How fast was a Mac running Windows XP installed using XOM compared to a PC?
It is important to recognize that an Intel-based Mac when booting Windows XP is for all practical purposes the same as a Windows “PC”. As the underlying hardware is essentially identical, the Intel-based Macs running Windows XP courtesy of the “XOM hack” were comparable in speed, with the exception of video-related tasks on the driverless iMac “Core Duo” and MacBook Pro, to similarly equipped Windows PC systems when all were running Windows XP. Gearlog, a companion blog to PC Magazine, installed Windows XP using “XOM” on all three Intel-based Macs and tested them encoding Windows Media, performing unspecified Photoshop scripts, and running Cinebench 9.5. The authors of the blog noted that: The MacBook Pro is the fastest Core Duo laptop we’ve tested running the Photoshop scripts. It’s faster than other laptops originally designed for Windows. This bodes very well for the performance of an Intel-accelerated [Mac]OS X Photoshop, when that finally appears. Given that the high-end compariso
