Network latency

While fiddling with my home NTP server, I noticed that the NTP daemon of my
Powerbook (running Mac OS X) reported a latency (to acces the NTP server)
about half of the latency I get from my Thinkpad X30 (running GNU/Linux with
a Debian-built 2.6.7 kernel).

CPU-wise the two machines are about comparable and they access the NTP
server over the same network (wireless 11b). Any idea what might be
happening (the network is using WPA, the Thinkpad uses the hostap driver
with wpa_supplicant)?

Is it just that the wireless card of the Mac is much better designed (it
can do 11g whereas my Thinkpad's mini-PCI card is 11b only), or is some
of the processing done in hardware in one and in software in the other?


Stefan