Gigahertz Mac Finally SPEC'd

FrkyD writes "C't magazine puplished a story with the results of a test they designed using a Mac OS X-adapted benchmark suite by the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation (SPEC) entitled CPU2000. SPEC allows comparisons to be made within a certain framework with the Intel competition. They compared the G4/1 GHz running Mac OS X with a PIII/1 GHz (Coppermine) running Windows and Linux."

Comments

It all comes down to application

[Strog]

Until a more optimized compiler comes along then it looks like for general purpose applications clock speed will mostly be the indicator of performance.

Having said that, there will always be applications that are optimized enough to kick some butt on a G4 like Photoshop, etc. If you are a programmer then it is nice to not be limited on registers on a RISC cpu. Choose the right tool for the right job. If it comes down to a push then use your favorite. :P

Re:Linux vs. Windows

[foobar104]

That means Linux is over 30% faster than Windows!

Of course it doesn't. It means that GCC is somewhat better at compiling the SPECint_base benchmark than Visual Studio is.

I won't pretend to be educated about the inner workings of SPECint, but one would suppose that, because it's purported to be a hardware benchmark rather than an OS benchmark, it is completely independent of the standard C library, or any other OS-level service. One would expect the compiled benchmark to just run pure code inside the CPU, without any system calls or any of that stuff.

So the same benchmark compiled with the same compiler but run under two different OSs should return exactly the same result, within a certain statistical margin.

Somebody with more time on their hands could either test this hypothesis, or confirm that it's already been done by somebody else.

Processor only test

[gouldtj]

I guess, I am supprised by the results. In just USING the various machines I would say that there is about a 1:2 ratio between the MHz on a PPC to an x86 processor. But then I started to think about them. In reality the processors aren't what make the difference. It is everything else. Macs don't tend to use as much 'soft' stuff, and they make better use of the GPU, so the processor is left to do more 'processing'. I guess they're will never be an completely perfect 'user' test, I'll just have to go with feel. But in my experience those SPEC numbers don't tell the whole story.

It might be interesting to see a comparison with Linux running on both machines... Anyone have one of these?

Re:Linux vs. Windows

[foobar104]

[I]f GCC consistently turns out code that's faster than Visual Studio, we could extrapolate that Linux is significantly faster than Windows.

Maybe you could, if GCC could be thus characterized. But there's no evidence in this article that points to that conclusion. Rather, this article says that GCC did a better job of compiling the SPEC benchmarks. As everybody knows-- or should know-- benchmarks are to real applications as fish are to bicycles.

Re:my own experience

[HypodermicEyes]

Sure, but that's not really relevant to the article. SPEC is a measure of the capability of a CPU+Memory Subsystem+compiler in performing Real Work, where Real Work is number/symbol crunching. You know - linear algebra, compiling, those kinds of things. SPEC couldn't care less about measuring how responsive a GUI is, and rightly so. Assuming the OS has decent process+priority management (as it should for Mach+BSD), the GUI bloat should not be relevant.

I was actually quite surprised by the poor performance of the G4. Although if the other posters are correct in stating that SPEC doesn't test very well for single-precision floats nor SIMD, it's probably not a very good test of the capabilities of the CPU. Of course, Apple has crippled their systems with PC133. That doesn't help either.