make up for a 5-10% drop in some benchmarks to me.

By: thej

thej — Wed, 20 Jun 2007 19:53:35 +0000

Leopard will show performance increases that Geekbench can’t because Geekbench isn’t 64-bit and it does not use the new APIs available in Leopard. Specifically APIs that manage theads on multiple cores.

By: sgarza

sgarza — Wed, 20 Jun 2007 19:33:41 +0000

I think the same as George. Debugging processes are making it slower than tiger. Let’s wait until October to see the real thing.

By: George Matook

George Matook — Wed, 20 Jun 2007 17:47:04 +0000

I’m no developer, but it is my understanding that such betas have multitudes of background/debugging processes running that would not normally be functional on a release version of the software. This, and the fact that they won’t be finalizing the optimization until later in the production cycle, could be contributing to the unchanged and decreased performances you are seeing. Either way, I’m certainly looking forward to it (and your new benchmark) in October!
-George