Mac Forum / Applications / Word / April 2006

Yes, WinWord 2003 does "apparently" start faster on a PC.  That's
because:

*  Usually, it's already running :-)  PCs using Word are also usually
using Outlook, and Outlook starts a hidden instance of Word when it
opens.  So Word is already running in the background.

*  On the PC, the system loads the fonts, not the application, so
there's no fiddling around with fonts on application launch.

Of course, everything the others say is also true: on an Intel Mac,
you are not running Word as native code, you are running it through an
emulator.  This reduces performance by about 75 per cent.

And modern desktop PCs usually go faster than the current MacIntels.
Apple purposly held the clock and bus speeds down on the current
versions to keep the heat and battery life under control.

Someone in France (no, I don't think it was Corentin...) has just done
an interesting hack: running the latest ATI drivers on a MacIntel, he
managed to crank the clock speed up to the limits specified by Intel
and ATI.  In doing so, he improved performance from 60-odd frames per
second to 90-odd.  There's no word yet on whether his machine has now
melted... Seriously, people:  DON'T try this at home, you WILL melt
your processor unless you really know what you're doing... :-)

On the new iMacs, things move along quite a bit faster because it has
a faster hard disk and a faster system bus.  But it's still not as
quick as the current crop of 3 GHz Pentiums out there.

When Apple starts offering the go-faster Intel Zeons with their 1066
MHz front side bus and 15,000 RPM SATA drives, and Microsoft issues
the next version of Office with the Universal binary, expect Messrs
Dell and HP to slink quietly out the back door.  But those machines
have yet to make their debut at Cuppertino...

Cheers

Hi Marc:

A Pentium-M in a Dell runs at up to twice the speed of the Core Duo on the
current MacIntels --  and on the MacIntel, you are first waiting for the
Rosetta emulator to load and create an environment before it can begin to
load Word.

You should also be aware that Word takes a LOT longer than it "appears" to
load on a PC.  However, Office 97 and later on the PC includes a "pre-load"
mechanism that brings most of Office up when Windows boots.  When you
"start" Word on the PC, effectively all you are doing is making an instance
of it "visible" :-)

We're in very early days with the MacIntel (well, you are, I can't afford
one ...)  You need to understand that nearly ALL of the software out there
for the Mac is currently designed to run on the old processor.  The fact
that the MacIntel performs as well as it does with old software is nothing
short of amazing: every single instruction is "back to front" to it, and has
to be flipped for use on the Intel processor.

The next generation of software, the "Universal Binaries" will be at least
four times faster on your hardware.  The next version of Office will be a
Universal Binary.

Cheers

On 20/4/06 3:56 AM, in article
93770D0F-4904-4509-AB28-25B07025451B@microsoft.com, "Marc"