Mac Mini Now Running XP

Posted on Apr 7, 2006

Thanks to Boot Camp I now have Windows XP running on the Mac Mini. Initial impressions are good – the installation was painless and switching between the the to OSes can be done via the Windows Control Panel (nice) or by holding down the option key and choosing at boot up.

So far my impressions are good – the driver disc worked great and everything is detected correctly, the display is nice and sharp on the DVI-D output to my TV. All in all it’s pretty nice though the bluetooth apple keyboard and mouse have not worked as yet

More impressions as and when I get them – one of my first tests was to compare the BOINC benchmark scores from XP with those for the Universal Binary on OS X see jailbreak iphone 4. No suprise that Windows wins that round though – far more effort has been put into optimizing the Windows client and the IPP and ICC optimized compilers for OS X have not yet been released. For anyone who cares, here are the scores, there is quite a disparity:

Windows XP

Measured floating point speed: 2086.17 million ops/sec

Measured integer speed: 6620.97 million ops/sec

Mac OS X

Measured floating point speed: 1344.11 million ops/sec

Measured integer speed: 3641.49 million ops/sec

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