[CaptainHaddock]

iTunes Music Ripping Comparison

Ouch. A current G4 Powerbook re-encodes music to AAC roughly 3 times faster than the new MacBook. A PowerMac was almost 6 times faster.

Interesting that Steve left out any comparisons of the Core Duo and PPC when it came to vector instructions and media processing. Right now, Altivec seems to be kicking SSE's butt (see a previous thread on choppy H.264 playback). It would be interesting to see more systematic benchmarks.

Update: The same forum poster did a second test the next day, and the MacBook was significantly faster for some reason, beating the G4. Hm…

[toneloco28]

Did you read further down the page where it says in subsequent tests,the MacBook ripped at 20x, making the first test an anomaly? Does anyone really believe that a dual core yonah rips slower than a g4!? Also, in the same thread a guy with a new iMac plays 1080p content with the cpu hardly peaking above 50%. The x1600 has h.264 hardware decoding so HD content won't be a problem.

[cambro]

I agree...

The benchmarks given in that forum thread are pretty bogus, IMO. Different songs, no mention of specs, converting AAC to AAC.

Not exactly a rigorous performance comparison....

[Drakino]

He also did the tests on a MacWorld machine, where someone else might have gone in and checked the "Run in rosetta" option on the machine he tried it on first.

Apple has had iTunes on Windows for over two years now, plenty of time to get some SSE based acceleration into their AAC encoder.