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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.
It seems the benchmarks they ran all favour SIMD FPU performance. I'd be much more interested in integer (and integer-SIMD) performance, as this is used much more in mainstream video and audio compression work.
Remember that MacBidouille has a history of inaccurate rumors... remember their AMD rumor earlier this year. Check out their rating at www.macrumors.com
I find in hard to believe that MacBidouille actually have been able to benchmark a computer not announced by Apple, based on a chip that's not available before the end of the year according to it's manufacturer IBM.
(Of course, IBM may have been willing to enter Steve Jobs' reality distortion field this time, and have been misleading us all this time - but personally I find that unlikely)
The roadmap is also interesting, though still just a rumeur, of course.
Apple must have had at least some "same machines that will be sold" at that time; they just did a really good job at keeping them under wraps.
These days the beans are typically spilled at least a few days prior to the announcement of new Apple products. It would be very difficult to have such a high-profile (and high-tech) company entirely leak-proof.
Take this article to mean what you want it to, but I think it is quite possible that it is true.
> IBM may have been willing to enter Steve Jobs' reality
> distortion field this time, and have been misleading us
> all this time - but personally I find that unlikely
I've a couple of uncles who recently retired from IBM. And today's IBM isn't the "Big Blue" of the '80s. Things have changed.
For starters, the engineers, at least, don't wear suits anymore!
But that's not the important bit. The important bit is that ever since bill gates fucked them over, back in the early '90s, in the OS/2 incident, IBM has had an institutional hatred of microsoft the likes of which mere mortals can barely comprehend. They're nowhere near as rabidly vocal about it as the likes of Ellison, McNealy, or a big segment of the Linux community, of course. But, then, IBM has always been rathar understated. They don't bluster. But they *DO* remember!
Catch an IBM'er and have a frank discussion sometime. And you'll find that the prevailing attitude towards microsoft there is: "One day, maybe not soon, but one day... we WILL bend gates and his minions over a barrel and assrape them HARD. And as they say: 'Revenge is a dish best served cold'".
It wouldn't be suprising at all if the RDF had nothing to do do with it; and IBM sped up production, and got prototypes to Apple early, JUST to spite gates.
cya,
john
Imagine all the people...
This strikes me as being odd, considering that an IBM chip shouldn't have an "Altivec" unit (Altivec is a Motorola brand name.) I know the 970 is supposed to have a vector processor, maybe the author's just screwed up. I'd certainly like to believe this article.
This site is wrong a majority of the time and their specs/benchmarks do not ring true.
Go to http://www.macrumors.com/ for a detailed analysis in the forums of why these are fake benchmarks.
Beyond that, the release dates they give are insane, apple is still producing G4 desktops.
Call me when the G5 desktops stop rolling off the line and apple starts depleting inventory.
I've worked corporate meetings for IBM, and they would quite happily do quite a lot to frustrate Microsoft. Keeping the 970 secret would be right in line with their corporate attitude. You have to remember that Microsoft's screwing of IBM didn't stop with the selling of DOS to Compaq - it's been a habit for the last 20 years.
As posted by some on macrumors, the benchmarks claim a performance increase in Bryce 3D with dual processors. Bryce 3D does not take advantage of dual CPU's. Don't trust these numbers. I think this website is just making some cash off of the banner ads on the site.
It says exactly what it should say about SIMD speed: "how fast does regular C/Fortran code run when I compile it with a regular compiler". If the compiler can figure out how to transform, say, Fortran array code into SIMD, it will help the SPECmarks. If not, then whatever SIMD features the chip has are useless for most applications, in particular scientific applications. The exception are a few specially crafted apps like Photoshop plugins and MP3 encoders.