During MWSF, Microsoft finally released the new suite of office applications, Office 2008. These applications run natively on the Intel processors.
Although one appreciates the improvement with the visual interface and functions, we have really been waiting for the improvement in performance when running on the Mac Intels. It is true that Entourage, for example, is now much more fluid; especially when using a very large database of mail - no longer does one have the impression that it is stored on a network disk.
A reader of XLR8Yourmac was surprised with the slow feel of Excel 2008. He decided to test the effect by launching many calculations - stopwatch in hand.
Surprising as it seems: the version Excel 2004 running under the Rosetta emulator (on a MacBook Pro Core Duo 1.83 GHz) took 178 seconds while version 2008 took 774 seconds, 4.3 times longer.
This is the first time that we have heard that a native application takes longer than when running under an emulator. Part of this comes from the functioning of Rosetta that does a beautiful job of storing in cache calculations previously done. However even in this case an application well optimised running natively should win hands down.
It will be difficult for those who have already installed version 2008 to make other tests, since the installer strongly advises that all previous versions are removed!
[translation by crispin]
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