“Linux is found to be much faster than Apple’s OS X for
statistical computing. And although Linux is 5 to 10 percent faster
than Windows XP, both are markedly faster than OS X. For example,
in one benchmark both Linux and Windows XP are more than twice as
fast as OS X. The results on this page were conducted on a
MacBookpro with a 2.16Ghz Intel Core Duo chip and 2GB of RAM.“I had previous conducted Linux vs. Mac OS X and Windows XP and
Opteron vs. G5 and Pentium benchmarks. Those results were terrible
for OS X and not particularly good for the G5 (970) chip. For
example, my 2.7 pound Pentium-M Linux laptop is faster than my 44
pound G5 running OS X. The floating point performance of the 970
chip leaves much to be desired, but OS X makes the performance
problem significantly worse…”