[OS X TeX] speed of typesetting on a MacBook?

[Nathan Dunfield]

Dear Gary et. al,

One would expect TeXing on the new MacBook to be very fast.  The 
processor from which the Intel Core Duo processor is derived, the 
single core Pentium-M, turns out the some of the highest TeX benchmarks 
of any processor (laptop or not).  For instance,

	http://www.nslog.org/latex.html

is somewhat out of date, but it shows a 1.6 Ghz Pentium-M laptop being 
38% _faster_ than a Dual 2GHz Powermac G5.   (There's a 17in Powerbook 
on the list, too, a 1.33 Ghz, which is 3 times slower than the 
Pentium-M.)   Of course, whether this benchmark is really 
representative of ones actual daily TeXing tasks is another matter.  
However, it seems reasonable that a lower-bound on the MacBooks' 
performance would be that of a random recent Pentium-M laptop, so you 
could probably do a couple tests on a friends PC laptop to get a better 
idea of how much performance you'd actually gain here.

Of course, I don't have a MacBook and this is all pure speculation; let 
the buyer beware, etc.

	Best,

	Nathan

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