Slashdot Mirror

The sad part is that with IBM's lack of progression of the chip, the PPC has not maintained the competitive advances it SHOULD have been implemented years ago that it is capable of doing.

Lack of progression? You mean like #1 in SPEC FP 2000, #4 in SPEC INT 2000 and #2 in TPC-C? IBM has been doing a great job with PowerPCs, but they've been concentrating on server versions.

I know they are really, really bad. Mot. ppc is dead. Mac zealotry keeps it alive.

HERE IS THE SMOKING GUN QUESTION FOR THE DAY:

WHY DOESN'T APPLE OR MOTOROLA SUBMIT TO SPEC.ORG FOR THE INDUSTRY STANDARD CPU AND MCPU INT AND FLOATING POINT BENCHMARK?

Motorola PPC is simply inferior.

Check out this recent review of a Mac vs. PPC scenario. Titled: Mac vs. PC III: Mac Slaughtered Again
Dell's Single CPU 3.06 GHz P4 Trounces Fastest DUAL Mac on the Market

Every time I have tried to independently verify ease of use claims or speed advantages that apple claims I find them to be false, ridiculous and they should probably be cited for false advertising on numerous occasions.

Now. I would like to say that I want a Power 4+ 6xx series or a Sun Blade 2000. If you don't know what these machines are or why you would want them, do not reply to this message - you don't understand anything.

According to "SPEC", the Itanium 2 trounces the UltraSPARC III in performance and beats it by a wide margin. According to the "Transaction Processing Council", the Itanium 2 beats the UltraSPARC III by a wide margin on the most important commercial benchmark: TPC-C. An Itanium-powered server has close to the world record: 660,000 transactions per minute.

Furthermore, you clearly haven't done your homework on SPEC. SPEC applications are run one-at-a-time, and are specifically uniprocessor applications. They are not threaded. (They *can* be manually threaded to compare performance, but SPEC forbids this for purposes of generating official reports.) SPEC measures single-processor performance. This is why IBM uses only one processor core when testing - cache synchronization overhead and interprocessor interrupts actually hurt (application, not overall system) performance on single-threaded code. SPEC measures application performance.

The above has nothing to do with mac & everything to do with simply reading & understanding benchmarks & computer architecture. H&P is a good starter book for those of you out there who are interested.

Comparing what the power4 gets on specint 2000 @ 1.45Ghz (Score of 935) versus Intel's P4 @ 3.06Ghz (Score of 1091), the power4 holds its own in integer performance and in fact, so should the 970. (AMD's athlon 3000+ comes in at 995, btw.) To claim that "clock-for-clock integer performance will be worse" is utterly bogus. (What are you talking about with resepect to a lack of FSB performance? The 970's 900Mhz blows away intel...)

Give the microarchitectures (and performance numbers) a glance next time before going on a dilettantish ramble about architectures.

Comparing what the power4 gets on specint 2000 @ 1.45Ghz (Score of 935) versus Intel's P4 @ 3.06Ghz (Score of 1091), the power4 holds its own in integer performance and in fact, so should the 970. (AMD's athlon 3000+ comes in at 995, btw.) To claim that "clock-for-clock integer performance will be worse" is utterly bogus. (What are you talking about with resepect to a lack of FSB performance? The 970's 900Mhz blows away intel...)

Give the microarchitectures (and performance numbers) a glance next time before going on a dilettantish ramble about architectures.

Comparing what the power4 gets on specint 2000 @ 1.45Ghz (Score of 935) versus Intel's P4 @ 3.06Ghz (Score of 1091), the power4 holds its own in integer performance and in fact, so should the 970. (AMD's athlon 3000+ comes in at 995, btw.) To claim that "clock-for-clock integer performance will be worse" is utterly bogus. (What are you talking about with resepect to a lack of FSB performance? The 970's 900Mhz blows away intel...)

Give the microarchitectures (and performance numbers) a glance next time before going on a dilettantish ramble about architectures.

I've been trying to tell Mac zealots this for some time. a Dual 1.4 "best of breed[term used laughingly]" Motorola G4 can't even beat a single P4 (I'm not a P4 pr PC lover, I find them rather cheesy, but when you get your ass handed to you, its fun to laugh. I also find the new Macs to be every bit as cheesy as the PCs, for they are essentially the same, with a different cruddy CPU at heart.)

I would like to see more lust for Opteron. The PPC970 is vapor. If you would all take a trip down to spec.org, you would all see that the SPECfp_peak of 1219 on the 1.8GHz part and the SPECint_peak of 1170 is very impressive.

And you can buy it now.

So what does the Mac "inner circle elite" have to say that a Mac head publication is letting the cat out of the bag (yet again, Digital Video Editing: Mac vs. PC III: Mac Slaughtered Again ).

So read it and weep. Steve Jobs, the arrogant bastard, seems to have people lusting after vapor, yet again. The story continues, history repeats and the niche is growing smaller by the day.

The dual Xeon has 512 MB RAM.
The dual Opteron has 2 GB RAM.

Maybe I'm just blind, but I can't seem to find these figures. According to the Config page for the 2x Xeon, it shows 8x512MB, same amount as the 2x Opteron.

Granted the 4xXeon also has the same amount of memory, whereas the 4xOpteron has 16x512MB, but that's cos the poor little(!) 32-bit Xeon can't address past 4GB of RAM anyway...

If i'm smoking crack, and you guys are looking at some different numbers, please let me know.

How about these?

At the low end, Sun finds a hard place. The story is pretty much the same. Sun's SPARC has extremely poor performance, compared to the x86 or its clones. So, Sun has contracted with Chinese manufacturers to build servers and desktops that run Linux atop an x86 or its clones. The trouble is that the profit margins are thin, and Sun faces severe competition from IBM, HP, and Dell. Sun does not have a significant services organization that can reap profits by providing contract software and support for these cheap x86 boxes. IBM and HP do, however, have significant services organizations that can generate profits from servicing cheap x86 boxes sold at a loss.

Now, given Sun's unethical business practice of preferring H-1B employees over American citizens, do you think that any self-respecting American business would consider Sun?

The Sun is setting. Good riddance.

At the low end, Sun finds a hard place. The story is pretty much the same. Sun's SPARC has extremely poor performance, compared to the x86 or its clones. So, Sun has contracted with Chinese manufacturers to build servers and desktops that run Linux atop an x86 or its clones. The trouble is that the profit margins are thin, and Sun faces severe competition from IBM, HP, and Dell. Sun does not have a significant services organization that can reap profits by providing contract software and support for these cheap x86 boxes. IBM and HP do, however, have significant services organizations that can generate profits from servicing cheap x86 boxes sold at a loss.

Now, given Sun's unethical business practice of preferring H-1B employees over American citizens, do you think that any self-respecting American business would consider Sun?

The Sun is setting. Good riddance.

The problem for Sun is that Linux on Opteron does not give Sun much in the way of profits because the profit margin is low and competition is fierce. Sun cannot compete against IBM and HP in this area. Worse, Sun has no services organization to make any money by helping its customers to use Linux on Opteron.

Anyhow remember that stupid comment by Scott McNealy, who claimed that Sun is a one system -- one OS and one processor -- company. Now, Sun is distributing 2 OSes and 2 processors. Read the article at the Economist web site . It says that Sun will lose out big time in the Linux marketplace.

The Sun is setting. Good Riddance.

The Opteron has 2 things that are vital for success. They are compatibility with the x86 instruction set architecture (ISA) and the ability to run Windows NT and variants.

Bye bye SPARC. Good riddance.

"I'm sorry, but your wimpy little Xeon will not keep up with these processors"

um, bzzzt, wrong answer.

obviously it depends on workload characteristics, but we find that 1.0 GHz P3's are equivalent to 900MHz US-III's (Yes, I have a Fire V480 to try this on). Those 2+ GHz P4's beat the pants off everything Sun makes. Don't believe me? Check SPEC, our workload correlates nicely to SPECint results.

If you don't want to click-through, the Sun 1.015GHz US-III benchmarks at SPECint = 516 and a Dell 6650 (w/ 2.0 GHz Xeon) runs 816. Don't even try it with a reasonably current (i.e. 2.8GHz, 533 FSB) Xeon (SPECint = 1017), the Sun will just turn into a black hole.

Of course, the reason we have a V480 is because it is 64-bit -- it's for our largest-footprint computational tasks. But it costs a sh*tload, and is dog-slow. I think we can normally buy 5 dual-proc 2650's for the price of one V480. And these are fully tricked out 2650's. Just do the math and realize how screwed Sun is.

Bring on the freaking Itanium/Opteron solutions!! now!!

Check the latest SPEC CPU benchmarks. The Itanium2 has the fastest floating-point score and is no slouch in the integer tests either. It will improve. Linus will eat his words in a few years.

The only chip that can threaten the Itanium II, III, etc. is the Power4, but it is nowhere to be seen on the desktop.

it does not scale across multiple processors. You get the same performance on one versus eight CPUs in the benchmarks I've seen

And these would be which benchmarks, exactly?

SPECjbb 2002 Q1 and SPECjbb 2003 Q3-- look at the xSeries 360 and 370 results, where it scales quite nicely as you double the number of processors.

More likely it's just some sychronisation primitive(s) that they need to tune or remove

Holy shit, let's all rush out and tell David Bacon that his locks suck :)

it does not scale across multiple processors. You get the same performance on one versus eight CPUs in the benchmarks I've seen

And these would be which benchmarks, exactly?

SPECjbb 2002 Q1 and SPECjbb 2003 Q3-- look at the xSeries 360 and 370 results, where it scales quite nicely as you double the number of processors.

More likely it's just some sychronisation primitive(s) that they need to tune or remove

Holy shit, let's all rush out and tell David Bacon that his locks suck :)

It's hard to get specs for smaller (whiteboxers and local guys, and homebuilt machines) runs of machines, but Dell, HPaq, IBM, Sun, and all of the major guys participate in the SPEC benchmarks. Try www.spec.org and hit the Benchmark Search Engine. Unfortunatly, though, I wasn't able to find any Apple benchmarks on there with my initial search, but you might try digging a little deeper.

In addition, Itanium performance for CPU-bound applications is bad.

Last time I checked the Spec CPU benchmarks, Itanium2 was the leader for floating-point performance. Check them out...they may not be the leader right now but Itanium2 is no slouch.

While it is not on that page and I am too lazy to go look for something to back this statement up, SPECmarks are like money in the back; More is better.

Well, no. According to the article you linked, the Mac was 56% as fast as the P4. Pretty bad on the face of it, but those programs are most likely testing the parallel processing functionality of those processors (Altivec, SSE2 etc.) as opposed to general purpose computing power. It is also not at all clear which of those functions (if any) took advantage of the second CPU in the Mac.

Unfortunately, no one seems to be posting SPEC results for G4 systems these days. The closest I can find is for a 1.45 GHz. Power4 system from IBM, which most likely has similar IPC. It comes in at an impressive 909/ 1251 SPECint/SPECfp, vs. 1085/1092 for the 3.06 GHz. P4 from Dell (Precision Workstation 350). Note that the IBM system outperforms the P4 at floating point at less than 1/2 the clockspeed.

I'm not claiming that the Apple machines are as fast as the IBM implementation, but I also wouldn't expect them to be all that much slower. Anyone willing to post SPEC numbers for the new Apple boxes? :-)

Well, no. According to the article you linked, the Mac was 56% as fast as the P4. Pretty bad on the face of it, but those programs are most likely testing the parallel processing functionality of those processors (Altivec, SSE2 etc.) as opposed to general purpose computing power. It is also not at all clear which of those functions (if any) took advantage of the second CPU in the Mac.

Unfortunately, no one seems to be posting SPEC results for G4 systems these days. The closest I can find is for a 1.45 GHz. Power4 system from IBM, which most likely has similar IPC. It comes in at an impressive 909/ 1251 SPECint/SPECfp, vs. 1085/1092 for the 3.06 GHz. P4 from Dell (Precision Workstation 350). Note that the IBM system outperforms the P4 at floating point at less than 1/2 the clockspeed.

I'm not claiming that the Apple machines are as fast as the IBM implementation, but I also wouldn't expect them to be all that much slower. Anyone willing to post SPEC numbers for the new Apple boxes? :-)

Well, no. According to the article you linked, the Mac was 56% as fast as the P4. Pretty bad on the face of it, but those programs are most likely testing the parallel processing functionality of those processors (Altivec, SSE2 etc.) as opposed to general purpose computing power. It is also not at all clear which of those functions (if any) took advantage of the second CPU in the Mac.

Unfortunately, no one seems to be posting SPEC results for G4 systems these days. The closest I can find is for a 1.45 GHz. Power4 system from IBM, which most likely has similar IPC. It comes in at an impressive 909/ 1251 SPECint/SPECfp, vs. 1085/1092 for the 3.06 GHz. P4 from Dell (Precision Workstation 350). Note that the IBM system outperforms the P4 at floating point at less than 1/2 the clockspeed.

I'm not claiming that the Apple machines are as fast as the IBM implementation, but I also wouldn't expect them to be all that much slower. Anyone willing to post SPEC numbers for the new Apple boxes? :-)

Well, no. According to the article you linked, the Mac was 56% as fast as the P4. Pretty bad on the face of it, but those programs are most likely testing the parallel processing functionality of those processors (Altivec, SSE2 etc.) as opposed to general purpose computing power. It is also not at all clear which of those functions (if any) took advantage of the second CPU in the Mac.

Unfortunately, no one seems to be posting SPEC results for G4 systems these days. The closest I can find is for a 1.45 GHz. Power4 system from IBM, which most likely has similar IPC. It comes in at an impressive 909/ 1251 SPECint/SPECfp, vs. 1085/1092 for the 3.06 GHz. P4 from Dell (Precision Workstation 350). Note that the IBM system outperforms the P4 at floating point at less than 1/2 the clockspeed.

I'm not claiming that the Apple machines are as fast as the IBM implementation, but I also wouldn't expect them to be all that much slower. Anyone willing to post SPEC numbers for the new Apple boxes? :-)

Far from objective...they gloss over many important things to make the Itanium appear to shine.

How isn't it objective? It is a dissemination of perfectly reproducible results. All you need to reproduce them is given at the end.

Just because it isn't all-encompassing doesn't mean it isn't objective.

EV68 and EV7 have the same core.

Hiding branches with predicates is the point of IA64. Predicated instructions can execute in parallel. Branches cannot.

I don't see how this method of reducting branches, the efficacy of which is amply demonstrated by this powerpoint presentation, can be applied to any architecture. Can you explain to me how one might hack this in to, say, PA-RISC, without making it look a lot (!) like IA-64?

If anything, its a step backwards because a compiler cannot know the path software will take in advance. Period.

What a stupid thing to say. If a compiler could know the path software would take in advance, surely it'd just emit a binary that prints out "the answer", so to speak.

Seriously though, it's not a question of whether a system adapts to a data stream or not, it's a question of _where_ it does this. IA64 pushes this up into software just a little more. If you need an example of this at work, just see how IA64 crushes Alpha when JITting.

41% faster, clock for clock. Trust me, IA64 is a wonderful _and_ challenging target for compilers and JITers alike. Still, the community has risen to the challenge.

The Itanium is a dud: systems based on it are hugely expensive, have iffy performance, and are not usefully x86 compatible.

Hugely expensive? You can get yourself a nice Itanium-2 workstation for less than you get get a 2x1.4G Opteron box

Iffy performance? Fastest SPECfp2000 result, bar none. Second fastest SPECint2000 result, clock-for-clock: only HP's awesome PA-8700 is ahead.

Not usefully x86 compatible? It's more than enough to run acroread. For everything else, you've got source, right? With over 90% of Debian packages available for IA64, and three free (as in beer) compilers for Itanium available to download, what's the problem with porting?

AMD aren't going to have a big winner on their hands. They're going to have another Athlon - enough to make an initial impression, that slowly fades into market oblivion over a few years as Intel take advantage of an inherently superior architecture while AMD are stuck trying to make their 64 bit extension of a 32 bit extension of a 16 bit extension to an 8 bit microprocessor go faster.

Do you think Intel are stupid, or something?

The Itanium is a dud: systems based on it are hugely expensive, have iffy performance, and are not usefully x86 compatible.

Hugely expensive? You can get yourself a nice Itanium-2 workstation for less than you get get a 2x1.4G Opteron box

Iffy performance? Fastest SPECfp2000 result, bar none. Second fastest SPECint2000 result, clock-for-clock: only HP's awesome PA-8700 is ahead.

Not usefully x86 compatible? It's more than enough to run acroread. For everything else, you've got source, right? With over 90% of Debian packages available for IA64, and three free (as in beer) compilers for Itanium available to download, what's the problem with porting?

AMD aren't going to have a big winner on their hands. They're going to have another Athlon - enough to make an initial impression, that slowly fades into market oblivion over a few years as Intel take advantage of an inherently superior architecture while AMD are stuck trying to make their 64 bit extension of a 32 bit extension of a 16 bit extension to an 8 bit microprocessor go faster.

Do you think Intel are stupid, or something?

The benchmark programs aren't free - this is a non-profit industry association that charges money to cover its costs, but there are a number of universities that are members or associates which may be able to do testing that could explore some of the compiler differences; poke around their website to see who's reported what kinds of results.

The benchmark programs aren't free - this is a non-profit industry association that charges money to cover its costs, but there are a number of universities that are members or associates which may be able to do testing that could explore some of the compiler differences; poke around their website to see who's reported what kinds of results.

It does matter, and the Alpha is still better for many applications. I have three I support (Tru64), but just bought a dual-Athelon 2000MP server for $1600 that will power one of our typical jobs about 10X faster than the 600 Mhz 21164 Alpha systems.

This job is coded in perl, and involves processing thru 80Gb of data (not really floating point intensive, more just summarizing the data).
A sample of 1/1000 of the data takes about 1 hour on the Alpha(ie, 40+ days!), but about 11 minutes on a P4 2.4Ghz and about 15 minutes on an XP1600 This is almost directly proportional to the SPEC numbers. I was blown away by these comparisons as I think the Alphas are great.

I wanted to buy a 21264 1 Ghz Alpha system (and we can get them at educational prices), but $12,000 vs $1600 is hard to justify for about the same raw power.

Look at the archived results on the SPEC website. (You'll have to do the arithmetic yourself, they only provide scores, not scores/Mhz.)

ximian are a pack of wankers

the dotgnu folk, on the other hand, "pwn".

anyway, it's good to see IL systems coming of age. anyone else noticed itanium 2's incredible JVM performance?

if portable.net can get up to that level, sun might have some headaches ;)

Until Apple submits SPECCPU benchmark results, it is hard to escape the conclusion that they are not cost effective machines for building scientific computing clusters.

Of course the benchmarks might make that conclusion inescapable.

Mac fans are welcome to do the benchmarking to prove my suspicions incorrect. Or you could translate this page from Japanese. It seems to say that a G4 at 1GHz is about 1/6 the speed of a 2.8GHz P4 on the floating point benchmark.

Yes, they would be rockin fast if they used IBM Power4s. But they don't.

Yes, they are slowly improving, but modern PCs are still behind where workstations were years ago, and a modern Intel based server is well behind a SPARC based machine.

Are you kiddding me? You must work for Sun's PR machine.

Any modern PC versus a modern workstatation [including SUN] is a joke. Nearly every application runs significantly faster on a PC than a workstation [large CAD packages, image processing, databases, etc]. Yes, the workstations have larger L1/L2 caches and such, but the sheer speed of the core processors in the PCs overcome this limitation quickly as they are significantly faster than their workstation counterparts. Also, the memory architecture on the SUN's isn't some form of wizardary; rather, the latest SUN workstations use interleaved PC133 RAM [the expensive SUN OEM version of course though] - not exactly revolutionary.

Anyone with their choice of a PC 'workstation' running Win32/linux versus a IRIX/SUN workstation will choose the PC hands down if they have used both.

Estimated Power4 scores
P4 scores at SPEC

Estimated Power4 scores:
Est. SPEC INT 937 @ 1.8 GHz
Est. SPEC FP 1051 @ 1.8 GHz


Intel Corporation Intel D850EMVR motherboard (2.8 GHz, Pentium 4 processor):
SPEC INT 1032
SPEC FP 1034

SPEC int2000 consists of gcc, gzip, perl, bzip2, crafty (a Free chess engine), and some other stuff. I happen to be interested in building a computer to run crafty fast, so it's very handy to have good benchmark results for it on recent AMD and Intel CPUs. (Athlons kick P4 butt on crafty, probably because of bit shifts and things like that that P4 is slow on.) Many people would find the gcc, perl, and compression benchmarks interesting when buying a *NIX workstation.

SPEC fp2000 includes Mesa, but only doing software rendering. The other programs are mostly scientific computing apps. (Not just synthetic matrix multiplies or things like that.)

SPEC int2000 consists of gcc, gzip, perl, bzip2, crafty (a Free chess engine), and some other stuff. I happen to be interested in building a computer to run crafty fast, so it's very handy to have good benchmark results for it on recent AMD and Intel CPUs. (Athlons kick P4 butt on crafty, probably because of bit shifts and things like that that P4 is slow on.) Many people would find the gcc, perl, and compression benchmarks interesting when buying a *NIX workstation.

SPEC fp2000 includes Mesa, but only doing software rendering. The other programs are mostly scientific computing apps. (Not just synthetic matrix multiplies or things like that.)

exactly as I said- how many people would group running a serious application (weblogix) and running an application for piracy (LimeWire, a Gnutella P2P client) ?

Sigh, Limewire is not an application for piracy it is a P2P client for sharing files. Yes, if one chooses to he/she can pirate just about anything, but that is not why I use it. Your ignorance is shining through. Have you ever used your personal workstation as a development box? You can be incredibly productive by unit testing on your box and then system testing on the server.

if you're so concerned about having quality java support for a commercial app, you would run it on a Sun box.

Why? Have you tested both platforms using a real world application using EJBs? Hmm, thought so. Have you ran the spec benchmarks? Hmm, thought so.

I know that JDK support and app support for linux are better now,

Correct.

but would you risk your job and reputation on it? I hope not. that's why we have budgets, and if yours isn't enough to truly build a good infrastructure for whatever applications you have then you shouldn't be building them to start with.

Hell yeah! Lets spend more money than we have to! Lets get a real expensive Sun workstation that will get its ass handed to it in Integer performance by a $750 Dell box. Let alone the fact that one wouldn't be able to run VMware with it (Don't you dare bring up the Sun PCI card). More to the point: Why isn't a 4 node Linux cluster of Weblogic with 2 Local Directors sitting in front (for failover if you are scratching your head now) using XML for the interface a "good infrastructure"? Why not save a ton of money in this economic climate and be a hero instead of a shmuck. Why don't you just come out and say "Nobody ever got fired for buying a Sun!" (Replace Sun with Microsoft to see how silly you sound?)

that being said, I'm running serious enterprise java apps on a freebsd box using the JDK right now (OpenNMS, available at www.opennms.org - great enterprise SNMP monitoring system.)

"the JDK" lol, how is your Hotspot compiler?

Oh well, it is late and I am tired of typing. Your last line BTW is hilarious! Nice sound logical conclusion :)

If they aren't interested in performance, then why do they achieve pretty damn good SPEC numbers??

JAAB
just another alpha bigot

Intel cares more about marketing and big business than they do about truly high-availability and zero-error CPUs

And that would be why a Pentium IV 2.8Ghz is the fastest tested on SpecInt? (Faster than any other processor in the world). That would also be why the SpecFP is dominated by the Intel Itanium2 (with, notably, the P4 not too far behind. The fact that the Itanium is at 1Ghz versus the P4 at 2.8Ghz is irrelevant, as both speeds are the fruits of their respective designs)?

Note that I'm not an Intel "fanboy": I have an Athlon in my machine, and if I bought a machine today it'd have an Athlon in it. However, the strategy of Intel for their P4 is just a different variation on the pursuit of speed, and obviously it works because it's the fastest processor in the world at SpecInt. Saying that it's just marketing is clearly not true when seeing the results of their efforts.

It's interesting that Sun chose the asynchronous architecture instead of taking Intel's route of over-the-horizon pipelines and other tricks.they chose

Let the results do the talking. As it is, clearly Intel is winning the processor war.

Intel cares more about marketing and big business than they do about truly high-availability and zero-error CPUs

And that would be why a Pentium IV 2.8Ghz is the fastest tested on SpecInt? (Faster than any other processor in the world). That would also be why the SpecFP is dominated by the Intel Itanium2 (with, notably, the P4 not too far behind. The fact that the Itanium is at 1Ghz versus the P4 at 2.8Ghz is irrelevant, as both speeds are the fruits of their respective designs)?

Note that I'm not an Intel "fanboy": I have an Athlon in my machine, and if I bought a machine today it'd have an Athlon in it. However, the strategy of Intel for their P4 is just a different variation on the pursuit of speed, and obviously it works because it's the fastest processor in the world at SpecInt. Saying that it's just marketing is clearly not true when seeing the results of their efforts.

It's interesting that Sun chose the asynchronous architecture instead of taking Intel's route of over-the-horizon pipelines and other tricks.they chose

Let the results do the talking. As it is, clearly Intel is winning the processor war.

You can get all the scores with benchmarks going back to CPU 92 and up to CPU2000, as well as other benchmarks, web, web w/ SSL, and others from Spec.org. Incidentally the current kings of the roost (integer and floating point) are IBM's Power4 and Itaniums. Alpha's were ahead and are likely to regain the speed advantage when the EV7 comes out.

Perhaps that's because it may not be a myth. The fact that Apple has never submitted SPEC benchmarks is also disturbing. I think Apple is significantly behind in terms of performance and they know it. The question is whether they are going to fix it by moving to IBM or Pentium.

http://www.spec.org/osg/cpu2000/results/res2002q3/

1. AMD Athlon (TM) XP 2600+ (813/839)
2. Intel D850EMV2 motherboard (2.8 GHz, Pentium 4 processor) 976 /984

http://www.spec.org/osg/cpu2000/results/res2002q3/

1. AMD Athlon (TM) XP 2600+ (813/839)
2. Intel D850EMV2 motherboard (2.8 GHz, Pentium 4 processor) 976 /984

http://www.spec.org/osg/cpu2000/results/res2002q3/

1. AMD Athlon (TM) XP 2600+ (813/839)
2. Intel D850EMV2 motherboard (2.8 GHz, Pentium 4 processor) 976 /984

http://www.spec.org

This benchmark is composed of various programs such as gcc and infozip distributed with source code. It's open source. It's respected. And it's already available. There's really little need to put together a new open source benchmark.

Marketing will always find a "good" benchmark. Dev/QA rely on real benchmarks.