No, there is one physical processor in the iMac that has two cores. Each core will page ram simultaniously for instruction sets. With DDR ram two sets can be paged every cycle. In a way its like a hardware version of hyperthreading technology. Instead of emulating it, there is another physical core now. A lot of the performance is going to be based on how the OS manages resources.

Like myself and others said, just give it a while and I am sure that the intel based macs will be very fast machines.

From what I can tell, it's not. The new iMacs feel FAST compared to the iMac G5s. Certain things do seem to take a second to start, just a very slight pause but that may well be the hard drive spinning up, I haven't taken the time to pin it down. Garage Band, iDVD, and iMovie are definitely snapper and less "laggy" on a core duo iMac than a G5 iMac.

I can't wait to try a universal binary of Final Cut Pro or DVD Studio Pro on the new iMac. If intel can live up to their roadmap, then it's going to be a nice future.

I've personally never liked xbench, but I don't like benchmarks in general.

An improbable profit margin.
 

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Off topic?
What I have a heard time understanding is the supposed "financial performance" of the Intel-embracing iMac. I don’t see how the figures quoted by MacRumours could be correct:

According to the company <iSupply>, the 17" Intel-embracing iMac which retails for $1299 costs Apple $898 before adding software and boxing it. They estimate that the most expensive component is the new Intel Core Duo chip which is estimated to cost Apple $265 a piece.

That doesn’t jive with usual profit margins, does it?


Best regards,
ArcticStones

My five minutes with an iMac Core Duo 1.83 GHz
 

Everything is very snappy, once windows are open. It does seem to hiccup a little bit right after a task is asked of it, just a split second pause. It's certainly noticeable though.

Safari and page loading was almost instant. I was very surprised with the difference in page loading between my PB and the new intel iMac...the pages really do snap to the screen.

I took the liberty to run BenchJS...and it did real well. The iMac did the entire test in 4.69 seconds...it takes my PB about 14.

So will The next version of OS X (10.5 Leopard I guess?), be overly optimized for the Intel Macs that it won't be that much of a good thing on "older" macs? Like my PowerBook G4, which I just got for Christmas, will 10.5 still be a good update?

Probably yes, if it has features you want. There is an established efficient code base for PPC processors and updating that is much easier than optimizing for a new processor.

PPC hardware is going to be phased out. So eventually like three years from now it will all be intel based. This is going to be a transitional period.

Does anyone find it odd that IBM's PPC chip was the first to break the 1GHz mark but couldn't keep up with Intel and AMD when they got past it?

Nope thats how IBM rolls. They develope something over everyone else and then shelf it to work on something else. Then sell the technology off to another company. Not to mention intel and AMD was making their chips in a way more cost effective way. IBM could never get a handle on that, and the cost never really went down over the years. IBM is more concerned with servers and enterprise business than consumer business, which is why they never really needed to develope PPC hardware much further than it was. It just wasn't a good investment for them, or they at least thought that way.

I want to by a new Mac... My G4 has give up the ghost and my MacMini is struggling! I like the iMac's and don't know what to do!!! do I by the PowerPC model or get an Intel model???? right now all my software is PPC (Quark, Adobe Collection etc) - If I by an Intel Model, I will be chucking away some very expensive software!

Any advice would be appreciated!

The thing with that particular example is was difficult to accurately guage PC performance against Mac performance simply because of the OS difference.

No, the memory controller is seperate to the core of the CPU so therefore they full access to the entire allocation of RAM.

Think about a dual processor system, that is basically what a dual core chip is.

Personally I would go for the Intel simply because it is the newest and the current line and theoretically should have a longer life.

Have a look at Rosetta your software might run under it - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosetta_%28software%29

Sorry if this has been covered, I just don't find anything about it.

I've been using a Mac Pro since the first month it was released. I run Parallels Desktop with one or two apps that only exist for Windows. They are insanely fast by comparison to all previous VirtualPCs and SoftPC's I've hacked around with over many years.

Meanwhile, the Mac side performance is erratic, to put it politely. Basically when it boots, or when not much is running, everything is lightning quick. Then the longer I run, the slower it gets. Finally, it acts exactly like Windows. Massive disk thrash, I mean you go to launch or quit Word or Excel and it pounds the disk for 5, even 10 seconds of pure thrash, before responding to whatever you just clicked on.

I've run iDefrag and it helps a lot, but does not change the result.

I added a second GB of RAM, and it helps but does not change the result, it just delays the onset.

I found that if I quit out of apps I am not using, that are VM hogs, like Excel (850 MB), Adobe Reader (800 MB), Parallels Desktop (2 GB), then things zip right along again.

I don't think rebooting has anything to do with it, it simply has to do with the total amount of VM in use.

Almost everything on my system is native Intel according to the Activity Monitor, except for Eudora, and HP All-in-One Communcations (which I was one of the original developers of).

Also, AM shows about 14 GB of total VM. That is just crazy. Apparently programs like Firefox or Safari, as well as Eudora, and all of the MS Office apps, appear to me to leak memory. The longer they are used, the higher their VM totals get, and the more the system is prone to violent and crippling thrashes. They are each in the 500 to 900 MB range, per program. A memory leak in a VM environment such as OSX of course means an ever-increasing swap file size.

Has anyone else a) seen this problem, b) come up with any other solutions other than throwing more real memory at it, or quitting & relaunching apps all the time like we used to do before Switcher, Servant, and MultiFinder? Do I sound old? ;-)

Also, has anyone been using a separate swap partition, or separate swap drive, to work this issue?

Many thanks in advance

I note that RAM usage ("Real Memory" in Activity Monitor) is more relevant than Virtual Memory. It is RAM usage that will (if excessive) cause swapping.

And I note that others have reported problems with Parallels (and, less often, VNC servers) taking up large amounts of "wired" memory.

Note too that Excel (like all of Office 2004) is non-native.

It could be a complete coincidence, but in another thread people are complaining about sudden slowness on their Mac -- both having HP all-in-one software installed.

You might want to try quitting the HP specific processes to see if that is the culprit.

Very interesting. However at the moment, I have HP All-in-One Comm running in background, and no thrashing. The system won't thrash until I get busy in MS Office apps, Photoshop, Adobe Reader, PD runnings Windows, etc. It doesn't seem to matter what I run, it is the VM itself that seems broken.

I was one of the early developers of the HP All In One Mac stuff, but it has been a long time since then, and I have no idea what all they've done with their software.

Right, sorry about the Office oversight.

I fully expect Parallels to use a lot of memory, that is fine, it is a complete OS with several apps running. But much like Mark Choi reports in a parallel thread (from November of 2006), the intense thrash is reproducible without PD around. If I run Safari or Firefox long enough, and/or Excel, Word, PowerPoint, Adobe Reader, and Photoshop, it will happen just the same. I can close all files in all of those apps and the system will still thrash for 5+ seconds at a time, especially when switching back in to one of the big apps, then quitting it. If I go to quit four or five at once, it is a comical barrage of massive disk i/o.

When this happens, Activity Monitor is quite clear about what is happening. Before thrash, as I am running now with relative quiet in the room, I have 50,000 page ins and only a handful of page outs. Once I get all the apps going for a few hours though, I will see for example 300,000 page ins, and even more page outs than that. It seems that in addition to leaking VM, someone somewhere is writing out dead pages that should be freed, not written to disk.

System again is a Mac Pro with 2GB real memory. 27 GB free on the boot partition, 165 GB free on the 'user' partition. One actual user.

Maybe the simple answer is, if I see 14 GB in Activity Monitor for total VM, then I need to keep quitting apps, or buy more memory (again). I admit that a 14 to 2 ratio of VM to real memory is awfully optimistic =) However, why does it take 350 MB of VM each to run Calculator, Dock, World Clock, Activity Monitor, etc.

In the thread by Mark Choi that you refer to (http://forums.macosxhints.com/showthread.php?t=62798) the problem was established to be due to excessive memory use by some of the apps he was using. There is nothing mysterious about getting a lot of disk activity when the system needs to swap because the apps you are running are using more RAM than what you have.

And note that Photoshop is also non-native unless you are running the beta version of CS.
Even when native, Photoshop takes a lot of RAM. But as has been discussed elsewhere on these forums, any app running under Rosetta (i.e. non-native apps) will take a lot more RAM than usual - as much as twice as much.

As I said above, it is best to ignore the amounts shown for Virtual Memory and just look at how much Real Memory is being used by your apps.
An application can allocate a bunch of virtual memory but never get around to using even a fraction of what was allocated. The system doesn't do anything with such allocations until the point where the memory is actually used.

So you should add up the amounts of Real Memory being used by the apps you are running (as shown in Activity Monitor) and see if the total approaches the amount of physical RAM you have installed. If it does, you should expect to get swapping.

I thought that was just the amount allocated to the app. It doesn't actually use that much.