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Engadget benchmarked the MacBook Air and declared it the slowest machine Apple makes. Most performance complaints have been about the 1.6 GHz CPU, a 20% clock-speed reduction from the 2.0 GHz CPU offered in the lowest-end MacBook. But that’s irrelevant in practice.
Most people, even those technically inclined, don’t understand some fundamentals about modern relative hardware performance.
Two things matter for general-use performance these days:
That’s it. Certainly not CPU clock speed, motherboard chipset, or GPU. They’re all so fast, even the lowest-end versions, that only specialized applications (video encoding, high-end gaming, etc.) are likely to benefit from boosting them.
Here’s something else you might not have known:
Install and watch MenuMeters to see for yourself.
And something that we just learned from the benchmarks at this link:
Take a look at the “Disk Test” section at the bottom of that benchmark table. Not good.
Engadget didn’t publish the drive models used by their various MacBook Pro comparison models, but I’d guess that the lower one is 5400 RPM and the higher two are 7200 RPM.
Look at the score on the iMac, using a 7200 RPM, 3.5-inch desktop hard drive. It’s double the performance of the laptop drives.
And look at the score of the MacBook Air’s 1.8-inch hard drive: it’s 40% slower than the good laptop drives and 70% slower than the iMac’s desktop drive.
The less-informed tech journalists are complaining that the CPU’s clock speed is 25% slower than other laptops, but they’re completely missing the point.
You could replace nearly anyone’s faster CPU with a 1.6 GHz Core 2 Duo and they wouldn’t notice. But swap their nice desktop drive with a 1.8-inch iPod hard drive, and the performance will suffer so badly that they’ll come over and kick your dog within minutes.
Comments
What I find surprising, and perhaps you can comment on this, Marco, is why current operating systems aren't able to (or interested in) offloading most of their operations into RAM when the user has 2Gb or more. It seems (from my position as someone well outside core computing) as if today's OSes should be able to do most of their business in RAM given those volumes rather than engaging in so much disk access.
> "...why current operating systems aren't able to (or interested in) offloading most of their operations into RAM when the user has 2Gb or more."
Linux and Mac OS X do a pretty good job of this: they use free memory as a giant disk cache.
I don't know how Vista does it, but Windows 2000 and XP (the NT5 kernels) were both awful at utilizing excess RAM. Under the assumption that programs should have RAM available to them *IF* they need it, the NT5 kernels page memory blocks to the swapfile very aggressively, even if there's plenty of RAM already available. This is why you can get a massive performance increase under XP by disabling the swapfile entirely.
Anonymous:
> "And what about solid-state drive option? Will it help?"
Yes. Solid-state disks are MANY times faster than even the fastest hard drives for the metric that matters most (seek time).
If you can afford the SSD and can accept the smaller capacity, get it. But most people won't be able to justify its cost and reduced size (64 GB).
What this has to do with how fast Airs run is, in my opinion, I don't think they need to run much faster to be effective in the workflow they were designed for. If you want more of a workhorse in your laptop, it's probably better to get one of the other models.
I don't know if you're confusing paging with swapping, but XP is not *that* aggressive (9x was) about it and disabling it when you have plenty of RAM changes nothing except that there is no longer a failsafe when an application requests more RAM than you actually have available.
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