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Gigahertz Mac Finally SPEC'd

Posted by pudge on from the mo-speed-mo-speed-mo-speed dept.

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."

5 of 52 comments (clear)

  1. Linux vs. Windows by crow · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I found this from the article to be interesting:

    With a SPECint_base value of 306 Apple's 1 GHz machine under Mac OS X ran almost head to head with the equally clocked Pentium III, combined with Linux and GCC, with a SPECint_base value of 309. Under Windows, the bad quality of Microsoft's run-of-the-mill compiler, which pushed the system down to a SPECint_base value of 236

    That means Linux is over 30% faster than Windows!

    Too bad they didn't give similar floating point numbers (or at least I didn't find them in the article), especially seeing as how the Mac is faring so poorly against the Linux PIII in that area.

    1. Re:Linux vs. Windows by Graymalkin · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Actually it means GCC is 30% faster than Visual Studio's compiler which is notoriously shitty. You're also basing your aguement on too few details. You don't know which compiler flags were used so you can't compare -O3 optimized code to VS optimized code. The VS compiler is not the world's greatest compiler and I think they should have gone with the Borland C++ compiler for Windows. Your compiler makes a big difference in the speed at which code is going to run.

      --
      I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
  2. my own experience by jchristopher · · Score: 3, Interesting
    My own experience tells me that a 500mhz Mac (iBook, 640 MB RAM) runs OSX and common apps (browser, mail, newsreader, IM) at roughly the speed of a Pentium II 300 with Windows 2000. That's terrible.

    Even a lowend PC these days ($700 or so) will run Windows FAST, whereas Apple's lowend end runs OS X slowly.

    Most of the Mac's "speed problems" lie in the OS, not the hardware. Linux on the iBook described above flies.

  3. Why a P3? by george399 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Call me crazy, but why is there a benchmark between a PIII and a G4.
    Wouldn't a P4 be a better test?

    --
    Patience is a virtue, but I don't have the time - TH
  4. Just make your compiler produce Altivec then! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    The whole idea with SPEC is that it test a number of very optimized real-world codes written in standard programming languages.

    The rules are simple: You can do anything you want to your system, compiler, libraries, optimization flags, but you are NOT allowed to touch the code.

    This is *GOOD* since it means any optimization introduced by the hardware vendor or compiler authors will benefit all programs, not only hand-tuned assembly.

    So, it's completely OK to use vector processing (and some of the benchmarks would benefit from it), but must do it in the compiler and not hand-tune each executable.