At the presentation of the new Intel chips, held at CES 2010 last week, the company's engineers carried out several performance tests for the public present, in order to demonstrate their processing power live. Obviously, this is nothing unusual from a processor manufacturer, except that, in a rare attitude from Intel, benchmark We know and focused on individual applications, including Apple’s iTunes, running on Windows.
In a demonstration carried out with a Core i5 desktop, the engineers compared its performance with that of a Core 2 Duo machine when sending the same video from the two computers to an iPod. Like almost all applications that today are integrated with Mac OS X by default, iTunes is optimized to use multiple processor cores even in its version for Windows, so that tasks can be distributed among them and thus be executed more quick.
Although this initiative was somewhat curious for some, I believe that it represents the best way to demonstrate to a common user the benefits of migrating to more modern hardware, in addition to clarifying how it can improve (and a lot) your day-to-day. On the other hand, the TUAW note that it represents how difficult it is for Intel to determine how its newer products are better than its older products, through “amount of performance”.
In any case, Apple is a company that has always compared the performance of its computers through the use of common applications, especially when presenting its Power Macs / Macs Pro to professional users. In the past, even some funny comparisons have been made between PowerPC machines with PCs from Intel itself.
