MacBook 2.0GHz Intel Duo 2 Core Performance

Question

I'm about to upgrade to a new MacBook and was just wondering what kind of performance I'm getting myself into!

Answer 1

well you should probably take a look at the specs in a different way. I have both a dual G5 2ghz and an MBP C2D 2.33, the MBP is definitely faster to run logic than my desktop machine is, period. I open a logic song (on an external FW800 drive) on the G5, then I open the same song on the MBP, and the CPU usage bars (both the logic ones and the activity monitor ones) don't go nearly as high on the MBP as on the G5. sure this isn't scientific testing, I'm sure there are little discrepanies here and there, but as far as it all averages out in actual real world performance, I'm afraid I just had to let go of my prejudice that a tower just had to be faster than a notebook. the mac pro is a different story, but I'm afraid the MBPs smoke dual G5s..
btw, i've mentioned this before on this forum, but I was at an apple briefing earlier this year in paris put on by apple for audio industry pros. it was run by a great german guy from the original emagic who still works in the logic team, and he had parallel setups of a G5 quad and a macbook pro (1st gen). the mac pro desktop was not out yet. basically, the laptop was not far behind quad's performance, running a big logic song with many audio tracks, lots of instruments and EXS vienna orchestra instances, all with a good quality H264 video file playing in logic. the MBPs disk performance was working a lot harder... but, it was all running on the internal drive, including sample streaming, so that should not come as a surprise. of course it's not ideal to work that way, but to see it could be done was impressive to say the least. so, it follows that these machines especially the new ones really do outperform dual processor and dual core G5s in real world running of logic situations.
if you're interested, there's a thread here somewhere of people playing a logic song with instances of sculpture playing 16 note polyphony constantly. this is of course a much less balanced test than what I saw at the briefing, but in terms of seeing processing grunt for CPU-intensive audio instruments, it's enlightening. the MBPs are getting higher plug in and polyphony counts than the dual G5s, and also the quad, unless people use the node trick to make the quad use its extra cores more effectively.