5/7 - One prominent analyst of PC hardware uses, of all things, as his primary notebook, a Mac! That should raise some eyebrows, and cause a few converts. "The PowerBook G4 was the best notebook I had ever owned".

Apple has since come out with the MacBook Pro. Almost everyone knows that Apple has started to use Intel hardware in their machines. Their new notebook line is no exception. "The heart and soul of the MacBook Pro is the Intel Core Duo processor".

One of the great things about Core Duo is that when its successor—Merom—comes out in the third quarter of this year, owners of Core Duo machines ought to be able to upgrade to the new processor. Unfortunately, owners of current MacBook Pros will be unable to upgrade, because Core Duo is soldered onto the motherboard. There's "no removing, replacing or upgrading your CPU".

Even though Intel continues to improve the battery life of notebooks based on its components, it nevertheless has trouble meeting the high expectations of the PC industry. So it is with the MacBook Pro: performance may have improved by leaps and bounds over the PowerBook G4, but battery life remains about the same, "which is disappointing since Core Duo is supposed to be the CPU to bring us to the 5 hour marker".

The MacBook Pros feature a 945 chipset. This is not a high performance chipset. It's not a 955 chipset or a 975 chipset. Neither does the notebook feature a 800MHz front side bus, or a 1066MHz FSB. Nevertheless, for a notebook, the 945 chipset and the 667MHz FSB are state-of-the-art.

Some forms of the 945 Express Chipset offer integrated graphics. Not the MacBook Pros. They have an ATI mobile Radeon graphics processors for offloading work from the CPU to the GPU.

Even though the MacBook Pro supports dual-channel memory (DDR2 @ 667MHz), it is currently unable to utilize the extra memory channel. The bottleneck is the 667MHz front side bus. Tests confirm "there's no benefit to enabling dual channel mode on the MacBook Pros".

Another potential bottleneck is that MacBook Pros are currently limited to 2GB of RAM. Apparently Macs are hungrier for memory than PCs. According to the analyst: "While anything above 2GB would generally go unused on my PC, I've found that on my desktop Mac around 4GB ends up being the sweet spot".

One of the things that is difficult to measure with benchmarks is system responsiveness. In the case of MacBook Pro vs. an older PowerBook G4, "the machine felt a lot faster".

Some of the benchmarks completed in about half the time as the previous G4 PowerBook. One might think that this makes perfect sense, since the MacBook Pro has two cores, whereas the PowerBook G4 only has one core. However, some of the benchmarks were single-theaded, which negated the MacBook Pro's dual-core advantage. "These sorts of performance increases don't come along all too often".

Apple provides a utility that allows you to create a partition, on which you can install Windows XP SP2. The utility is called Boot Camp. It's sort of like Partition Magic, except it doesn't take long. The "repartitioning only took about 2 minutes".

Core Duo of course provides support for virtualization in hardware—Intel's so-called VT. Virtualization, however, requires software support, something like VMware or Virtual PC. In the case of the MacBook Pro, a third party has stepped in to fill the need. "Parallels' solution offers the first hardware accelerated virtualization software for OS X".

One problem with virtual machines is that, while CPU manufacturers provide support for virtualization in hardware, GPU makers as of yet do not. This means that the performance of the graphics subsystem lags while running within a VM. All of the chores that the CPU could previously offload to the GPU must now be performed by the CPU. All "of the graphics are CPU rendered when running the VM".

Intel first implemented VT on single core processors, meaning that a VM was able to share the entire processor with the host OS. On the MacBook Pro, however, one is limited to using one of Core Duo's cores, while running in the VM. It may be that all implementations of virtualization on Core Duo processors are this way, and not just Parallel Workstation VM on the MacBook Pro. The "VM only allows Windows XP to access a single core of the Core Duo processor".

Apple has a translation technology for running legacy applications on Intel hardware called Rosetta. Problem is, applications take a huge performance hit under Rosetta. Both Boot Camp and Parallel Workstation VM offer viable alternatives to Apple's Rosetta technology. In the case of the VM, the responsiveness of the GUI suffers a bit, because the GUI uses the graphics subsystem. However, disk and CPU performance appear to be unaffected by Boot Camp, or the VM. The end result is that, under both Boot Camp and Parallel Workstation VM, you "get a huge increase in performance".

It is important to note, however, that network performance currently suffers with Boot Camp and the VM. Network "performance is noticeably worse".