First showdown: Mac OS X on Intel versus PowerPC

All right, this goes without saying that this isn't the be-all end-all of benchmark comparisons, but for what it's worth, there are some numbers out on a comparison between Mac OS X 10.4.1 running on a 3.6 GHz Pentium 4 versus a dual 2.7 GHz G5. The former was an Intel development box with all Altivec and 64-bit code stripped out of the compiled OS. The numbers are sort of disheartening for those who put a lot of stock in such things — but keep in mind this is one processor versus two, and there's surely a ton of tweaking that will happen before any of this goes into production.

[Via TUAW]

Update: Ok, so it turns out the guy who was running the benchmarks forgot he was doing it in an early version of Rosetta, the PowerPC emulator, which thus greatly skews the results. RTFM, yo. Thanks, Brian.