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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."
I know people are going to claim that the SPEC marks aren't susceptible to bias but the SPEC suite only test traditional architectures. As far as I know, they don't test for SIMD vector processing like the altivec.
No one ever claimed that the FP alone on the G4 was at supercomputer status, just that the G4 in conjunction with Altivec could crunch at FLOPs at "supercomputer" speeds.
Keep in mind that OS X is hardly optimized for this kind of test. OS X has just recently reached the point where it is useful as a general purpose platform. But Apple is making a big push in the scientific computing area so I expect that you will find vast improvements in the SPEC FP suite in the future.
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.
Part I.
Part II.
blarg.