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

They almost got it. . .

[noewun]

Inneresting. However, I wish they would have left off the

Mac fans, our wait will be rewarded. The fight is over and Apple will soon rule the world !

cause it makes the whole article sound silly. I've been a Mac user since 1989, but I really, really, really, really wish people would find something more interesting to argue over than which platform/OS you use.

Nice, but still skeptical....

[Dr. Mojura]

While I truly believe Apple will use the 970, and I'm sure it will be much faster that their current offerings, I still have to remain skeptical of this. Call me naive, but how am I to believe they not only have alpha releases of panther (very possible, since they are probably developer seeds), but they also somehow obtained unreleased hardware as well? "...were done on the same computers that will be sold." I can't imagine Apple is so loose to let out alpha/beta harware.

Then again, never underestimate the marketing power of 'hype'. Whether it's true or not, I hope the release is sooner than later.... I miss OS X.

Re:So it is faster than dual G4s

[dAzED1]

did you read the article at all?

Right there in the article is a comparison to the P4 3Gz, which the 970 is only slightly faster than. Now, compare the price of a p4 3.0 (or a duel p4 2.6 or such) to the price of a 970...

Glad that there is a great chip out there (970) but price per performance, the guy (intel) that's making far more chips still is doign it cheaper. Economics.

Remember the "Apple" section of /.?

[chasingporsches]

Maybe this should have been posted to the Apple section. I had to actually click on the /. logo to see this post! My home page is the apple section, to filter only what i really want to see ;-)

Re:Apple Secrecy Sucks

[Valdrax]

Perhaps you should read the educational tale of the Osbourne to learn exactly how your reaction is exactly why Apple keeps this kind of thing secret:

Two years after the Osborne débuted in the marketplace, the company was bankrupt! Why? Osborne made a fatal mistake! They failed to plan! To make matters worse, they announced a second machine, the Osborne 2, which was suppose to be a great improvement over the initial Osborne and all of its competition. However, the announcement was premature since the Osborne 2 was not ready for customer shipments. As a result, the sales for the original Osborne dried up while their customers waited for the Osborne 2. Consequently, the company had no sales that translated to no revenue and subsequently to no cash. Meanwhile, the market was waiting for the new and improved Osborne 2 that never materialized because the company ran out of money, and went bankrupt. The company failed in large part to a lack of honest and intensive business planning. In summary, by failing to plan, it plan to fail and was found guilty of "eating its own children."

-- From this site.

Re:Mac Rumour Mongering

[John Harrison]

Also remember that Steve likes to announce things himself. There is not way he would stand for a leak of this size. The chances of this being real are slim indeed. If it were real they would show us a picture of the machine and its innards. That said, if it is real this might be enough to get me to purchase another Mac.

Re:Sad...

[Steveftoth]

They're not running in 64-bit mode.

The 970 runs 32-bit PPC code and 64-bit PPC code. Only the kernel has to support the 64-bit mode and switching back and forth for the individual applications.

However, these benchmarks still might be fake. It's hard to tell since I can't even download the article.

Re:So it is faster than dual G4s

[Shuh]

did you read the article at all?

Right there in the article is a comparison to the P4 3Gz, which the 970 is only slightly faster than. Now, compare the price of a p4 3.0 (or a duel p4 2.6 or such) to the price of a 970...

Now consider the 1.4GHz single-processor 970 is goint to be the bottom-of-the-line PPC tower.

Don't trust

[humina]

I don't trust this information at all. There are a lot of apple people that would like to see a processor that is significantly faster than intel's offering (I am one). Unfortunately there are people that will publish rumors that apple is going to do this soon without proof because they wish it were so now. The only apple rumor site that I would trust is Think Secret. Other than think secret or an announcement from apple, I refuse to believe that any of this information is true. This is merely wishful thinking.

Re:So it is faster than dual G4s

[timeOday]

Well, if you'd looked at the bar charts in the artcle, you'd have seen that the 1.4 GHz benchmarks at about the same or a little faster than a 3 GHz P4.

The 1.4 PPC 970, that is, not the G4 1.4.

Of they G4, they write,

By reading these benchmarks you'll understand that we couldn't publish them before. Now we know that PM G4 sells are stuck at a very low level, the following test results won't have much incidence. It will however make the ones switching to PC wait for the next generation of Power Macs.

Now, maybe I'm reading too much into a rough translation, but it sounds like they were witholding benchmarks that showed how the single P4 3.0 spanked the dual 1.4 G4. That doesn't seem very forthright.

Meanwhile, comparing *today's* Intel product against *tomorrow's* PPC must also be done with caution; by the time you can buy that PPC 970, Intel and AMD will have something else, too.

Macintosh Nerd Factor @ All-Time High

[Shuh]

First they moved to a modern RISC-based ISA in 1994. Then they moved to a UNIX/NeXT-base OS with OSX in 2000. Now they're moving into a Power-4-workstation -derived 64-bit processor that will come out of the gate (at its lowest clockrate) neck-n-neck with the highest clockrate x86 CPU's in their prime.

Throw in things like brilliant X11 support, a desktop graphics subsystem only dreamed about for other OS's now, and even a Nightly Phoenix/Firebird build for OSX.

It's going to be a great time to upgrade a Mac, or buy one if you don't alreay have one.

Re:Pot calling the kettle black

[Brandon Sharitt]

Well MacRumors doesn't really release its own stories that often. Most of the time they just post links to sites like MacBidouille and tell you to take it with a grain(or barrel) of salt.

The benchmarks are bogus

[Hannibal_Ars]

We've had some discussion of these in the Ars Mac forum, and the consensus is that they're bogus. I'm currently wrapping up part II of my 970 article, and I'm pretty certain that these numbers are made up.

Here's how it will break down clock-for-clock:

Floating-point: the 970 will spank the G4e
Integer: The G4e will spank the 970
Vector: it's a tie, even though the 970's Altivec hardware is inferior to that of the G4e. What gives the 970 a boost is Dual-channel DDR400 and a real FSB. If you were to put the G4e in a similar system, it would out perform the 970 clock-for-clock pretty handily.

Anyway, I could elaborate more, but I'd rather work on my article.

Re:So it is faster than dual G4s

[gig]

I think they mean that these benchmarks are really for PC users. If you are about to buy a new P4 and do MS Windows all over again then they are saying to you "wait a tick and see how the G5 looks first". There is a widespread feeling in the Mac community that the G5 will be something special because it will be from top-to-bottom all New Apple (post NeXT purchase). There won't be anything at all left from the pre-1997 Mac, basically, that hasn't been completely rebuilt (OS, form factors) or replaced (ADB with USB, A/V with FireWire, CRT with LCD). Also, there is a feeling that IBM made the PowerPC 970 just for Steve and Avi and John, so whatever they wrap around it will take really good advantage of it, and basically blow the doors off Wintel for all you guys who are still stuck with 1990's-era computer systems. The idea is that if you bristled reading the previous sentence they hope to show you that it is really true, with 64-bits and system design that goes from the tiniest hardware element all the way to single pixels on the 3D alpha-composited display.

If you are a Mac user you probably don't care about bar graph benchmarks. I am one and I don't. I just buy a new Mac every three years when my AppleCare is up and sell the old one for half what I paid for it originally and just laugh and laugh.

Mac users are more interested in feature lists like Rendezvous (zero conf networking), FireWire (hook up lots of disks and cameras real fast and easy), CoreAudio (flexibly utilize pro audio interfaces, applications, effects, and instruments simultaneously in real-time), CoreMIDI (route MIDI performance data between applications in real-time), SuperDrive (read and write CD and DVD), Unicode typography throughout, one-crash-per-year stability, etc. And of course I want it in an enclosure that is 50% of the volume of the last one, too.

Bar graphs of a particular render or a particular step or action are fairly useless in creative work. You get a better idea by just using the machine you plan to purchase for 20 minutes at an Apple Store or similar dealer. As long as it has all the necessary features (some noted above) and it feels good then you are set. Apple's Photoshop shoot-outs are not so bad because they run numerous day-long scripts on Photoshop on both platforms. These are scripts that it literally takes an artist all day to record in Photoshop, and you can play them back as fast as the machine can manage, so if you play back 20 scripts on both machines and one is consistently faster then that might be interesting. Not enough to make me ignore how much I don't want to run Windows, though. It's not worth if for so many reasons, not the least of which is the dearth of good creative software on MS Windows.

Re:The 970 vs The Opteron x44 ....... tsarkon repo

[Aqua OS X]

First off, most mac users have known that their platform has been behind the curve (in processing power) for a few years now. I don't know why you'd have to "try to tell" Mac zealots this. Mac users use Mac's because of the better usability, better UI, better hardware integration, etc. I could care less if my new Mac is 8months slower then a new Windows/Linux box.

Secondly, the 970 is far from vapor. It was first presented 6 months ago and they are now rumored to be falling off Hon Hai assembly lines. Not only was the PPC970 announced well -after- AMD and Intel's consumer 64bit solutions, it will most likely be the first 64bit CPU to appear in consumer desktops and laptops.

And finally, what good would an Opteron be to Mac users? Although Cocoa apps could probably be recompiled for a different CPU with minimal headaches, Carbon apps do not port well. Apple would have to create an emulation layer for Carbon apps. It would be a nightmare, it would take for ever to develop, there would be countless software incompatibilities at first, and Mac developers would throw a hissy fit. Shess, we're still coming out of a -major- OS migration.

I could go on and on about why an Apple AMD box would be technically impossible at this point in time...but hey, just trust me, ain't gon'a happen. The PPC970 is a smart move.

Not serious

[Bulln-Bulln]

This ''benchmark'' is really bullsh*t.
When you do serious benchmarks, you post details about the hardware and the used OS.
Well, they gave a few details about the Mac they claim to have. But what about the P4-PC?
What kind of RAM did they use? 100MHz? 800MHz? Something in between?
Which Windows version did they use? Was Hyper Threading enabled?
The list could be a lot longer, but you get the point.

Also: Wasn't the PPC970 meant to be a competitor to Intel Xeon and AMD Opteron CPUs rather that just the plain P4 (by price and aimed market)? (I'm not sure about this one.)
Why didn't they benchmark these as well? (They could at least get a Xeon, an Opteron is harder to get.)
The last sentence (''The fight is over and Apple will soon rule the world!'') gives me an indication why they didn't do this: They seem not to be interested in an objective comparison.

Re:So it is faster than dual G4s

[afantee]

>> But I switched to Linux on Intel five or six years ago and haven't looked back since. As a programmer, I love the tools. As a user, I love the independance. And as a man who appreciates freedom, I savour the chaos, the energy, and the source code.

With OS X, the Mac world is so much better and more exciting than it was 2 or 3 years ago, so you experience gained 5 or 6 years ago is simply irrelevant.

As an long time UNIX and Windows programmer, I can tell you that OS X is truly a dream platform - better than Solaris, Windows and the old Mac OS in every way. I am now much more productive on my $999 iBook than on a $15K Sun Ultra Sparc machine.

Many UNIX and Linux geeks have switched to Mac OS X, including people like James Gosling, Bud Tribble, James Duncan Davidson, Tim O'Reilly, and most of the Perl 6 core team. At least 4 or 5 Slashdot editors are now Mac users.