I’d venture to say the biggest fuss around Intel’s new Core Duo line of processors isn’t the processor itself but the device it’s living inside of: the Macintosh.

An early benchmark of the iMac 2.0 Ghz Core Duo (sorry, I can’t find the source story) put it around 1.8x faster than a full-on Power Mac G5. About in line with Apple’s 2x number. Considering this is the first generation MacIntel that’s a good, although not extraordinary, start.

People will probably spend many hours debunking Apple’s performance benchmarks of the Intel vs. G5. More likely the Windows fanboys will go to extremely great lengths to debate the Core Duo vs. AMD vs. Pentium 4 for gaming and overall value. That’s a debate more heated than religion or politics and I avoid it at all costs.

However, in preparation of my Windows-running colleagues asking questions on the topic, I sought a benchmark between the Core Duo and the AMD Athlon. Anantech has performed just a comparison and the numbers aren’t bad at all for Intel. They felt the Core Duo T2500 (2.0 Ghz) could, in some regards, keep pace with the AMD Athlon 64 X2 4800+ although most of the numbers match the T2500 with the 4200+.

Related posts:

• Macintosh - Intel inside, but not outside
• Mac OS X 10.4.11, Plaxo, and slow performance
• Industry opinion on the Mac (circa 1984)
• When to buy anything Apple
• Was Microsoft’s Mac business unit asleep last year?

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