Powerbook, another comparison

Here is a another tip bit from my research. In Mac Forums – 1.5 vs 1.67 PBs – maccentral suggests little difference there was the following interesting comment by plinden about the relative performances of Powerbooks (and thus G4) vs IBM Thinkpad P-M:

It depends. No on would say that the G4 1.5 /chip/ is faster than the P-M 1.5 (or some would, but we can ignore them), but a computer is more than a chip.

I work mainly on an IBM T40p 1.6GHz P-M, doing mostly Java development, and in general I’m very pleased with it. But someone in another thread posted some Java compile times for some processors/OS combinations, and he got results something like 13 seconds for a T42P 1.6GHz (similar in specs to mine) running linux, and 26 seconds for a 1.5 G4 PowerBook

I ran the same compilation on my laptop, which uses WinXP pro, and guess what time I got – 28 seconds.

What the fsck? My laptop is slower at Java development than a 1.5 GHz Powerbook, even though Java on MaxOSX is generally considered to be slower than on other OSs?

The only way I could get the compile time lower was to switch off the virus checker – down to 17 seconds. But there’s no way I’m connecting my PC to the outside world without a virus checker.

I don’t really think I’ll notice if the PB is slower than my current PC, and I’m very seriously considering getting one of the new 15″ PowerBooks if I can persuade my wife (actually, I have a plan – I promised my wife a new laptop when she got a new job. She’s close to that now, so I’ll get her a 15″ PB. If she doesn’t like it, I’ll take it. If she does like it, she’ll insist that I get one too)

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