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Mac vs. PC Digital Photography Comparison Redux
Macmurph writes "Bibble Labs has released a lightning fast version of the RAW image convertor, MacBibble. According to MacBibble creator, Eric Hyman, "MacBibble 3.x is almost 10 times faster than the manufacturers software when converting RAW files under OSX.". Prelimenary tests indicate the Mac may be faster than PCs in RAW image conversion afterall. This calls into question the relevance of the the hotly debated article Rob Galbraith posted just 3 weeks ago and discussed here on Slashdot. Two thumbs up for the PowerPC G4's AltiVec vector processing engine, now being put to work in MacBibble."
The way I see it, multi-processor systems need to become more commonplace in the PC world. I don't know why they haven't. Is it a cost issue? My assumption is that's how the G4 performs so well, based on the fact that the multi-threading is what gave the program its edge.
No. See the many, many other discussion on /., ArsTechnica, etc., about G4 vector processing capabilities. This and laptops are the (only) areas where the G4 remains competitive or better than the P4.
"Science is a tribute to what we can know although we are fallible" -Jacob Bronowski
Hang on a moment. The last Mac vs PC test was conducted fairly - Photoshop on a Mac vs Photoshop on a PC. Using nearly-identical software the clear answer was that the fastest PC today was faster than the fastest Mac.
Now someone writes more efficient code for the Mac, then tries to claim that Macs are somehow quicker than PCs? Talk about an unfair test - that's like that's like writing a pi calculator in BASIC for the PC and seeing how quickly it can calculate 1m decimal places on a 2ghz P4, then writing one in assembler for a Mac classic. If the Mac classic wins, does that mean the Mac* is faster at calculating pi than a PC?
* Macs in general
Sorry, but my karma just ran over your dogma.
Actually the original review was done by a Mac fan. While his benchmarks do not necessarily mean anything in a general sense (i.e. is a PC or Mac faster), they do have relevance in his specific situation. For the task of converting RAW images, his testing showed that PC's were faster. Many commented that it was due to poorly written software on the Mac, but that did not change the fact that if you wanted to do that task, you could do it faster on a PC. Now the situation may have changed (probably has). I would imagine that the original review will be updated with this new software for the Mac. Unfortunately it won't change the poor performace of reading the photos from the media...
as I understand the PC has faster hardware in the sense that American cars have more horsepower - they just throw a ton of power at the problem and don't worry about the effeciency.
The Mac has the ability to do some cool wider pipline stuff and specialized vector processing - but you need to design stuff especially for it - otherwise it isn't as efficient and you lose to the big block Intel/AMD family.
I think the Playstation2 had this problem at first - it is *highly* optimized for vector processing and the first bit of releases for it hadn't taken full advantage of that.
If I can come up with a scenerio that is useful to me where I really *need* a mac, I'd consider it - but at this point, they are simply cute as hell and that is about it.
There are some odd things afoot now, in the Villa Straylight.
Macs are faster in most algorithms with source available.
:
Typically the PowerPC (seen in most of the the www.top500.org list of fastest clusters) trounces Intel and even AMD at almost every benchmark.
Not just the 10 famous benchmarks as part of the composite in ByteMark , but at many other things such as the RC5 contest.
according to the RC5 benchmarks AMD is far slower than dual cpu macintoshes (half as fast). (source available for cor rc5 loops for most
processors)
The Mac Dual 1 Ghz g4 is faster than all existing dual AMD motherboards in RC5 benchmark by almost 100%.
21,129,654 RC5 keyrate for dual 1 Ghz g4 system ! And Now apple sells dual 1.25 Ghz stock and this week a 1.45 Ghz which would be even faster.
A dual 1800+ AMD MP get only HALF as many as a Mac! 10,807,034 rc5 keys !
Funny "Mhz myth" there showing itself I guess... Apple now is selling even FASTER machines than that one I mentioned made over one year ago, but with smaller caches and less fast read-write ram (it
now uses DDR on newest boxes).
The mac I mentioned uses a 2 MB L3 cache and no amd mp dual cpu boards I know about have any L3 cache at all, so maybe that is why some common macs are
over twice as fast, its not just altivec meager tweaks to rc5. AMD have similar , but less mazing vector ops.
The Pentium 4 takes many cycles (over 7?) to do a simple left shift. That is why the Pentium is MUCH slower than even the AMD or Mac.
Most modern CPUs can do a left integer shift in 1 cycle, any barrel position, not 7 slow cycles.
(Shifting is used a lot in decryption, encryption, graphics processing and many things).
Another reason the mac might be over twice as fast as an amd dual mp board is not just the 2MB l3 cache but the fact that mac can read and write to
a cold page of memory simulatneously FASTER than any AMD MP designs which are biased for linear access and streaming. Many memory scatter
benchmarks show this too. Apples newest DDR-RAM machines might not offer this feature though.
True, RC5 fits in primary cache of most machines, though interrupt services need larger caches depending on interrupt designs and load for the rest of the OS.
The RC5 benchmarks are never run with interrupts off, they use real world overhead.
The Macs made since september also can RAPIDLY service every pci slot almost simultaneously one 32 byte cacheline each if needed. How can it do that ? Three cool features of modern PCI
* out-of-order completion
* address bus streaming
* intervention
Out-of-order completion allows the memory controller to optimize the data bus efficiency by transferring whichever data is ready, rather than having to pass data across the bus in the order the transactions were posted on the bus. This means that a fast DDR SDRAM read can pass a slow PCI read, potentially enabling the processor to do more before it has to wait on the PCI data.
Address-bus streaming allows a single master on the bus to issue multiple address transactions back-to-back. This means that a single master can post addresses at the rate of one every two clocks, rather than one every three clocks, as it is in the 60x bus protocol.
Intervention is a cache-coherency optimization that improves performance for dual-processor systems. If one processor modifies some data, that data first gets stored only in that processor's cache. If the other processor then wants that data, it needs to get the new modified values. In previous systems, the first processor must write the modified data to memory and then the second processor can read the correct values from memory. With intervention, the first processor sends the data directly to the second processor, reducing latency by a factor of ten or more.
ALtivec is not usually the reason a mac performs better than Intel in benchmarks of properly compiled code, because the famous set of 10 algorithms in ByteMark were not using ANY altivec instructions.
And the AMD bests the Intel at Rc5 mainly from integer features.
I laugh when pc people try to dismiss the fastest machine (Macs) by claiming Altivec "cheating" all the time. The mac people should be the ones to call foul when Intel was cuaght PAYING adobe to slow down filters in one version of Photoshop to artificially make the Pentium MMX 166 Mhz look faster. They got caught paying big bucks. Adobe replied that it was an unfortunate side effect of adding optimization for MMX and not keeping the code efficient in the non MMX case as it was before. HA!
Almost every pc person likes to use benchmarks that use lots of assembly for intel (Quake, etc), but shy away from benchmarks that offer source code in ANSI C.
I knew the mac handled RAW better than PCs and this news is no surprise to me.
The reason it was faster was that the G3 had more on-chip cache, which suited the benchmark, and said absolutely NOTHING about the rest of the system.
A computer is as fast as its bottleneck... when evaluating performance it's best to see as many REAL WORLD benchmarks as possible. No use having a 12ghz processor if you still use 33mhz memory.
Sorry, but my karma just ran over your dogma.
Rather than indicating that the distributed.net team would rather see PowerPC 74xx systems triumph in the key-crunching race, it would indicate that MMX/SSE2 are a royal pain in the ass to leverage unless you're coding/decoding pretty specifically what they were designed to code/decode - though IANAC++P...
I hate Grammar Nazi's
Oh, and search slashdot for 'Mac +Mouse' to read the 13'000 posts that describe how you can plug any 'normal' mouse into OS X and it'll work instantly...
That part is actually the beauty of the USB spec.
If you design a device to the spec, then it will work on any OS that implements drivers to that spec. So you shouldn't need special Mac drivers for USB speakers, drives, mice, keyboards if they were properly designed. I even had a Mac friend that wasn't sure how to hook up his computer to his new reciever that has a USB jack. I told him to just plug it in. And it worked. The maker didn't even include a CD, drivers or any of that crap.
Also, the right to sell products with the USB logo means that the company is required to have those products compatibility tested - which means any product with the USB logo is going to work, so you don't have to look up special hardware compatibility lists. The reason why computer standards didn't work as well in the past is because those standards didn't mandate compatibility tests.
I know USB has its downsides but it works.
I write c++ code for both pentium 3/4 and the g4. For most conventional operations, the pentium is going to smoke the g4. Except if you have a data parallel problem. I wrote a vectorized monte carlo integration routine that was 2.5x faster on my g4 laptop (800mhz) than on my p4 desktop (1700 mhz). I didn't use SSE1/SSE2 on the P4, using altivec extensions is much easier than SSE2 extensions; since there is a C language interface and no context switching going on. What does this have to do with pictures? Photographic data is a prime example of data that can be vectorized during manipulation.
mate, if the bulk of your Mac experience is limited to 8.6 do yourself a favour and find an excuse to play with OS X for a few weeks.
:)
Before I bought my powerbook last year my only experience with Macs was classic (7.5.5 through 8.6) and I wouldn't have gone near 'em with a barge pole let alone blown two grand on a new Apple Laptop, an afternoon with OS X changed all that, and this was back before Jaguar.
seriously, give the modern Mac a real test-drive your inner geek will love you for it
PC Favoring Article:
Tests done of 4 computers, 4 different
processors, 2 OS's,
Over 30 tasks done using 6 different Programs.
Mac Favoring Article:
Tests done on 1 computer, 1 OS, 1 Processor,
1 Task done on 2 different Programs.
It just appears to me that this is an unfair comparison. It seems that the conclusions of the former test are founded on principals of scientfic testing and have more credibility. Whereas the conclusions of the latter article are amusing at best.
There's also the whole critical mass thing. I work with a lot of graphic designers because, and they all use Macs because... they all know other graphic designers who all use Macs.. and on and on.
These guys - the guys I know, at least, are a close knit community. And technology just isn't that important to most of them. So they use a Mac because they know that if they get stuck, there's a whole host of other people trying to use the SAME exact software the SAME way on the SAME platform that will help them out.
I have a 1.33GHz Athlon. I have a CPU usage graph sitting in my system tray. My CPU usage almost never goes above 20% (exceptions: Compiling and encoding oggs, which will use 100% CPU however fast your CPU is). On a new Mac, a lot of the GUI related CPU load is shunted to the GPU, and PPC chips do run faster than x86 chips per MHz (This was never in dispute. The dispute is that a 1GHz PPC can outperform a 3GHz x86, which stretches even my 'will-to-believe'). So, If I upgrade to a new Mac with Dual 1.42GHz CPUs I get
And the reason I'm still using a PC? Cost. At the moment, my 18-month old system really isn't slow enough to justify upgrading it.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
i bought a cheap 50$ HP scanner from walmart - hooked it through USB and it worked - heck the HP manual did not have a word about OS X - and for windows you need to go through installing the crap and rebooting. Also i have hooked sony and canon digital cameras - works out fine - and i have also used the digital memory of the cameras to transfer files - as the camera memory shows up like a folder in the desktop - cant get any cooler !!! :)
get a mac
The main reason why macs are so dominant in publishing and art is becasue of the old (true) cliche - it just works...if they can't figure out problems with DLL's, conflicts, registry problems and having to reinstall Windows every 9 months then what is the better system for them?
What are the productivity gains of perfect networking, great UI, better support for FireWire, BlueTooth, Wireless stuff etc etc etc.? It's not quantifiable but it is much more important than slightly faster processors, so lets just stop the whole thing there.
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I agree with your premise - that in the end, the result is what matters, and if you can save 10 hours of headaches with sacrificing a few seconds here and there, then you are probably better off.
However, to your point above, please see Rob Galbraith's post about 10 down from the top of the discussion forum related to his comparison.
He states that he continues to use Macs as his primary machines. However:
"For a major project that ran through much of last year, I got up close and personal with Windows XP Professional running on the humble Dell box in the speed report. I connected a whole raft of pro digital SLR cameras, over a dozen card readers, plus several CD writers, several inkjet printers, a flatbed scanner and a film scanner. Every device connected and worked without a hitch, many of them sucking their own drivers from the ether and configuring themselves. Way, way cool."
"On the Mac, it was as it always has been for me dealing with pro digital photography peripherals, whether in OS X or earlier iterations of the operating system. Some devices worked fine, though many required the manual installation of drivers, while some devices, and especially USB and FireWire card readers didn't work at all. Or required a driver for OS X 10.1, then a different one for 10.1.2, then a driver change again in OS X 10.1.3. Ugh. I've had fairly serious ongoing fights with my film scanner, so much so that I only use it on the PC now, where it just works. Where's the true plug and play in that?"
"Part of this is just dumb luck of course, because with a different PC and different peripherals I could have been given a rougher ride by Windows XP, and an easier ride by the Mac. As it happens, however, life with Windows XP in 2002 was a breeze compared to the Mac. By OS X 10.2.3 things have settled down a lot on the Mac side, but for the speed report I experienced yet again an incompatibility between one card/reader combo that was not replicated on the two PCs. After awhile, these types of experiences make me think that Apple needs to spend more time delivering true plug and play for the pro digital photographer, and less time marketing the notion that they do."
"Keep in mind, my preference would be to remain on the Mac, and right now, two of the key applications I use everyday are Mac only, so I'll boot up my Mac first every day for a while yet. But I won't stay on the Mac because of what I now consider to be outdated notions about the Macs ease of setup and use, since my experience using the other platform is that life is okay over there, even preferable in certain, specific ways."