Preliminary OS X & PPC 970 Benchmarks

Dixie_Flatline writes "Macbidouille.com is reporting that they have preliminary benchmarks involving PPC970 hardware. The results are seriously impressive. We're looking at a single processor PPC 970 1.4GHz machine quite strikingly outperforming a dual G4 1.42GHz machine. Don't worry, there's an English translation embedded in the page so you don't have to try to muddle through the French." Update: 05/05 19:58 GMT by T : Thanks to Eric from macbidouille.com, above link updated to a static page; hopefully you'll get better response this way.

Comments

Re:So it is faster than dual G4s

[OwnedByTwoCats]

It's in the article.
Test 1: Cinema 4D-XL
PPC G4 Dual 1.42 GHz 33 seconds
Pentium IV 3.0GHz 30 seconds
PPC 970 1.4 GHz 29 seconds
PPC 970 Dual 1.8 GHz 18 seconds

Test 2: Photoshop Actions
PPC G4 Dual 1.42 GHz 73 seconds
Pentium IV 3.0GHz 58 seconds
PPC 970 1.4 GHz 50 seconds
PPC 970 Dual 1.8 GHz 24 seconds

Test 3: Bryce 5
PPC G4 Dual 1.42 GHz 21 seconds
Pentium IV 3.0GHz 16 seconds
PPC 970 1.4 GHz 16 seconds
PPC 970 Dual 1.8 GHz 7 seconds

Re:Mac Rumour Mongering

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, macbidouille.com is known for its ACCURACY on rumours. They had early photos of the Quicksilver PowerMac, they had photos of prototype motherboards for XServe, they were true about the specs of 2002 Apple-Expo Macs, etc...

Note that it is NOT a rumours site, but a Mac news / hacks site.

barely keeping up

[g4dget]

The French site is slashdotted, but SPECmark estimates are out on the web here. The relevant quote is:

When the PowerPC 970 first ships in the second half of 2003, it should clock in at around 1.8GHz on a 0.13 micron, 8-layer SOI process with copper interconnects. [...] The estimated SPEC INT and SPEC FP numbers (937 and 1051) would allow the 970 to clearly dominate the desktop scene were it released tomorrow, but by the time we see this chip in a shipping system the performance landscape will look significantly different in both the 32-bit (P4 at 4GHz+ with SMT) and 64-bit (AMD's Hammer) desktop markets. I won't try to predict exactly how it will stack up to the x86 and x86-64 offerings in late 2003/early 2004, but when it finally ships the 970 certainly won't spanking anything from Intel or AMD in the SPEC benchmarks. It should, however, enable Apple to avoid the kind of overpriced embarrassment (from a hardware perspective, at least) that is their current "pro" desktop line. And in fact a dual- or quad-970 system could potentially compare quite nicely in terms of price/performance to a single-processor Prescott or Hammer machine.

Note that a 3GHz P4 system already gets SPECint and SPECfp of 1130 and 1085, and AMD's Opteron may be slightly faster yet (and give you an optional 64 bit mode).

Re:Altivec?

[Brandon Sharitt]

IBMs vecotor processer is Altivec compatible. Apple calls it velocity engine. I think they just called it altivec since some people wouldn't know that Altivec is just Motorolla's name for their vector processor. When these things are in Macs, apple will probably call them G5s with velocity engine, even though they will be fourth generation(or second if you count how long they've been 64-bit) chip and not the exact same thing that was velocity engine.

Re:So it is faster than dual G4s

[sjgman9]

All this seems very nice.
Lets get it out now.

The thing to remember is that the PowerPC is originally based on the IBM POWER chip -- a native 64 bit chip that can do 32 bit programs as well.

IBM tends to undersestimate and overproduce. They arent just making it for Apple, they will put the 970 in their own Linux blade servers and NetVista boxes for financial stuff. Also, the 970 is a variant of the POWER4 dualcore Risc monster processor in IBMs big server iron.

IBM doesnt screw around. Motorola is becoming irrelevant.

Heres another key reason why this chip might actually be as fast as MacBidoulle claims:

The system bus runs at 900 MHZ. The current mac system bus runs at 167 mhz. Think about it. A 900 lane highway vs a 167 lane highway? This chip will have monstrous bandwith. And the power consumption will be reduced a big deal as well..

Look at this official IBM presentation from last october

and this ArsTechnica review as well

The 970, being a 64 bit chip, allows more memory than 4GB, the current 32 bit limit. Servers need more than 4 gigs, especially IBM's monster iron.

10 years ago my Mac used 32 MB's of ram. Now its up to 768 megs. Sooner or later, it will go past 4 gigs. Better to get this transition done now than later.

The current PPCs (The g4s) are wide, but shallow. The much faster Pentium 4s are deep but narrow.

This is a guess, and if any cpu engineer wants to help out, id appreciate it.
The P4 stuffs all execution data down the pipe as fast as it can. If there's a break in the chain of execution instructions, the whole chain must be shoved down the pipe again.

The G4 spreads it all out over multiple pipes, but the pipes arent deep. The main work is figuring out which pipe is free to shove stuff into.

This is a gross simplification, so please bear with me.

The 970, on the other hand, has more pipes than the G4 and the Pentium 4, but the pipes are deeper than the P4. So it can stuff a whole ton of stuff down and be very efficient. Wide and deep. Theres a bit of a tradeoff, but the chip is just engineered much better.

I read the Ars technica article a long time ago and the IBM PDF file a while ago too. I would not be suprised if the data on Mac Bidoulle is accurate.

I am waiting for apple to stuff a 970 into a PowerBook, preferably the 15 inch one. I am waiting on that for my next computer. I do not want the G4. The Mobo on the G4 just doesnt have a wide enough bus to suck up massive amounts of data. The 970 mobo will.

The 970 mobo will be 900 Mhz. Intel has the 533 mhz mobo and soon will have the 800 mhz mobo.

Motorola and Apple were fighting about how to make the data path on the mobo. Motorola had the chips, they were just being strange. Motorola's problems stunted apple with the g4 for a long time. Apple had to overclock the g4 so much that the g4 tower got obscenely loud.

I welcome the 970 and want it in a Mac ASAP. I think that WWCD was delayed to show the developers the chip and a version of Panther that will have it. Bring it on! Lets see IBM take on Intel in the chipmaking business.

My bets are on IBM

Panther version is wrong

[Anonymous Coward]

The Panther builds are not on the B build train yet, so this article is wrong. There is no such thing as Panther 7B6.