Ok. I'll admit I was duped by Apple many times—all you need is one mouse button, girls aren't as fun as a PowerBook, Steve Jobs came to us on a comet and will die for our sins strapped to a volcano. But even I was kind of fuzzy on this whole Intel chips being faster than a G5 trip. I know that Intel makes some nice, low-power chips, but AMD is eating their lunch in terms of speed and if you wanted real low-power consumption you'd go with VIA—I'm talking hypothetically. Therefore, it's good to know that the MacIntels tested by MacWorld offer about 25% more speed than a similar G5. This, obviously, is quite a bit less than the original 2X and 4X improvements Apple was touting.

Under the Rosetta emulation - a British invention from Manchester - PPC applications running in x86 performed at about half speed. With the exception of iTunes, which encoded audio files a third as fast as it would have done running on a decent processor, such as the IBM G5.

So maybe the joy is slightly premature. While it's a good idea that they're moving out of the floundering grasp of IBM, it's clear that they still have a ways to go before they work out the hardware bugs.

Intel Macs only one fourth, not four times faster - report [RegHardware]

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