I'm not sure what this vaguely-named test actually does, but it didn't tell me much. ![]() I'm guessing that since Virtual PC is targeted mainly at office applications, they probably haven't done any particular optimizations for these extended instructions. The virtual CPU performed at half the level of a 500 MHz Pentium III on floating-point operations, and evenly between the 500 MHz and 1 GHz CPUs on integer operations. The "Multimedia" test pushes a bunch of difficult math down the pipeline, using MMX or SSE where available. I imagine that there's another factor here, such as a smart caching or precompilation system, that performs well for synthetic-benchmark code (which probably just repeats a small block of similar instructions). In generic arithmetic, the virtual CPU absolutely dominated, almost reaching the performance of a 2 GHz Athlon. In these cases, I chose the nearest match available. Note: The comparison platforms are not identical across tests because some platforms' results weren't available in some tests. I decided to benchmark the virtual Windows 2000 installation with SiSoft Sandra 2004, a synthetic benchmarking suite that's good for testing raw number-crunching power. Overall, general Windows performance seemed noticeably faster. I wasn't expecting this at all, since it draws and redraws incredibly complex maps constantly as you pan and zoom. It ran extremely well - it performed just as well as my real PC. I installed DeLorme's Street Atlas USA 9.0, a slightly old mapping/GPS program that's far better than every other mapping program I've tried, including the impressively-mediocre Microsoft Streets and Trips 2004. I chose not to test Office 2003 for two reasons: I didn't have it, and if you're that much of an Office fan, you probably just have Office 2004 for OS X (which I'm really not a fan of - but that's a topic for another review). The usual culprits (IE, Office XP, Transport Tycoon for DOS) all worked flawlessly with no noticeable sluggishness. I ran some subjective software usability tests first. The testing platform was my Powerbook, a standard 1.33 GHz G4 model with 1 GB of RAM. (XP performance is still barely tolerable, even at low settings with all of its bloat disabled.) And the CPU results surprised the hell out of me. ![]() While I never got a chance to benchmark the previous version, I was actually quite surprised at how much faster Windows 2000 seemed - it is now fast enough for general-purpose use. I've been playing with Microsoft's new Virtual PC 7, which promised massive speed increases over previous versions.
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