By AppleInsider Staff
The speed of Mac OS X running on Intel hardware is impressing some developers who’ve been privy to one of Apple’s first Intel-based developer transition systems.
The systems started shipping to Mac OS X developers three weeks ago, each equipped with a 3.6 GHz Intel Pentium 4 processor with 2 MB L2 Cache, 800MHz front-side bus, 1GB of 533MHz DDR2 Dual Channel SDRAM, and an Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 900.
Developers are renting the $999 hardware from Apple for a period of 18 months in order to get a head start in porting their applications to run on the Intel version of Mac OS X.
“It’s fast,” said one developer source of Mac OS X running on Intel’s Pentium processors. “Faster than [Mac OS X] on my Dual 2GHz Power Mac G5.” In addition to booting Windows XP at blazing speeds, the included version of Mac OS X for Intel takes “as little as 10 seconds” to boot to the Desktop from when the Apple logo first displays on screen.