Now that my PowerBook is nearing its 4th year, I'm finding myself more and more impatient with ever-slower software. Spend a few hours with Photoshop CS2 on a 667MHZ G4 with *only* 512MB of RAM and you'll know what I mean.
So I decided to test out the machine under various scenarios, to see just what a difference software has made. The benchmark is of course calculating pi, 1m digits of it, with pi_css5. The numbers are all from the above-mentioned PowerBook.
| Environment | Performance (in seconds) |
Relative performance | Configuration |
| Fedora Core Test 5 | 42.19 | GCC 4.1 (prerelease), compiled with -O3 -funroll-loops -mcpu=G4 | |
| MacOS X 10.4.4 | 42.44 | GCC 4.0.1, compiled with -O3 -funroll-loops -mcpu=G4 -fprefetch-loop-arrays -ftree-vectorize | |
| MacOS X 10.4.4 | 44.48 | GCC 4.0.1, compiled with -O3 -funroll-loops -mcpu=G3 -fprefetch-loop-arrays -ftree-vectorize | |
| MacOS X 10.4.4 | 44.61 | GCC 2.95.2 (from MacOSX 10.1), compiled with -O3 -funroll-loops | |
| MacOS X 10.4.4 | 45.37 | Metrowerks Codewarrior Pro 8, Level 4 optimizations, a Carbon application | |
| MacOS 9.2.2 | 47.30 | Metrowerks Codewarrior Pro 8, Level 4 optimizations, a Carbon application | |
| MacOS 9.2.2 | 48.50 | MPW and MrC 5.0, all optimizations enabled, a Classic application. | |
| MacOS X 10.4.4 | 48.72 | MPW and MrC 5.0, all optimizations enabled, a Classic application. | |
| MacOS 8.1 | 65.83 | SheepShaver 2.3b emulator (prebuilt), running the above CodeWarrior build. | |
| MacOS 8.1 | 82.50 | SheepShaver 2.3b emulator (prebuilt), running the above MPW build. | |
| MacOS 8.1 | ? | Basilisk II 1.0b emulator, crashes running the MPW/68K build. |
