News for Thursday, 25 May 2006

Today is our third Birthday!!
On May 25th, 2003, HardMac was born to bring to non-French-speaking visitors the information/articles/tutorials/news available on www.macbidouille.com. Our very first news was about the future G5/PPC970 that was to power the PowerMac. It was showing amazing benchmarks which were later on confirmed by Apple. Ever since we have tried to translate into English our French touch and French Mac user spirit to serve the worldwide Mac users community.
Over the last 3 years, the number of HardMac readers has increased week after week. This steady growth has been supporting us as a reward for our every day contribution to this website.
In short, here’s what went through this site in 3 years:
- over 5500 news
- nearly 60 articles about overclock/benchmarking/software and hardware tests.
- thousands of emails, etc.
This year we plan to make some major changes to further interact with our readers, in order to provide more possibilities beyond the already existing hardmac Blog and hardmac frappr map. We will probably have to strengthen our team to keep up with our activities.
This year is far from being over. Plenty of products are still to be unveiled, announced or tested.
We will try to keep our "specific touch" among the Mac dedicated Websites.

AMD has just released its future processor platform, AM2. Following the rather disappointing performance results of this new architecture from its competitor, Intel has decided to increase the pressure.
Indeed, Santa Clara giant has posted on its own website, performance evaluations between its Core-based architecture Xeon (aka WoodCrest) and its predecessor Xeon 3.7GHz and of course an Opteron-based system, current AMD flagship:
http://www.intel.com/performance/server/xeon/
Without big surprise, the Xeon WoodCrest is a clear winner, leaving the Opteron as well as its predecessor clocked at 3.7GHz in the dust . Performance gains vary between 20 to 80% depending on the evaluated tasks. For some tests, results show that the Opteron might be faster than the WoodCrest if AMP CPU was clocked identically; but for those test, the performance/watt ratio the reference scale.
This is probably the best way to kill the "MHz Myth", amazing enough it is Intel that provides the best demonstration.
Intel has also started releasing information to the media regarding the Conroe, the PentiumIV successor that should be available in july.
The website Hexus has published Intel evaluations for the Conroe; and here again the Conroe outperforms the AMD Athlon FX 62 as well as the Pentium 4 Extreme Edition, the current Intel desktop CPU flagship.
One would of course need to run benchmarks in a more independent manner to confirm the performance lead taken by both future desktop and server CPU from Intel.
Apple will also have to work hard on optimizing its OSX in order to avoid biased tests to put the Mac in the dust when comparing OSX vs. Linux vs. Windows.