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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.
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
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.
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