Zope 3 benchmark revisited: PowerBook vs. MacBook Pro

After a little more than two and a half years, I retired my PowerBook G4 and got myself a brandnew MacBook Pro. While I was at the Plone Conference in Seattle, Apple had finally upgraded the MacBook Pro to the Core 2 Duo. I had been waiting for that upgrade to happen, not only for performance reasons, but also because I was betting that they would upgrade other things along with it -- and they did (FireWire 800, better DVD burner). With the MacBook Pro line being over half a year old, I was now also confident enough to buy it after the hardware trouble they had with those machines initially.

Back in April when I bought my folks a Mac mini, I compared my PowerBook G4 to the slowest Intel Mac avaiable and found that the Mac mini was basically twice as fast in processor speed. Now I tried to reproduce the same "benchmark" that I did back then with the MBP:

==============  ===================  =======================  =========================
                     PowerBook              Mac mini                 MacBook Pro
==============  ===================  =======================  =========================
processor       PowerPC G4 1.33 GHz  Intel Core Solo 1.5 GHz  Intel Core 2 Duo 2.33 GHz
RAM             1 GiB                512 MiB                  2 GiB
harddisk        80 GB ATA 5400 rpm   60 GB SATA 5400 rpm      80 GB SATA 5400 rpm
--------------  --------------------------------------------  -------------------------
OS              Mac OS X 10.4.5 with latest security patches  Mac OS X 10.4.8
python                    2.4.2 from darwinports              2.4.3 from darwinports
zope 3                         trunk, r66263                  (same)
--------------  --------------------------------------------  -------------------------
pystone 1.1              19800 py/s               34700 py/s                 58800 py/s
--------------  -------------------  -----------------------  -------------------------
compile[1]                     77 s                     52 s                       27 s
1st startup[2]                 63 s                     25 s                       22 s
2nd startup[3]                 21 s                      8 s                        5 s
--------------  -------------------  -----------------------  -------------------------
unit tests[4]                 344 s                    173 s                      105 s
ftests setup                   25 s                     11 s                        5 s
       run                    610 s                    245 s                      160 s
==============  ===================  =======================  =========================

Ignoring tasks that obviously max out due to the harddrive (1st startup), it seems that the MacBook Pro is somewhere between 1.5 to 2 times faster than the Mac mini, making it 3 to 4 times faster than the PowerBook.

Of course, the MacBook has other advantages just besides the amazing speed:

• 2 GiB of RAM speed up the system considerably when many applications are running in parallel. Considering that I almost never quit apps, this improves overall productivity a lot.
• It's an Intel machine, which means I can use Parallels to boot Windows XP (e.g. to test Python software on this platform, check websites in IE, make screenshots for documentation) and Linux (use valgrind to debug nasty C code). I can also use WINE to run IE6 on OS X directly.
• It's noticeably lighter than the PowerBook.

Overall I'm impressed by how smooth Apple made the transition to the Intel platform. A year and a half after they announced the switch to Intel, and half as much time after the first Intel-based product came out, all applications that I need are available as native binaries. There were no problems migrating the system whatsoever, even though I resisted the temptation of having all my files copied over, I didn't need more than an afternoon of setting up the new machine and copying over my home directory via FireWire.