Office 2004 under Rosetta
If you are like me and have yet to plunge into the world of Intel Mac (my MacBook Pro arrives next week), you may be wondering how key productivity apps function under Rosetta (Apple’s trick for running PowerPC code on Intel Macs).
Here’s a pretty clear indication of how Office 2004 runs:
We won’t keep you in suspense. In general, Office 2004 under Rosetta works “well enough” to “very well,” and in some cases, it’s even faster than on the PowerPC machine.
To determine this, MacTech ran over a thousand tests across three models of Macs, and the four major Office applications: Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Entourage. And, since graphics code is shared between Office applications, we ran a suite of graphics tests as well. These are each covered in more detail below.
In one of the most critical set of tests, we specifically looked at whether the user could type or interact faster than Office could keep up, and even in the slowest of scenarios, we never found the user waiting for typing, or other interactions like selecting menus. Even when typing at over 100 wpm, Word was able to stay ahead of the user.
Of the four applications, PowerPoint, is the one that struggled the most. It appears this is due to Office graphics engine shared by all of the Office applications.
At the other end of the spectrum, Entourage was not only on par, it was faster in many cases than our PowerPC baseline. In fact, with the exception of launching the application, Entourage was faster across the board on the Intel iMac, while the MacBook Pro was about on par with the PowerBook G4 (slightly faster in some cases, slightly slower in others).
Whew!
Of course, universal binaries are highly desireable and hopefully will come sooner than later.