In this video two iMacs with equal 512 MB RAM are booted at the same time. One is a 2.1 Ghz G5, one is a 2.0Ghz Intel Core Duo. The Intel is on the left, the G5 is on the right. Some users said that the G5 iMac might have a problem for booting so slowly but others say that it’s a normal “first time” boot.
Video of iMac Core Duo vs. iMac G5 Booting
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
because I think his .Mac account is redlined.
Mirror is here: http://www.youtube.com/watch.php?v=zmaAZwkhYeQ
It took the iMac Intel exactly 40 seconds to boot (I added 2-3 more seconds because there are a few more things loading in the notification area after the Dock is loaded). The iMac G5 took exactly 98 seconds to boot fully, it seems.
Thanks for the final results, sure beats having to fool around with the…lovely Quicktime format.
Sorry, I meant “To be sure”. Can’t edit subject line, so the correction is here.
Repeat it with these same machines, to avoid any doubt about “first time boot” problems? In any case, they booth seem to take a long time to boot, but if the G5’s boot time is confirmed to be 98 seconds as Eugenia says, that’s just ridicolous.
Edited 2006-01-17 05:37
My iMac G5 2.0Ghz/512MB/10.4.4 cold boots in 45 seconds – I’d say there was something wrong here.
do you have the same boot up stuff that this test used?
Agreed. Hell, my 12″ iBook G4 with 1 GB of RAM boots in about 40 desktops to a usable desktop — I *have* done some tweaking to my OS X installation, but 90+ seconds for an iMac G5? Sounds like he cleared all of the caches before booting.
It definitely looks like they either pulled the plug instead of cleanly shutting down the system or rebooted just after an os update which triggered some fsck.
Maybe OSX should have a more… verbose graphical booting mode. It’s nice to have a lovely apple, rather than the ugly BSD output but a few icons indicating what steps the icon is doing wouldn’t be that bad.
Of course you can hit cmd+v to see it the linux way but that’s not what I want to see either.
Agreed — it would be handy to have a little read-out along the lines of some Linux distros.
It’s just the caches being rebuilt, though. If you rm -rf /System/Library/Cache/*, /Library/Cache/*, and /System/Library/Extensions.* then the next boot will take ages.
I got a brand new iMac G5 right here and it booted in 45 seconds.
The iMac G5 in the video did it in about 90 seconds.
The iMactel in the video booted in about 35 seconds.
10 seconds difference isn’t much.
The iMac G5 they got most likely has a old OS on it that’s been updated over time and totally unoptimized. Add that with a slower hard drive.
The iMacTel most likely has a newer hard drive with a larger cache and a brand new OS not strewn all over the drive like what updates can do.
My PowerMac DP 2 Ghz G5 with a RAID O pair of 74GB 8MB cache Raptors at 10,000 RPM each, boots in under 36 seconds, about the fastest possible.
Just wait until everyone finds out about the hardware locking software, music and movies part of the equation that’s coming, they going to wish they could get their hands on a PPC DRM free Mac.
The G5 iMac on the right has an iSight camera built into it. I can’t be more than a few months old. And the guy on the movie said they were both brand new, but had be started up to set up the OS (however, it isn’t clear, he might only have been talking about the Intel iMac). Either way, if we wait until these things are actually shipping, then we’ll know for sure.
“Either way, if we wait until these things are actually shipping, then we’ll know for sure.”
Well, the Intel iMacs are shipping now. From order to shipping is 1-2 business days…..at least according to Apple anyway.
There’s something seriously wrong with that G5 iMac, unless it was rebooting after an OS update, in which case the boot will be severely slowed. My G4 Powerbook 17 (the last model) I’ve had since early November boots way faster than that. Not as fast as that Intel one, but still very snappy.
took 47 seconds.
In case you cannot view the video directly from your browser (as in my case), download the entire film (28 MB, quicktime format) from http://homepage.mac.com/mugenpuppy1/.Movies/DSCN0336.MOV
And you said Linux is slow at booting, SuSE 10 boots in 32 seconds to a usable desktop here.
OK, I’m curious: which desktop?
Do you have tweaked your install or is-it a default install?
Do you have a 10000 RPM disk or just a normal disk?
Common..he’s linux user. By usable desktop he means the Grub command line 🙂
GRUB is a boot loader
BASH is a terminal shell environment.
//By usable desktop he means the Grub command line :-)//
Except that Grub doesn’t *have* a command line. Nice try.
>Except that Grub doesn’t *have* a command line. Nice try.
Well it does have that thing where you can edit the OS boot string, kinda like a command line.
No, grub does in fact a command line. I never liked grub’s philosophy/approach and “language”, but indeed, there’s a command line.
You should see openboot’s prompt, though, now that’s powerful ;o) It’s an OS all by itself.
At first I thought there’s no way my machine was this slow but it turned out that it cold booted in about the same amount of time as the G5 in the movie. Of course this was based on not having cold booted my Mac is weeks if not longer although I have restarted it a number of times. When I repeated the test the Mac booted much faster, only marginally slower than the Intel iMac. So, I would have to say that the comparison in the movie was not at all scientific and in reality the test should be repeated a couple of times.
Edited 2006-01-17 07:56
…is no test. And I repeat so even the testers can hear: one test is no test.
I think there’s nothing more I can add.
Agreed, my mini mac is slow after a fresh install, but the os learns to boot faster.
From the video it looked like a hardware fault. It was slow before the OS loaded.
Yes, I concur. It’s statistically insignificant.
Sample size, mean, and std.dev. plzkthx
I remember when Tiger came out. Apparently there was this new daemon added which handles the startup of services. This was meant to increase the bootup time of the OS to 15 seconds because the new application could start services at the same time.
Even 13 seconds to a usable desktop is impressive (it beats my 60 or so seconds on my iBook) but it’s nowhere near the 15 seconds we were all promised.
Am I missing something here?
My Apple Cube from 2001, running at 450 Mhz boots in 40-50 seconds (don’t remenber the exact time). I compared it once with other Macs.
If somebody thinks boot time is a way to compare CPU speed or general computer speed, he is quite wrong. I think the time difference probably comes from EFI.
BTW, my Amiga 1200 booted from harddrive in 15 seconds and my c64 boots in 3 seconds
Edited 2006-01-17 08:20
Yes I reckon my G3 500 iMac boots faster than that G5 did adn I’m running 512mb of RAM as well. I would agree that was definetly done after a system upgrade…
Well, cons a bit of a strong term, but my mothers G3 750 365meg of ram boots about twice as fast as that PPC Mac. They’ve knobbled the other machine to show off how fast the IntelMac is.
Not ethical.
They’ve knobbled the other machine to show off how fast the IntelMac is.
Agreed. I get the impression that these Intel Macs are not as fast as they thought they were going to be. The one and a half minutes for a G5 is just to excessive, and I think the 40 seconds for the Intel Mac is rather optimistic.
It will be interesting when these Intel Macs start getting used more and benchmarked, and I look forward to Mac OS X Server running on these machines.
This benchmark is stupid, but I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see if the G5 numbers aren’t realistic. The G5s spend quite a bit of time in OpenFirmware before OS X even starts loading. Note how long the black screen was up before the grey Mac logo came on. My PowerMac does the same thing, for approximately the same amount of time, even though its theoretically much faster.
In general, comparing boot-times is moronic. Boot-times don’t measure speed, just how the designer chose to implement certain things. Windows, for example, boots quickly because it does as little initialization as possible before bringing up the GUI. That’s why if you actually try to use the system as soon as its booted, it won’t be very responsive. UNIXes, in contrast, initialize everything first, then bring up the GUI. This means waiting for network shares to timeout, waiting for the CD-ROM to spin-up, etc. In reality, when you try to compare boot speed, you’re mostly measuring the performance of the hardware detection code, and how big the programmers decided to make various time-outs. Unless you bootup all day, its a fairly meaningless number.
A BeOS box would have booted in what, 6 seconds
Well you can probably install beos (or zeta) on an intel mac.
Does Zeta support EFI?
Are you kidding me. My AMD64 boots Windows XP64 in less than 10 secs… And not to mention my old BeOS machine which boots BeOS about the same.
What is it with OSX and efficiency???
My Powerbook with 10.4 seems to boot much faster than my P4 desktop at home or work. If your system boots in 10 seconds from a cold start that is amazing. I would guess it takes at least 90 seconds for my P4 machines to fully boot.
Don’t know what stuff you got in your box, but I spent about 2 000$ on my AMD machine. Guess that if you buy proper PC hardware from the right places and build yourself you can get some real iron going. I guess the whole problem is the 50% Apple adds on top for their name which makes things slow…
Are you kidding me. My AMD64 boots Windows XP64 in less than 10 secs… And not to mention my old BeOS machine which boots BeOS about the same.
Yah, that when you do a fresh install. Let in run for a year, and then see how fast it boots
My Toshiba Centrino 1.6Ghz Laptop with Mandriva Linux 2006 seems to boot 42 ~ 45 seconds into KDE 3.4.2 and Windows XP just 30 seconds 🙂
Well, I guess boot time might be important if you must constantly reboot your system.
Can’t we find anything more important to discuss.
This mean the new Intel Mac may be slower than current Intel P4 PC ( in terms of boot speed ) ??
My Amiga boots in two seconds! My endian is bigger than yours!
Seriously, what’s with this peeing contest? What relevance does boot time have?
Who needs faster startup time? My iMac II (yeah, same old one) isn’t switched off….some three weeks? And so what?
I need it for job, not for competition who will have faster startup. It works still quite fine.
It is nice to have 15-20 seconds, but in fact, I don’t care. And my guess is, most users too – as long is it is near one minute, it is acceptable.
What about testing mp3 encoding, resizing of 30 photos for email sending, applying a system update, compressing, a home directory for backup, I mean, things that you have to wait for and that everybody does…
These machines can be put to sleep and woken up in a matter of seconds so what’s the big deal about how long it takes to boot ?
just a standard UDMA 133 hard drive/Ext3 filesystem/KDE 3.5.
My G3 500Mhz iBook boots faster than that G5, something MUST be wrong!
Just timed to almost exactly 90s (although I paused the timer while I entered my password…).
iBook: G3 500Mhz 10.3.9 384MB RAM.
Edited 2006-01-17 11:36
You will find that 10.4 boots a lot faster than 10.3 so you G3 is going to boot even faster than 90 seconds with the same OS.
I can get X.2.4 on my Amiga One, via Mac On Linux booting faster than their top of the range (?) PPC G5. Well their mac is significatly better anyway.
I hate to say this, IntelMac boots faster is a small news story, Mac sites putting up badly fabricated “Test results”, is well, slighly bigger news story.
This is shooting foot off time.
Edited 2006-01-17 12:23
Testing boot time is nothing scientific and doesn’t give any real results as to how fast the CPU of the machine is, like someone said in a post before, this boot time is maybe cause of EFI. And why do everybody here uses Linux distros which boot that slowly. I’m not lying here but my specs are amd athlon-xp 2000+(1.6ghz) 1GBram. Arch Linux boots in incredibly less than 12 seconds, I think is somewhere between 8-10 seconds. Even my FreeBSD boots in less than 30 seconds.
Don’t bother with the video, Ars has a complete review of the iMac, complete with actual benchmarks against the G5 iMac and PowerMac:
http://www.arstechnica.com
You can easy increase boot time, by using the resouces better at boot time, current linux systems use an syncronicly load model. Using an alternative init system like initng (http://initng.thinktux.net/) you can half the boot-time by launching daemons and services in parrarlell, also giving you more control on your boot.
Well, 30 minutes.
A quick boot indicates nothing…
Boots in 2 seconds.
( Os in ROM ).
The boot process is disk bound, not CPU bound. The CPU is just not used too much in startup….
I remember after the last Apple update some people in forums were complaining that boot times were slow. Some claimed it was only the first time after the update, others said it was permenantly noticable. Maybe there was an issue and Apple corected it in the new version that ships with the Macintels ?
I could care less about boot time by the way. I reboot once a week to refresh the system but for the rest I just go to sleep mode. Waking up my mini is as close to instant-on as you’re likely to get.
this would be the first thing I would test. also to see if it runs linux , live cd’s or winpe
Even if this G5 doesn’t behave normal this video is another proof that macs aren’t better than any other computer. They might have the same flaws, they’re not different.
Who are you trying to convince?
If you notice in the video, the iMac on the right hand side spends the first 30 seconds of the video with it’s white ‘sleep’ light on, then the machine started it’s post. Further, it never did it’s startup chime, un otherwords, it was asleep, most likely at shutdown, and therefore had boot issues.
If you notice in the video, the iMac on the right hand side spends the first 30 seconds of the video with it’s white ‘sleep’ light on, then the machine started it’s post. Further, it never did it’s startup chime, un otherwords, it was asleep, most likely at shutdown, and therefore had boot issues.
I think we have a winner to explain the WTFness of the results.
My Pismo Powerbook booted 10.4 in under 90 seconds.
but it’s not a full SHELL like Bash. I’ve used it quite a bit lately and it’s very powerful. It can even read filesystems – just FAT (incl 32) and EXT2 for the time being.
It also supports TAB completion for commands and argument lists.
I’m sorry but that is a bunk demo. I don’t know what’s wrong but I promise you the results are a joke. I’ve got a dual G4@500 that boots up faster than that G5 iMac. Sorry, try again.