Using PC_efi technology (a means to run OS X on a PC without kernel modification), an anonymous source for netkas.org has managed to run and benchmark Leopard on an Atom chip, which is rumored (and denied) to be headed for Mac.

The Atom Processor would certainly make a good candidate for a mini-tablet. It's small enough to fit any form factor, and low power enough to run for long periods in small devices. According to netkas, you can even run one of these on solar power. Here are the results of an Xbench test, courtesy of netkas:

More details are available at netkas.org.

It's a big day for the Psystar Open Computer -- the quasi-Mac clone based on PC hardware and a cracked version of Mac OS X. ZDNet today published their comparison of the Open Computer with a Mac mini, and all three flavors of MacBook.

The results? The Open Computer fares pretty well against all of its Mac cousins. It scored nearly 147 with Xbench 1.3.

It beats the Mac mini, its closest price competitor, by nearly 50 percent. The Open Computer outperforms even a MacBook Pro (with a 2.4GHz Penryn processor) by 10 points. Not too shabby at all, if you can stand the sound of a jet airplane on your desk (Just kidding. Apparently the noise isn't too bad).

ZDNet promises results using GeekBench soon. UPDATE: the GeekBench results are here, and the Open Computer still leads most of the Macs, but by a narrower margin. The MacBook Pro, though, edged out the Psystar 3327 to 3244.

Our friends over at Engadget got their hands on one of the newly released iMacs (the 3.06GHz model, to be exact) and they have put it through its paces. Using XBench, and running Leopard, they compare the new iMac to a MacBook Pro, MacBook Air, MacBook, and a previous gen iMac. The new iMac bests the rest of the competition in almost all categories. Check out the post for the full results, and scope out the unboxing pictures while you're at it.

At first glance, last week's MacBook update did not appear to be anything to write home about. However, some benchmarks are starting to come out that show a non-negligible performance boost on the new 'Books. Macworld has found that the new top end 2.16GHz black MacBook bests previous top end white 2.0GHz white MacBook by an overall 12% (strangely, the different colors somehow tested differently). In fact, the new MacBooks are even giving the top end 2.33GHz MacBook Pro a run for its money in non-graphics intensive applications. MacLife also found an appreciable performance gain. So while it's not Santa Rosa, it is a nice little performance gain.

Update: It's only the low end MacBooks that saw an increase in L2 cache.

Other sites are already getting their hands on Mac Pros and putting them through the benchmark ringer, and since we aren't done checking the couch for change yet, I figured a benchmark roundup would be the best way to let you sink your teeth into some cold, hard numbers. If you've been waiting to see how well these things perform in real world tests, your wait just might be over:

• Macworld pits a 2.66 Quad Core Ghz Mac Pro against 2.5 Quad and Dual 2.7 G5 Power Macs - G5s run crying to mama in everything but Adobe Photoshop tests (hint: that will be a benchmark theme across the board)
• MacInTouch posts some initial impressions as well as a wide variety of benchmarks, including some real low-level geek stuff like "multi-threaded scalar." Until now, I thought a 'scalar' was just a monster in Unreal
• Bare Feats posts their own set of tests, including the only After Effects test I've found so far (AE still isn't a UB either; I guess Adobe misunderstood the phrase 'fashionably late to the party')
• Geek Patrol, as you might glean from the name, also posts some extensive low-level tests in categories such as memory performance, floating point, integer and more
• Apple's product page also seem to think pretty highly of their own new Mac Pros

That's it for now. Just don't blame us for the credit card interest if this pushes you over the edge to buy one.

Macenstein has blogged a Mac mini CPU swap, as a poster in a Taiwanese forum has switched out the Core Duo chip for a Core 2 Duo chip, a next-generation CPU from Intel. The brain upgrade has resulted not only in the Mac mini stomping a PowerMac G5 dual 2.5 GHz in an iTunes MP3-AAC conversion test (remember: Mac minis have slower laptop hard drives than desktop PowerMacs), but it also runs cooler, due to the new architecture of these Core 2 Duo (code name: Merom) Intel chips.

Given reports like this of these new chips, we might as well talk about the elephant in the room: if these reports of cooler running and even more powerful chips so soon from Intel are true, I foresee a lot of criticism of Apple jumping the gun on cramming Intel chips into their present lineup, in light of all these complaints about heat.

[via MacNN]

While some of us are content taking Apple's word that the MacBook isn't so good for Final Cut Pro, the people at Creative Mac decided to do some testing. They pitted a MacBook, a MacBook Pro, and a dual G5 PowerMac (2.0 Ghz), all with 2 gigs of RAM, in a Final Cut Studio showdown.

The results? Both MacBooks pretty much spank (yes, that's the technical term) the G5. It looks like the MacBook is a pretty good video editing machine (even though it isn't supported).

Bare Feats has been busy with their Mac OS X vs XP tests earlier today and now this. From what I can tell, they are probably the first site to post some benchmarks of non-Intel native Adobe apps, specifically Photoshop CS2 and After Effects 7.0. Check out the machines they used, and note the equality of RAM:

• MacBook Pro CD/2.0 -- Apple Intel MacBook Pro with 2.0GHz Core Duo and 2GB of memory
• PowerMac G5/2.0 -- Apple Dual Single-Core G5/2.0GHz Power Mac with 2GB of memory
• PowerBook G4/1.67 -- Apple PowerBook G4/1.67GHz with 2GB of memory

Not surprisingly, the PowerMac swept the floor with the MacBook Pro, but to my delight: the PowerBook didn't perform that much better. In fact, in the After Effects render test, the MacBook actually beat out the PowerBook.

The SP (Single Processor) Actions test is where you can really see the performance void of Rosetta apps on the MacBook Pro, as the PowerMac and PowerBook clearly are going home with the prom queen.

Still, I'm glad to see that the MacBook Pro will perform more or less like my PowerBook G4 when running these pro apps, especially since I'm living in After Effects these days. Unfortunately, I now must curse Bare Feats for ever performing these tests, as they got my 'hmm, maybe I could upgrade' gears grinding again. Thanks guys.

According to Macworld's benchmarks it looks like the MacBook Pro is a Windows XP speed demon, of course, C.K. already told you this. In particular, they found Office 2002 in XP on the Pro absolutely flew. I thought that laptop was a little too businesslike. Maybe the revamped iBooks will have some color (and be single core no doubt). Macworld and their sister pub PC World tested the iMac and MacBook Pro against a couple of Windows machines to see who was faster. Every machine was pretty darn close, really. Maybe the aerodynamics of Apple's gear gives it an edge?

If you are like me and enjoy a good clean fight, check out these benchmarks at Geek Patrol using their own pre-production software: Geekbench, a multi-platform benchmarking utility. These numbers reflect benchmarking on a 1.5GHz PowerBook G4 with 1.25GB RAM vs a 2.0GHz MacBook Pro with 1GB RAM (the latter benchmark running as a Universal Binary not in Rosetta).

I took it upon myself to average their twenty benchmark results. Using Geek Patrol's benchmarking results, the MacBook Pro they used is 3.74 times faster than the PowerBook they tested. If I throw out the low results they received from Stdlib Allocate (which they note: "depends more on library performance than raw hardware performance"), the MacBook Pro is on average, 4.26 times faster than a PowerBook.

We all know that real world testing is what will really determine whether or not the MacBook Pro can severely outperform the PowerBook, but we will have to wait for more pro apps to be released as Universal Binaries before anyone takes a crack at graphing those statistics. Until then, all of you who have a MacBook Pro, enjoy your zippy new laptop.

[via Slashdot and reader Ernest Leitch]