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New G5 Power Macs "Fastest Desktop In The World"
Beyond the many numbers, the bottom line is that the new machines have a new architecture, and that the memory speed is now the bottleneck, not the processor or bandwidth speeds. So they can have up to 8GB of 128-bit DDR RAM, as it is efficient to keep data in memory. The memory bandwidth is one of the most talked-about features of the new architecture.
USB 2.0 is now included, as are FireWire 400 and 800, Bluetooth, AirPort Extreme, and digital audio in and out. The 4x SuperDrive is now standard, and it can house up to 500GB of internal storage.
For video, the GeForce FX5200 is standard on low-end models, Radeon 9600 Pro on high-end models.
The case of the new machines is redesigned too, from the ground up, focusing on decreasing noise and heat. It is an aluminum enclosure, with ports for FireWire and USB on the front, and a door on the side to get into the box. It has four distinct "thermal zones" with computer-controlled cooling with its nine (yes, nine) independent fans. And it is much quieter than its predecessor.
The G5 is 10 percent slower than the P4 and Xeon in SPEC int scores in single-proc units, but 20 percent faster in FPU scores, and the dual-proc G5 beats the dual-proc Xeon in all SPEC scores.
The models are a single 1.6 GHz ($1999), single 1.8GHz ($2399), and dual 2GHz ($2999). They will ship in August. A 3GHz processor will be available from IBM in 12 months.
Apple notes that recompiling apps for the 64-bit architecture is easy, and in some cases can be done in minutes.
There was no word about the heavily anticipated redesign of the 15" PowerBooks.
Thanks to iPalindrome on irc.arstechnica.com for his running transcript of the keynote address.
Power Mac page
Apple store
-T
Sun should be very scared. Their Dual 1.2GHz 64bit offering is $14,995. Ouch!
Too bad I have to wait until August to pick one up. Oh well I guess that gives me time to think up a good excuse for why I need one and my wife should be okay with it.
http://www.beosjournal.org/wwdc/
for some pictures of the new case.
user@host$ diff
http://www.apple.com/powermac/
if you didn't see it yet.
Of course, issue is still price. $3000 at the top line is about 30% rich in my opinion, but Apple likes its margins fat, what can you say.
RDRAM last time I checked had higher total bandwidth than DDR, but fails to be faster where it counts - latency. Latency on non-sequential read/write is where the memory bottle neck is.
Why?
What, you mean for those hundreds of Itanium workstations?
If that's not the case, I as a consumer would be confused indeed.
Ñ'
Perhaps the most interesting aspect of these new systems will be seeing how AltiVec performs now that the processor has a bus with sufficient bandwidth to keep the AltiVec unit supplied with instructions and data. On the older G4s the AltiVec unit could execute instructions faster than the bus could supply it with instructions and data to process.
I'd like to see some independently-verified benchmarks before I believe that it's the "Fastest desktop in the world". I seriously doubt ol' bullshitter Stevo would tell the full truth.
Well, the problem is... Steve is telling the truth.
Go to www.spec.org and look at the SpecINT and SpecFP ratings for the Power4 (single core benchmark).
Okay, the PPC970 is based on this core and yes, at 1,6 Ghz it runs around an 3 Ghz P4.
Okay, now take a look at the SpecINT and SpecFP ratings for the alpha 21264 and 21364.
Those processors are a real match for the P4.
With a 1.5 times slower clock they are as fast as most 1.5 higher clocked P4's.
The thing is, that intel doesn't have a decent 64 bits processor.
Their itanium II is a joke with a performance which is equal to most 64 bits processors 2 or 3 years ago.
Contrary to intel ibm knows how to build fast 64 bits processors without all the tradeoff's intel had to make with the P4.
Second, if you look at the price of the PPC970 and compare it with the P4 you will see that the P4 is almost 2 times as expensive as the PPC970.
Let's face it, at the moment there is no 64 bits or 32 bits processor available which is faster than the PPC970 (i mean for desktop systems).
It will take intel at least more than a year to get the itanium near the PPC970 2 Ghz..
But then they are no match to the PPC970 3 Ghz. which will be available then.
I hate to bust your bubble, but there is no such thing as SMP P4. Intel designed the P4 to be only single processor. Xeon is for SMP applications.
Also, with SMP you can't just double the speed of one chip to come up with a benchmark. You double it, and take 10-15% off the top. You see, there is overhead in SMP because the two processors need to communicate to make sure they are on the same page, so to speak.
- FinalCut Pro
- Logic Platinum
- Shake
When you're throwing around cinematic quality film clips, the more power the better.According to Apple's website, they're specing against a dual 3.06Ghz Xeon.
See for yourself.
concrete5: a cms made for marketing, but strong enough for geeks.
From apple's website.l e_performance.pdf
+3 GHz Pentium 4-based Dell Dimension 8300
+3.06 GHz Dual Xeon-based Dell Precision 650
+SPEC® CPU 2000 benchmarks run with GCC 3.3
+independently tested, full report available from http://www.veritest.com/clients/reports/apple/app
They benchmarked against the 3 Ghz Xeon, not the 2 Ghz, which you'd know if you paid attention before posting.
According to the specs available here, the G5s have
So, since they have two ports which are stated as being 1.1, I presume the ones listed as "2.0" are really 2.0, not just 2.0-in-name.
Um...might as well be, since you can't buy anything to run that on yet.
All jokes about apple's supply chain aside, these things will be widely available in less than a month.
Please help metamoderate.
but strangely only to a SINGLE-CPU P4 machine?
Gee why could that be?
BECAUSE you can't have anything BUT a single P4 machine. There are no dual P4's - the chip just doesn't support multiprocessing.
8 slots times 1 gig sticks. certainly it can address more than that, there's just no way to add it physically.
slashdot: where everyone yells sarcastic metaphors to themselves to understand the issue
Could Apple close the tech gap?
No.
Could IBM?
Oh yeah.
Am I the only one who's noticed that only the mobo, BIOS and firewire are Apple technology and everything else is purchased/licensed? I'm not berating Apple for this, but it's an IBM processor with JEDEC memory, USB/PCI/AGP (from Intel!) and, IIRC, an AMD hypertransport bus. This is by no means the culmination of "Apple Technology." (The Newton may have had that distinction) Good marketing, good engineering, overall a good job but nothing that stunning that originated in Steve's back yard.
I've been on slashdot so long I'm starting to get out of touch with the cool stuff if it ain't on slashdot.
Summary: It not only beats up the P4 and Xeon, it takes their lunch money as well.
It did even better at DNA matching: "Testing BLAST with common searches using a word size of more than 11, the Power Mac G5 far outperformed the Pentium 4-based system and the dual Xeon-based system, and nearly five times faster at the long word length of 40."
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
Sun Blade 2000
The Single 900MHz is 7,595
The Single 1.2GHz is 9,995
The DUAL 1.2GHZ is 13,995 (whoops off by 7.5%)
What about Dual 2.0GHz don't you understand? They may not have been in the same market before now. However, that will soon change (there is your clue). As far as the 106 CPU Version Cluster the XServes the same way Sun does it. I said Sun should be scared. They no longer have a lock on the 64bit market.
I guess things never change in your world. Look out someone may be moving your cheese.
i would say it's the "real" or "fast" USB 2.0 since the G4 towers have actually had (fast) USB 2.0 for a few months now (just not enabled by default in 10.2).
overall these look pretty nice.... guess they will be selling maybe 3 G4 towers till these come out in August... unless there is a mad sale.....
Intel should be penalized because they have better compilers?
Suppose you are like me and run Linux on your Intel boxes. What results are you going to get? The gcc results, that's what.
door comes right off quicktime VR here
To be fari, he did add in a digital sound system and a second 23 inch apple monitor.
Mod point free since 2001
It looks more like an electic razor to me.
Unfortunately, it looks like they've abandoned the easy-access pull-down door that let you add ram and add-on cards with ease.
From the Apple web site:
In other words, they didn't just keep it, they improved it.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
They are ? Are you sure?
Why do you suppose Apple has been pitching to the home and graphics communities for so long ? It's because neither cares for Wintel and both can tolerate less-than-spectacular performance to varying degrees. Apple has lacked the resources to attack the enterprise market, and their hardware didn't measure up to the engineering/scientific market sufficiently to compete effectively with Wintel. Neither is the case now.
While I'm not going to jump the gun and suggest that this is It, I do believe we're seeing the first hint of a long-overdue revitalization of the Macintosh product line. If IBM is indeed able to go to 3GHz in 12 months and Apple can produce compelling hardware with the PPC970 and its descendants (both of which seem reasonable at the moment), we might be looking at the beginning of a trend towards the enterprise market.
As for CATIA and Pro/E, if the customers demand it, Dassault and Parametric Technologies will eventually get on board. Both have their primary foundation in Unix hardware and neither will have a difficult time making an X-windows port. Ask Mathworks, Inc. Why do you suppose Apple put out X11? To appeal to Linux geeks?(yes, but only in part)
Sun should indeed be worried about now, especially considering that there's no reason on earth for Apple to neglect its server and laptop lines with this new chip. Add in the overwhelming presence of Microsoft-based server products and you have a hard time seeing where Sun fits in the long term.
Gee, why could that be?
Perhaps because there is no such thing as a Dual-CPU Pentium 4. Just a hunch.
Double those bottom numbers from the P4 and it handily beats the Dual-G5...
And multiply the numbers from a TRS-80 Model 4 by 10,000 or so and it absolutely wipes the floor with the Dual G5. Your point being?
A couple things:
Yours only has 1 flat panel instead of two-- add another $2205. Also, you'll be unable to hook both DVI monitors up via the Radeon 9800-- you'll need to get a slower PCI video card to hook the other up.
Yours doesn't have a 3 year support contract, does it?
Also, the Apple you could get much more cheaply if you were to use third party RAM. Vendor RAM is always expensive.
Finally, as to "2 much faster machines"-- the dual 2GHz PPC G5 is 41% faster in SPECfp_rate_base2000 than a dual 3.06GHz Xeon, which IMO is the most important SPEC benchmark. It's faster in all the others, too, except single processor integer performance.
Let me think-- I could pay $12k and get two of the nicest LCD panels available and the fastest dual processor workstation available in the world made by a vendor with great fabrication quality and customer support. Or I could spend $9k to get two good (but not as nice as the Apple) LCD panels and machines that are only 71% of the speed from a no-name vendor. I think I'd pick Apple.
Actually IBM is selling them for alot cheaper then Motorolla was selling their overpriced G4's. I personally believe they overcharged Apple because they had a monopoly on the CPU's for so long.
:-(
Anyway lets wait and see. I assume with integrated bluetooth and pci-x bus it isn't going to be cheap. But a 3.2 ghz pIV are not cheap either.
The cpu itself is what $500 ?? If you can afford Maya or your a professional artist or engineer then you could probably afford this. I wish I could
My guess is the 1.6 ghz versions will be affordable like the $1599 867 mhz ones today.
I read online about a guy who tried to build a top pIV with bluetooth, dvd, firewire, gig ethernet, etc, and it become more expensive then the equilivant mac.
I kind of agree with you on desktops but I am hoping for the best.
Laptops its a different matter. Powerpc processors use something like %20 of power then a pentiumIII-M. I hope to go to a university in 2004 while I am in community college now. Anway if my university has wireless acess my choice of a laptob is a no brainer. Apple laptops last for years and do not brake down as much as pc ones. Especially IBM's or Dell's.
http://saveie6.com/
Spot on!
Anyone remember the Digital Multia aka "Universal Desktop Box" powered by Alpha CPU's?
They weren't all that powerful (had a lower cost version of the Alpha CPU - the 21164PC with watered down FPU and such) or popular, but they were out there long before Apple had any 64-bit dreams.
Show us a dual-processor Opteron/Itanium system from a major computer manufacturer and we'll be happy to benchmark them for you...
You mean like HP or Dell? Yeah, I can see why it would be hard to find those, eh?
What's your damage, Heather?
Safari 1.0 is now available through Apple's software update.
The new version seems noticibly faster and has no bug button, but there is still a "Report Bugs To Apple" option under the Safari menu.
Integrate Keynote and LaTeX
Hey, even my HP-48 has a 64 bit ADD instruction. (It's executed in microcode, though, the Saturn processor has just a 4-bit adder, it seems.)
Apple is lying, very egregiously. If you go to veritest.com and download the report, it gives these numbers:
specint_base2000
G5: 800
P4: 889
Xeon: 836
specfp_base2000
G5: 840
P4: 693
Xeon: 646
So, the G5 is the slowest in integer but fastest by quite a bit in FP. But wait: these tests were done using gcc, which nobody in the Intel world would actually use to compile code that needs to run fast. At specbench.org, I see for the P4, using Intel's compiler (hey, gcc is now Apple's compiler, right?)
specint_base2000: 1164
specfp_base2000: 1200
Admittedly, this just proves that gcc sucks, but that's all you get from Apple. Nothing has changed, Intel is still winning and Apple is still lying about it.
...wearing a skin-tight topless leather jumpsuit, with cutaway buttocks and transparent crotch panel.
Because the Mac is cheaper... go to dell.com and configure a dual Xeon 3.06 with a DVD burner and the same vidcard/RAM...
Guess what, the Mac is over 1k cheaper! That's why... better performance, and a cheaper price...
_CMK
Bad spellers of the world untie!
Exercise for the reader. Go and examine the SpecInt scores. Then try to restate that there isn't a very high correlation between MHz and SpecInt score. It isn't the same for every processors, but generally faster wins.
Many core loops fit within on chip caches where the speed diffferences get substantial traction. Now that isn't ALL core loops. And not ALL data sets. There is enough truth there to say that MHz is a fuzzy measurement. You cannot say that it doesn't mean everything or nothing. It is indicative, with proper discretion and "error bars", of performance.
To say it is not is equally as goofy as to say it is.
steve jobs' keynote address is now available as a quicktime stream here: http://stream.apple.akadns.net/
The ATI 9800 Pro is a $300 add-on option.
I tried every decent and legal way I could think of to resolve the issue w/the business before I rented the chicken suit
The SPEC benchmark programs that Apple ran were all compiled by GCC 3.3 -- the benchmarks on the SPEC website are different because they use different compilers. Chill out. :^)
Slashdot's first reaction to VMware
The veritest SPECfp test is flawed. As described
on page 27 of their report, they use gcc -O3
-march=pentium4 -mfpmath=sse . As documented
in the Pentium 4 optimization manual, scalar
SSE/SSE2 math is slower than the plain old
387 math on the Pentium 4. Specifically,
the 387 math can execute one FP addition per
cycle, whereas SSE2 executes one scalar FP
addition every two cycles.
Bottom line: the fp numbers are totally bogus.
They are either a bunch of idiots, or they
are deliberately slowing down the Pentium 4.
Actually, HyperTransport was co-developed by Apple, AMD, and a few other companies. It is not an AMD technology, and Apple had a significant role in its design.
That said, the computer certainly isn't -all- Apple technology, but it is more Apple Technology than your average Dell is Dell Technology, HP is HP technology, and so on.
Well, Photoshop, for one thing...yes, Macs are still used for graphics, dontchaknow.
Try editing CMYK graphics at 600 or 1200 dpi for high-end print work sometime. With layers. And masks (which are essentially added layers). Running filters. The whole she-bang.
Such a file can easily get into hundreds of megabytes in size, and Photoshop generally needs 2x to 3x as much RAM as the actual file size to efficiently work; even then it starts to bog down at those file sizes.
My dual G4/450 with 1.5 GB RAM and Radeon 9000 already gags on that enough so that it's a hassle when I have to design and edit that kind of stuff. Believe me, I'm going to be first in line as soon as I scrape together the $2500 or so for a new G5 system with added RAM (the more RAM, the merrier -- Photoshop is VERY hungry for RAM).
Not to mention video editing and 3D, both of which are markets that the Mac has generally been strong (if not dominant) in for some time.
I might add that you could ask the same question about P4-based PCs. Who needs that kind of firepower? Not many (mainstream) people, really -- aside from perhaps gamers. The vast majority of users just do e-mail, web surfing and word processing, maybe a little photo editing. A P2 or P3 running Linux or an older version of Windows would be more than enough in those cases. Hell, even an old Pentium with a smallish Linux installation would be enough in many cases.
OTOH if you give users and developers the added power of new processors and mainboards (strange that HyperTransport hasn't gotten much mention here), people will find a way of using it. One example: Apple's predicted that video editing will be the next mainstream computing revolution, like desktop publishing was twenty years ago. If you think about it, they're probably right.
Most newer computers can easily handle basic video editing now; the question is just how to make it easier for Joe Sixpack to edit his family videos (and maybe make Junior a budding David Lynch).
Cheers,
Ethelred
Everyone wants to be Ethelred. Even I want to be Ethelred.
Actually, yes you can. You can buy both Itanium machines (http://www.hp.com/workstations/itanium/index.html for example) and you can get the OS, at least I can download it using an MSDN subscription (I could downloaded the beta about 7 months ago, iirc).
I just went to Dell's site and configured a dual-processor 3.02GHz Xenon with 240 Gigs of 7200RMP IDE, disk, DVD-RW, and a Gig of RAM. Cost: $4,351
I went to Apple's site and configured dual-processor 2GHz G5 with 250 Gigs of 7200RMP IDE disk, DVD-RW, anda Gig of RAM. Cost: $3,374
So, let's see, the Mac is 10-25% faster, and costs 30% less.
If you care about bang for the buck, you should buy a Mac. (Of course, after replacing all your software, you'd be behind. See if they'll let you switch platforms on the next upgrade cycle.)
My list isn't going to be exhaustive but should provide some pointers:
Software:
1- Nicer Interface. Admit that Aqua looks much better than Luna.
2- Unix-based. You can run pretty much any Unix software on OS X with X11.
3- Stability. I have to say WinXP and OS X are pretty much similar there, but better than other Windows versions.
4- The Apple iApps. Nothing beats iTunes, iMovie, iPhoto, and iDVD.
5- Ease of install and software update/upgrade. Much easier to install OS X than Windows, software updates are much more reliable (and rarer) than MS. Updating to a new OS version or reinstalling if necessary is painless, whereas XP almost forces you to reformat.
6- Security. Most security-conscious tools and applications in OS X are open-source and/or Unix-based, and as we all know security failures are rarer for those, and patching is faster and more reliable.
7- You don't support Microsoft unless...
8- You can still run a recent version of Office if you need to, OpenOffice or Appleworks work well otherwise.
Hardware:
1- Although Apple sometimes is late to adopt certain standards (USB and USB 2 are examples), they are still the only manufacturer to implement firewire across their entire product line, and have firewire 800 on all high-end machines, as well as (now) serial ATA.
2- They're nicer to look at, and STILL easier to work inside than most PCs I've seen (exception for the iBooks, they're an horror to work in).
3- They're very robust, mostly apply to the laptops but still an important factor for some.
4- You just KNOW it's all gonna work together.
Note that I like PCs too, not just Macs, but you mostly asked for the Mac's strong points, so I'm not gonna be PC's advocates now.
If he explores all forms and substances Straight homeward to their symbol-essences; He shall not die.
Except that the Octane's bus is theoretically much, much faster. It has an end-to-end point speed of only about 3 and half GB/sec, but it can connect any of the individual systems to each other simultaneously at full speed; the memory can talk to the processor while the processor writes to the disk subsystem while the video card...and none of it ever has a collision and can operate at Crossbar's full point-to-point speed without effect from other subsystems.
Not only that, but as you add processor modules(which if I remember right, have memory on them?), you add Crossbar bus bandwidth; adding modules adds extra Crossbar channels(I think. It's been a long time since that technology briefing).
It's a quad-processor-capable system- so I don't think you are giving it a very fair shake; on a 4-processor system, I think each processor would have about +14GB/sec access to anything in the system(including memory), which is just a few GB shy of double the G5 which can only manage 8GB/sec for access to main memory. Oh, and let me remind you Crossbar is 5-6 years old...
Thanks, but if I want to push around multi-gigabyte datasets, I'll take the Octane. I find Hypertransport, at only 16 bits wide, destinctly unimpressive...
Please help metamoderate.
Apple is still selling the OS 9 bootable G4s. Look under the "Apple Products" sidebar on the store's front page.
Single 1.25GHz for $1299, dualies for $1599.
~Philly
According to Apple's web site, they tested their machine against two Dell Intel boxes (Dell Dimension 8300 (P4) and Dell Precision 650 (Dual Xeon)) running Red Hat Linux 9.0 Professional (at Apple's request).
.PDF format) including all hardware and software used is available from Veritest's web site.
Intel states that Red Hat Linux 9.0 Professional is one of the Linux OS's currently available that "include optimizations for HT Technology and are currently eligible to carry the Intel® Pentium® 4 Processor with HT Technology logo".
Apple commissioned the benchmark from a company called Veritest. The full report (in
This could make Intel take notice! Of course, this benchmark comes on the same day that Intel announces the 3.2GHz Pentium IV (and Xeon) processors. Go figure!
Of the published data on both (in SPEC processor benchmarks), Apple's Power Mac G5 generated a SPECfp_base2000 score of 840 and SPECint_base2000 score of 800, while Intel claims that their new 3.2 GHz processors get a SPECfp_base2000 score of 1252 and a SPECint_base2000 score of 1221.
And the SPIN goes on!
-Joe
If we're all god's children, what's so special about Jesus? - Jimmy Carr
For students and/or educators (personal purchases), the Powermac G5 line goes like so in prices:
1.6GHz - $1,899
1.8GHz - $2,299
Dual 2GHz - $2,849
The discounts are consistent with previous Apple academic discounts. These are the same configurations as the corresponding non-educational priced retail systems:
1.6GHz - $1,999
1.8GHz - $2,399
Dual 2GHz - $2,999
-Joe
If we're all god's children, what's so special about Jesus? - Jimmy Carr
First off, GCC is probably better optimized for x86 then it is for the PPC 970 by virtue of the fact that it's been running on x86 for so much longer. So, even using the same compiler, the field is still tilted in the direction of x86.
Second, the test is of the speed of the processors, not the quality of the optimizing compilers for them.
Third, the "fastest" comment was made with respect to the dual-processor configurations. The numbers you site are for the single-processor version.
Yes, in single-processor land Apple lost in intspec by about 10%, but won in floating-point land by about 30%. This is using a compiler that is better optimized for the competitor. And they still came out ahead.
In dual-processor land they came out ~10% ahead in integer land and over 40% ahead in floating-point land. A tremendous difference.
The real-world tests they performed seemed to back up these results with Photoshop, Mathematica and a few other programs running an average of 2x faster on the PPC 970.
This may sound incredible, but it is just a matter of bandwidth, and the G5 has plenty of it.
The dual-processors have completely independant busses, a 1Ghz FSB, 400Mhz 128-bit DDR memory, two independant floating-point units and two independant integer units. The PPC970 is capable handling over 120 in-flight instructions, that is, instructions which can be worked on and processed in parallel. In P4-land only a few dozen instructions are can potentially be run in parallel.
Do you really think that Apple would hire a company like VeriTest to verify their results and then lie about them? If they didn't actually have better spec scores they just wouldn't have used those tests...
Justin Dubs
Combo Drive (CD-RW/DVD-ROM) [Subtract $200]
Timeo idiotikOS et dona ferentes
The latching system is still there. You know, the one thats been in every single G3, G4 and G5 tower case......
/. my bad :)
Have a look on the apple site before posting. Oh, wait, it's
Quote: Except that the Octane's bus is theoretically much, much faster. It has an end-to-end point speed of only about 3 and half GB/sec, but it can connect any of the individual systems to each other simultaneously at full speed Uh, for those of you on the short bus, Apple's new memory chip is also point-to-point. From the G5 (system, not chip) white paper: Advanced System Controller A new system controller is central to the overall performance of the Power Mac G5. This revolutionary application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC)â"one of the industryâ(TM)s fastestâ"is built using the same state-of-the-art IBM 130-nanometer process technology as the PowerPC G5 processor. A superefficient point-to-point architecture rovides each primary subsystem with dedicated throughput to main memory, so massive amounts of data can traverse the system without contention for bandwidth. In contrast, subsystems that share a bus, as on other PCs, must deal with time-consuming arbitration while they negotiate for access and bandwidth across a common data path.
Stand back. I've got a brain and I'm not afraid to use it.
I can configure that -- by maxing out every option in ways that are ridiculous. Unless you want a desktop, a gaming machine and a rackmount server all in one box.
That $13,730.90 pricetag would include an iPod (not part of the system, merely offered for sale along with it), *two* 23-inch flat panel displays, 802.11g WAP (also not part of the system proper), the Raden 9800 Pro upgrade, maxed out disk and memory, 802.11g and Bluetooth, Fibre Channel, 5.1 speakers and cables, and other non-hardware extras like extended warrantee and .Mac.
Oh, and a deletable 56k modem. But that might actually be useful for faxing, I suppose... although anyone who needs or can affod such a box almost certainly already has a fax machine if they need one.
Get real. The sole purpose in configuring a machine such as this is to jack up the price to create/exagerate what you perceive is a lack of value-for-money in the Apple line.
Perhaps there is something to the criticism; perhaps not. But by making your point this way, you shoot yourself in the foot. So you work for SCO, perchance?
Congratulations to Apple. They are finally moving ahead. But is it enough to conter AMD and Intel juggenauts?
- 840------800- --2000---764------756
/ res2002q3/ cpu2000-20020827-01593.htmlr es2002q3/ cpu2000-20020827-01594.html
Let's see MHz per MHz (you'll see below why it's too early to stop believing in MHz myth, at least with regards to Apple):
--------MHz----SPECfp---SPECint
G5------2000--
Opteron-1800---1095-----1122
P4A--
P4 SPECint:
http://www.spec.org/osg/cpu2000/results
P4 SPECfp:
http://www.spec.org/osg/cpu2000/results/
Opteron (SPEC.ORG)
(P4A is an old modification, the 3.2 GHz P4C has some modifications that should make it faster on the per MHz basis)
We see that while G5 is looking quite good compared to P4 at THE SAME MHZ, it looses out completely to Opteron. No wonder because G% is a cut-down (1/2 exactly) version of POWER4 chip. An excellent chip when it came out in 2001, but now IBM is readying POWER5 with much improved performance.
Anyway it's a great day for Apple. Compared to G4, the new processor is almost twice as fast (of course, for the applications that can use its power). But we'll be waiting for G6 to see if they can beat Intel/AMD on MHz per MHz basis.
Dude, ain't no such thing as a dual processor P4. They. Don't. Exist.
I am a believer of momentum and curves.
After looking at these machines, the prices, and available configurations, it seems to me that the middle configuration is the winner.
The low end one does not have PCI-X, and at $2000, it's pretty pricey, though you could remove the superdrive, modem, and load it up with cheap 3rd party RAM (only up to 4 gig tho). Does not seem to be competitively priced with Wintel.
The dual 2 GHz seems nice for the price, but you can't get less than 512 megs of RAM, or 160 gig HD, to save yourself a few bucks that you don't need to spend. So if you're frugal, Apple gets that little "dig" into you for at least a few hundred anyway. WHY do they do this. Are they just anal control freaks? Some people like to do all they can to minimize PORK items from a purchase, so why won't Apple throw us a friggin bone here?
But the middle-system is ok, because you can unload some of that way-overpriced Apple RAM, the combo drive, the modem, and get it down to around $2200, which is only slightly more expensive than the overpriced bottom model, + PCI-X and no RAM limit (and a trivially faster CPU, which you're going to upgrade in 3 years anyway).
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The Pentium 4 is SPECIFICALLY designed to not be able to be put in a multi processor solution. If you can find me a P4 system with more than one processor that isn't a garage hack, I'll eat my hat.
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As noted earlier, both systems used GCC 3.3. That is where most of the loss can be attributed.
As for the question about HyperThreading. On a SPEC int or fp run, the test is single threaded. HyperThreading in this case only serves to help with the OS overhead a bit.
In the case of a SPEC rate run, hyperthreading actually hurts performance. This is due to the fact that to fully load down the system, a copy of SPEC is run for each processor the system sees (in the case of a Dual Xeon with HT, 4). Considering SPEC int and fp tests use all the available units of the respective type, HT would be unable to do anything useful as a single thread would be using all the particular units and the second thread on the processor gets stalled.
So, if you disable HT and run only 2 copies of SPEC for a rate run, the overall throughput is greater because the threads complete faster since they aren't stalling.
kc8apf
"Everything about the Mac shines, except software tittles available,"
um, other than games and high end architectural/engineering apps, what's the mac lack? (and there are a lot more games on the mac than there used to be.)
Audio? nope, Logic Audio, Cubase, Pro Tools, Reaktor, Max/MSP, Reason, Melodyne, Digital Performer, Bias Peak, and even an open source smalltalk styled programing environment called Supercollider
Video? nope, Final Cut Pro, iMovie, Shake, etc.
Design? nope, Photoshop, InDesign, Quark, Illustrator, etc.
Emacs? built in.
Not to mention 10.3's new features (up to date with FreeBSD 5.0, X-11 windowing system, etc.) make it relatively easy to port from linux/unix to OS X.
The mac has thousands of apps. Lots of really, really solid ones. Of course there is less software than in the windows world, but that's going to be the case unless Apple gets another 30% of marketshare at least.
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As someone who uses and develops bioinformatics software for a living I should point out that BLAST is not a great benchmark in this case. The performance graphs Apple is showing are very misleading. The longer word lengths are rarely used because they are very insensitive. More usually a word length of 14 down to 7 would be used for nucleotide searches and at those word lengths the difference in performance is nothing like as marked.
Also, BLAST is IO bound rather than CPU bound so what the graphs are showing is that BLAST needs a lot of memory and a 64 bit processor is a significant advantage in this case. This is why SGI, SUN and Alpha systems are popular for running BLAST as services. You really need gigabytes of RAM especially for DNA searches. I expect a comparison of BLASTp (protein search) would be nothing like as impressive which is why Apple chose BLASTn.
Now, this is not to dismiss the performance in any way, the new Apples look very quick and I am surely not the only one who is very interested in getting one.
Actually, the performance of HMMer is more telling, this is a CPU bound application and clearly AltiVec is doing some good, I wonder if the x86 version is as optimised though?
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Now hot grits, I know that was a joke, but seriously, what can one get in a 2 processor opteron system for USD 3K? One place a checked wanted about $750 for each Opteron 242. That does not leave much of a budget left.
Before people jump on me about comparing a Linux server to a Mac, this is really what I want to buy, a cheap (err, relatively speaking) 64bit box with at least 6G of memory. If it has to come with pretty box and a religon (well, true in both cases I suppose).
The opterons are a bit faster, at least at the top end, but the 970s seem ok. And the Macs are much easier to buy for a University (as in one phone call, compared to chasing down 3 quotes and filling out extra paperwork).
So here is a partial answer to my own question. Looking at one vendor (www.einux.com) then a server with twin opteron 240 (1.4GHz, right?) and 512M memory (for comparison), 120 G disk, prices out at $2500 w/o OS. So the extra $500 is not so bad considering what you get.
My back of the envelope calculations suggest the fastest 970 (2GHz) is about the same speed as the slowest opteron (that I quoted above). Namely, take the Linux gcc specint 2000 1045. Scale down by 0.77 to get a number for 1.4 GHz of 811.
Then of course you have to spend about the same amount on RAM. Sigh.