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Apple's G5 Speeds Challenged
An anonymous reader was the first of a seemingly infinite stream of people to submit a URL to an argument that makes the case that the G5 isn't quite what Apple wants you to think of it. The evidence? Apple's own press material. Worth a read.
While the methods Apple used may not have been in the best of intentions and possibly missleading, this just underscores the greater difficulties of benchmarking across platforms, specifically processor architectures. The playing field will never really be level using SPEC. The only way to truly determine which machines are "faster" is at the application level, where real work is done.
Apple is always a little sketchy when it comes to speed measurements. I can't count how many questionable run-offs Steve Jobs has demonstrated during his keynotes.
They're always a little suspect. I love Apple as much as anyone, but their talk of the megahertz myth and the amazing clock cycle of the G4/G5 and the biased tests they use are starting to sound a little shrill. Apple needs to admit that their machines aren't as fast as the fastest Intel has to offer. They're much cleaner and much more elegant, though, and that's why they're in the market. That's what they should stress, since it actually attracts customers -- rather than THE NEED FOR SPEED.
Lets hope we can look at some independent tests in the coming days and see which unit is really value for money, because if Dell's benchmarks are correct their unit is 20-30% faster and only 2/3rds the price.
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He had me thinking he was insightful and thoughtful until the end where he replies to all of his hate mail individually. Woulda made his point better if he just left it alone.
slashdot: where everyone yells sarcastic metaphors to themselves to understand the issue
YOUR HOME TOWN (AP) -- You were not "the most handsome boy in school," contrary to what your mother may have said at the time, officials today announced.
... no shiat! Apple marketing spins things; Dell marketing spins things ... everyone spins. Don't take it so seriously.
"Mothers always say things like that to their gangly, awkward teenage children," one official said on condition of anonymity.
----
Point is
Mindy: "Well...desserts aren't always right." Homer: "But they're so sweet!"
Anti-Apple Troll vs. Apple Troll
How terribly interesting.... o_O
Well, it certainly isn't the first time that a company has used a benchmark to make a product look better than it is, and it certainly won't be the last time. I think what we should all learn from this is as follows. Don't worry about Statistics, Benchmarks, or any Media Hype. Just go to the store, buy whatever kind of computer you want that floats ur boat, Be it a Mac, Linux Box, Windoze Box, or god forbid, a compaq. Set it up, get broadband internet, and read lots of Slashdot and play Starcraft.
I have no regrets, this is the only path.
My whole life has been "UNLIMITED BLADE WORKS"
I mean computers are so fast that there's very little that I might want to do at a consumer level that makes a difference. Most applications are responsive on my ancient 500MHz Pentium 3.
The only things that really need speed are things like 3d rendering, video compression and compiling large appllications. 3D rendering in games is influenced by the speed of the graphics card a lot more than the speed of the CPU, so we're left with the long slow scenes. Personally, it makes very little difference to me if a rendering a scene or compressing a video takes 30 minutes rather than 40. If I can kill 30 minutes, I can kill another 10 quite easily.
In the past, I'd have been able to tell you whether I was using a 20MHz or a 25Mhz 386 just by using it. I can hardly detect the difference between a 1.5GHz machine and a 3.0GHz machine without using a benchmark.
In the end, it's just numbers.
> They're giving us a desktop UNIX running on 64-bit hardware, what else can you ask for? sheesh
Who wants 64-bit for 64-bit's sake? I want fast, cheap computation. I'd be happy with an 8-bit computer if it gave sufficient bang for the buck.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
And what's more, when you start running programs that use more than 2GB of data, the 64-bit machine is going to beat the pants off the 32-bit one, since the 32-bit machine (i.e. intel) is going to have to resort to slow and hacky solutions such as segments and paging. The intel may me "faster" but only as long as 32-bit are enough for you. The days of 32-bit machines are numbered, just as they were for 16-bit machines when 32-bit machines started to appear.
Stick Men
Both Apple and Dell are guilty of using misleading prices.
So are Ford, Chrysler, Dodge, Microsoft, Taco Bell, Comcast, Best Buy...
Sorry, I have to go to work at some point, and I don't have time to list EVERY OTHER COMPANY IN THE WORLD. That is the stupidest comment ever, and shows that this whole article shouldn't be taken seriously.
I agree. This all smacks of desperation on Apple's part.
Hmmm.
Does it make any difference? What he writes about makes sense! The numbers are out in the open. He is simply presenting it in a readable fashion...
Don't Panic
I guess I fail to see how pricing something at $2999 vs $3000 is absolutely ridiculous. Maybe its just me, but when i'm looking at a $3000 system, a single dollar will not sway me one way or the other. Americans should be used to this... bottled soda and water are typically $0.99 and for some unknown (to the general public at least) reason, gas is sold with a price having 10ths of cents.
Apple's been selling computers far longer than Sony. In this arena, Sony are trying to be the new Apple.
> He MAY have valid points but his credibility is zero.
That claim really doesn't make a heck of a lot of sense.
If his points "MAY" be valid, then is credibility is not zero.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Finally, I'm sure the real world testing, once available, will be of more interest to most people than any of these silly lab tests.
If you're talking about this (section entitled "Apple Copies Ideas From Microsoft") then you'll find that he admits that Microsoft copies stuff from Apple, but that Apple have copied things from Microsoft too. Which wouldn't seem a too unreasonable claim.
If you're going to claim someone is a troll, the least you could do is give us an example which isn't guaranteed to mislead us.
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First nVidia, now this... how am I supposed to go bankrupt buying more computing power than I could ever hope to use?
seriously... so now we might think that in real world usage, the G5 is maybe just a little faster than the x86 competition instead of a S*** load faster. Considering the performance point of Apple's previous offerings, I'm not exactly dissapointed
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Are you going to deny that Apple cheated at the benchmarks by disabling various optimizations on the competition? Are you going to deny that most software uses integer math, as one "software coder" clearly did (hint: i write a lot of software, and integer math practically always dominates)?
The guy may, or may not be a troll. However, the sheer amount hate mail, and the level of it, was stunning. What kind of people write stuff like that? Very few of them even attempted to address the guys points, and those that did made a hash job of it (nobody uses int math? wtf?).
The fact is that anybody outside the Mac community, having read that essay, is going to come away with a bad impression of said community. Nobody deserves to get hate mail like that for pointing out the other side of the statistics.
How does having one "stupid" comment show taht the article should not be taken seriously? To me the article makes sense. The numbers are in the open. If you dont trust the article, do your own research, and you would come to the same conclusion!
Don't Panic
Trolls, by definition, don't make valid points. Just because he dares to disagree with Mac fanatics doesn't make him a troll - there has to be a more compelling reasoning behind that statement if it's to stick.
There may well be aspects of MacOS X that Apple copied from the Windows GUI. Gods know, it certainly went the other way. But if he substantiated his case, then he's still not a troll.
Of course, calling someone a troll is easier than actually refuting his arguments; but that won't really make your point well, either. The way to refute the guy's "maybe-valid" points is to reason through them logically.
!#@%*)anks for hanging up the phone, dear.
Benchmarks aren't what sells apples and price certianly isn't the drawing point. People use macs because they like macs. Hence why the mac market doesn't increase that much, they're too pricey and don't act like a PC. Granted as a user who uses windows, linux, and Mac OS, and all the subvarients between I can tell you that there are perks to all the operating systems. But as far as hardware goes x86 wins hands down.
Why is x86 better than apple? Simple, they're more tweakable, upgradeable, provide more selections, and are used by more people. Apple makes up for the "not used by many people" by making every mac an exact clone of another. Hence why when you get a file for a mac to be installed you just drop a binary in, every mac is the same (to an extent), whereas every PC is not, but the components are the same some just perform better than others.
Apple's prices are outrageous, and let me get into it a little more. A first time computer buyer is wary of a computer. They don't want to invest a whole lot of money in something they don't know if they're going to be able to use. But for $600 they can have a pretty decent machine that plays most every x86 game out there and runs most every x86 OS out there with little or no trouble. For $600 you might be able to score an old iMac. That old iMac MIGHT be able to run Mac OS 10.2, but it's going to be hella slow and not be able to do half the things the same priced PC will be able to do.
People who buy computers are looking for the most they can get with the least amount of money. Most people's computers are still beige. Most peoples computers have all the same applications. And Most people rely on somoene other than themselves for computer help, hence more PC's more help available.
I like OS X (especially with a two button mouse). I like linux (especially when everything works right). And I like windows (especially when XP loads correctly and doesn't crash and doesn't require me to kill processes in the task manager all the time to get some of my memory back).
All of these systems have their perks and they all have a place in the market, just they all want more of a place in the market, hence the competition. If Apple wanted to procreate so much they'd come up with a bargain computer other than the eMac or iMac. Something that has the ability to be upgraded (even if the user never wants to) and has the ability to run popular programs, hence MS, hey MS if I buy a copy of Word I want to be able to install it on either my PC or my Mac, I don't want to have to buy two different copies.
Anyways, these computers will be blasted out of the water in no time when Intel and AMD roll out their 64-bit badboys. Remember the 970 is actually an older chip in comparison to the AMD and Intel varients. Granted x86 isn't exactly new ... but neither were the moto's.
Ignore the "p2p is theft" trolls, they're just uninformed
I really can't understand why the author of this piece takes the SPEC numbers provided by Intel and Dell at face value, rather than investigating them in detail the way he has with Apple's; Those guys have certainly done as much twiddling to perform well on those tests as Apple has.
And I can't understand why there's a problem with using GCC on the intel over ICC. Sure, GCC doesn't produce the fastest code for the x86. But it doesn't produce the fastest code for the PPC, either; For that you'd want to use the IBM compiler.
And the repeated claim that for "most people" integer performance is what matters is somewhat stupid: For the "most people" who are mostly exercising integer performance (i.e for web browsing, emails, word processing), a top-end box like the ones being compared here is overkill. For the people who do need this sort of speed, it's much more likely that there will be a large amount of FP in the mix.
I had a desktop UNIX (Solaris) running on my desktop 64-bit hardware (Sun Blade 100) a couple of years ago.
Yeah, me too. But unlike the Mac, I could not run Office, Photoshop, function as a web server, surf the web, compile code, run bioinformatics searches, do molecular modeling and have wonderful text aliasing all at the same time. Now with OS X, I can do all this and network seemlessly with Wintel and UNIX machines while maintaining my sanity by only having one software library to keep up with and have one system on my desk instead of three. Oh, and when I am on the road (like now on the other side of the country), I can take all of this with me by using a Powerbook.
No other company has been able to give me these tools, and for that.....I have to say, "Thank you Apple Computer".
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But I still fail to understand why. If you don't want a faster computer, then don't buy one. But you're completely wrong that "it's just numbers." Sure, one step up a mountain is only one little step where no one can tell the difference. But then you take another step. And another. Before you know it, you've travelled 10, 100, 1,000 feet. That 40-minute video compression might take 39 minutes on the next step up, then 37, but eventually it will only take 1 minute, or less.
So don't dismiss numbers, especially if you can't see far enough to add them up!
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Believe it or not, some of us want both a desktop UNIX on 64 bit hardware AND legitimate benchmarks. I don't see why one excuses the other.
Listen, Apple made a good product because they needed to stay in business. They didn't do it out of the good of their hearts. And their good product in no way changes the fact that I don't appreciate being lied to by corporations.
Don't get me wrong, this is not the world's biggest lie or corporate misdeed. I don't put much faith in benchmarks anyway, and I wouldn't make my decision between a Mac or a PC based on them (although for others the specs might be more important). But it's still sleazy. And it's very unfair to act like it's "ungrateful" or "trollish" to demand that Apple set up legitimate benchmarking tests.
there is a bit of a bias there. He complains about Apple tweaking its benchmarks. I have no problem with that. Companies should get blasted for running bogus benchmarks. But then he compares Apple's results to Dell's and AMD's without questioning their tweaks.
Perhaps what he meant to say is: "If we are going to use bogus benchmarks, let's compare them to the bogus ones from the competition."
I thought everyone copied from Xerox.
There is only one rule --- WIN.
I have worked for six different computer companies over the years. All they ever wanted to do was win ONE test. This is so the literature and marketing droids could focus on that test showing that we had the faster computer in the known universe.
At one place there was a choice. We could have a C compiler that either ran the customers work faster OR gave better spec marks. I don't have to tell you which one management picked.
The results are never that useful. Each manufacturer runs their soon-to-be-released hardware and software against the competition's already released product. It is always unfair. Everyone in the industry knows that and no one really cares.
Apple now has a machine that stands up to the best for performance. Recognize that and move on. Because next month someone else will have another machine that gives "better" numbers. The only thing any of us care about is -- is it fast enough for what I want to do?
I think it's fair to say pretty much every single chip maker does whatever they possibly can to skew their results. It's what happens when we let the marketing droids control corporate policy and direction.
I think it's pretty obvious Apple did that here, but I'll still use my Mac's anyway. No, I am not a Mac zealot who thinks that Intel or Gates, or whoever it is that day is the devil. I have a PC too. I enjoy building them. I just use my Mac for most things because I'm more comfortable with it. Bad marketing won't turn me off from a product - because then I'd never buy anything! Which actually might be a good thing....
In a row???
After reading the article, I'm left with the impression that Apple very purposely and cynically lied to its users and its potential customers. The various tweaks and hobbles (disabling SSE2 !?!) they added to the systems, then the misrepresentation of the resulting data defies any kind of good-faith explanation.
Why can't Mac users just enjoy using their computers without trotting out these bogus benchmarks?
Actually.... He has a good point. People think that things are cheaper if they see a lower number in it. IE something for $1.99 will sell better than something for $2.00. It is because they think they are getting something for cheaper.
Companies have been doing this for years and its been working flawlessly.
Just wait and see if Apple releases benchmark numbers to spec.org. There, they would have to pull out all stops (not use GCC, etc.) to get as high a number as they possibly can.
Considering the IBM pSeries benchmarks already trounce the P4 and Xeon using 1.7GHz POWER4 CPUs, it would be interesting to see how the G5 does with its smaller cache but at 2GHz (don't forget the 1GHz bus, either).
I think we would find the benchmarks at Apple.com were off, but probably not by much. Another thing that is not denyable is that the G5 scaled to two CPUs much much better than the Xeon (look at the rate numbers--this is unsuprising given the POWER4 heritage).
Healthcare article at Kuro5hin
Say after me: there is more to a computer's speed than the CPU's speed.
This 2ghz G5 may only be as fast as an Athlon XP 2800+, but it has got a ONE GHZ FRONT SIDE BUS (!!!) man.
How long has it been since computers last used x2 multipliers: the likes of the DX66, DX4 100, and Pentium 133mhz.
So while the CPU may be a tad slower than the very top AMD & Intel chips (which cost insane amounts of money and nobody much buys for good reason), the significant front side bus advantage will give overall better system speed.
Of course MacOSX is slow and bloated, but so too is Windows XP.
Probably the Gensi Pegosis and Castle Iyonix are the snappiest computers for everyday computer use - yet they both use 600mhz CPUs.
A computer's usage speed is dependent on the following in this order:
*software efficiency (by far the most important)
*front side bus speed / ram bandwidth
*hard drive speed and transfer bandwidth
*CPU (least important)
but that list has been reversed in popular perception.
Hence why billions is spend on making CPUs more efficent and faster every year, while front side bus speeds increase at a crawl and software takes a full 100x more resorces to do the exact same thing it did a mere decade ago.
Our priorities and perceptions are every bit as messed up as Apple's marketing. If modern OSes like WinXP and Linux only used 4x as much resources as Windows 3.1 to run, which is not unreasonable, then we'd get better real-world performance out of a PII 500 than our P4 3000s give us.
First off, yesterday we have the day when all the Mac fanatics go overboard. Hey, I'm one of them and I went overboard. Enthusiasm goes right over the top and reality slowly slips away inside the Reality Distortion Field of the great and mighty Jobs. Yesterday was for the Mac users
Today we get the backlash and debunking. I honestly don't know if it's completely true or not but I'm inclined to believe it. I've grown accustomed to the idea that benchmarks and anything else like them (side by side tests of any kind) can't be trusted so this seems to fit.
The only thing that really makes any difference to me personally is how much faster the G5 is than the G4 it's replacing. The rest of it I just don't care about.
I use a Mac for a lot of reasons and flat out speed isn't one of them. It has to be fast enough obviously but it doesn't have to be the fastest and never has had to be the fastest.
I use a Mac because I have found it to be very stable and a pleasure to work and game on. If the benchmarks were rigged then it's a shame. They didn't need to do it and it wasn't worth the risk of negative press IMO.
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There's a pretty deep irony here. As you note, Al Gore never claimed to have invented the Internet -- but the hysterical right-wing press claimed he did, and repeated the lie so often that people believed it. Similarly, I suspect that Apple's claims are in fact much more honest than the author of the article claims -- but he's clearly hoping that if he's loud and shrill enough, people will believe him.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
A. Benchmarking is a black art, and benchmark results more often than not bear little or no relation to reality (i.e. the actual performance you will get, today, running your particular workload). Talk to anyone who does it for a living and they are the first to admit that.
B. Benchmarks are very rarely impartial. Whoever is footing the not inconsiderable bill for a properly-done benchmark will have a result they want to see, and the benchmarkers can do a lot to make sure they do see it.
C. "Perception is reality" is a well-known saying in marketing. It doesn't actually matter whether the perception is correct. If Joe Sixpack believes he has bought the fastest PC in the world, he will be happy. More so since he most likely has nothing on hand to compare it to.
D. The speed this industry moves at, there will be a faster one along in a month or less, so if you really want something faster, wait for it.
E. All this debating about which is faster is more like masturbating. And "Masturbation, although an inherently pointless way to pass time, is at least enjoyable. Comparing PC performance is equally pointless, but rather less fun. The conventional epithet applied to those who engage in the former to excess is equally applicable to those who persist in the latter."
Its obvious that the new PowerMacs are aimed at early adopters doing things that people have not really caught up with. DVD burners are cheap now. Make your own movie. Play with the iMovie effects plugins. I'd like to see (later) DV/HDTV rendering performance compared on different systems: AFTER the iMovie plugins crowd has a chance to catch up.
Oh, and in case you don't understand where games are going or you never saw "The Matrix" or any other VR sci-fi, convincing virtual reality relies on MASSIVE databases of objects filtering out the things that would get obscured by other objects, and streaming them to a rendering engine/GPU. I could just say CG animated movies, but really we will be playing *in* the CG scene and not just watching it play. I want to see the NEXT game made for the PowerMac.
Also, benchmarks are putting the cart before the horse. A new architecture or platform is a challenge to programmers: Saturate THIS! Imagine as a programmer if you took turns completely exploiting a machine at a time and simply reported the results. If you do a test that is a greatest common denominator of two platforms, you ignore the value of the incompatible feature sets of each respective platform. A real benchmark illustrates the full potential of each compared system, which provides an illustration of their differences. What happens when there isn't really any software to exploit the potentials of either/both of the platforms?
PCs are cheap and fast, but not really that advanced. There isn't much unexplored potential to attract the early adopters and the fatter profit margin supplying their hardware. I understand if you want to get the most for your money, but for some people, money isn't the top criterion.
Consider as a side note that after a year, top end Mac computers only lose half of their market value. So, after a year, you can almost trade-in your old high-end Mac whereas you're stuck with the comparative PC model. What can you get with a $1500/year budget over 5 years? Can you push the envelope on a PC? That's a tough question.
--- Nothing clever here: move along now...
That's true. However, those hundreds of backgrounds tasks are normally asleep. As an example, open up ten different desktop apps, run top or whatever and note that CPU usage is only a few percent. Those apps are blocking in an event loop, and until they receive events the kernel won't allocate them any timeslices.
Because of the way pre-emptive multitasking works however, having a dual CPU machine generally simply gives you more cycles to burn. You could get the same effect by buying a chip that's twice as fast - in fact, performance would be better as you don't have the overhead of the communication between the two CPUs.
So, this is useful if you spend a lot of your time doing very processor intensive things, because adding extra CPUs is generally easier than finding chips double the current speed of what you're using (assuming you're already on the cutting edge).
But, for most desktop users, it wouldn't make any difference, because no matter how many apps they have open, only a few of them will actually be doing any processing at any given time.
The author claims that the P4 is "Faster on integer single-processor tasks, which is what most people use most of the time."
This is patently false. Typically, users run more than one program at a time. At the very least, there's an application, and the operating system. The machine I'm typing this on has 40 processes going, totalling a few hundred threads. Single-porcessor systems may have been king back in 1995, but these days you can typically make excellent use of multiple processors.
I completely understand that Apple has been optimizing gcc, while gcc on a P4 is not very optimized. However, when I see specs, I would prefer to see them using gcc. I run apache, mysql, postfix, cyrus, and jabber. I compiled all of them with gcc. I never used Intel's nifty super optimized compiler. So personally, even though I could theoretically run it faster with Intel's compiler, I won't. So I'm happy to see the gcc specs.
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~Niessner
>Who wants 64-bit for 64-bit's sake? I want fast, cheap computation. I'd be happy with an 8-bit computer if it gave sufficient bang for the buck.
Heck. perhaps you don't wan't to consider a possibility of running out of VIRTUAL address space,perhaps programmer who intends to continue selling their product in next year starts worrying it today. Perhaps the guys who complain that they run out of memory all the time buy it. Or guys who do troublesome hacks to have their program run with more than 2gig of data. 64 bit is convenience for programmers, and it gives performance boost where it counts for apples target market. People don't buy power Mac's primary for 3D shooters, nor office productivity apps nor RTS. Their primary market is image editing, and when your image is over 500MB in size and program wan't to have temporary copies of it and other temporary structures that are function of image size you start up having troubles with 32bit address space. Oh wait you just didn't realize that macs are used to edit something that goes to high resolution PAPER. 64 bit is BIG issue for some people while its not issue for majority, Apples target market happen to be those with big issues related to that.
64bit desktop is just neat, but its the business users that need truckloads of RAM.
BTW: 8 bit computer could store upto 64kb of stuff with address space extension (16bit) normally, so you would be screwed up badly no matter how many THz it would run, the amount of bang doesn't matter if your problem is too large for it to solve, for instance edit 300*400*8 sized image, or compile linux sources or... Oh wait even if it would be the fastest computer on planed doing stuff that fits in the 64kb area it would suck on things that don't. And there are businesses which have similar problems with 32bit these days.
Image editing, 3D rendering(no not games), business databases, simulations, and...
Sure thats not apps that average slashdotter would use but those do exist and Apple does fine for those.
Emacs is good operating system, but it has one flaw: Its text editor could be better.
Ok, ok, if you use both processors on an integer task, continuing to ignore floating point and bus performance, all you have to do is use a different benchmark on the Intel box to show the Intel box being a hair faster.
No comments on using the G5 on appropriate applications or application mixes.
Why rain on Apple's parade like that? They continue to do amazing work. The G5 appears to be dramatically faster than the competition in some perfectly realistic applications and at least comparable everywhere else.
The people giving this anti-Apple rant any credence seem not to have read it very carefully. It exemplifies exactly the sort of spin-doctoring that it claims to be offended by.
mt
According to the linked article though, Apple used different optimizations on each platform. Personally I'd like to see both platforms with all optimizations on, compiled with GCC. Not that this really means much anyways, and it does _not_ really simulate "real world" application performance because all you're running is the benchmark on a minimal system install.
Of the benchmarks displayed I'd believe the Photoshop and Mathematica ones to some extent. The emagic comparison seems a little fishy though. The composition on the PC didn't look all that complicated, it shouldn't have sputtered and died the way it did.
That said, I'm sure each of the current leading CPUs shows better performance in one area or another. I'm sure things suited for altivec optimization will be way faster on the G5, and things suited for raw integer performance will be faster on the P4.
In any case, we have a rather fast, 64 bit, UNIX-based machine, that exhibits excellent polished design both software and hardware wise. I for one am lusting after a Dual 2 GHz G5 with at least 1 GB of DDR RAM, and I can't wait to see how it performs with Panther.
So, I guess you guys all benchmark your cars before you buy them, right? I mean, you study torque curves, run them on the dyno, analyze fuel consumption, record 0-60 acceleration and skid pad figures, right?
If all those numbers are the best, it must be the best car, right?
Or do you just go test drive one? Maybe two? I'll bet most of you don't have a clue how much horsepower you make at the drive wheels.
Yes, Apple hasn't fooled you with thier bogus numbers for a second... But somehow Intel and AMD are completely honest. And Windows really is worth all the trouble just because it's mainstream and you can play MOO3 a few months earlier. And Linux is worth all the trouble because it's free.
Uh huh. Have fun.
I hope this doesn't make me sound naive, but didn't they actually do comparison tests with Photoshop, Mathematica, Logic, and a couple others in front of a live audience? Didn't the G5 cream the competition? C'mon people, yesterday was a reason for Mac fans to get boners, and today some guy who really thinks Apple and Dell are horrible companies for knocking $1 off their prices is gonna give the PC fans boners? Enough with the boners already, they're just benchmarks and they mean next to nil.
He had me going until I saw the responses at the end. I just have a hard time believing that every single person who would respond would be a drooling illiterate imbecile. Looks like a troll. I'd like to read a real discussion of what he has to say, though.
Apple used gcc, which did give the 970 an advantage - but is hardly 'tweaked' for the Mac. I'd like to see IBM's own 970 numbers, using a compiler optimized for POWER/PPC in the same way ICC is optimized for x86. I haven't checked them personally, but somebody in the G5 announcement article has, and pointed out (too lazy to link up, sorry) that if you look at both optimized sets of benchmarks, the magnitude grows, but the relationship stays pretty much the same.
Anyway, as a longtime Mac guy, it's nice to see some LEGITIMATE argument about who's fastest, and it gives me a warm feeling deep down inside to know that the *initial* release of the 970 is this fast - I look forward with much anticipation to what IBM does with this chip in the next 12-18 months (coincincidentally the practical timeframe for replacing my dual 1.25, which suddenly doesn't have nearly the appeal it used to...)
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. - Aldous Huxley
Using SIMD instructions is a huge part of the performance of modern processors. Heck, even using SSE2 for scalar arithmetic is faster than using the old 387 instructions.
Saying "disable SIMD -- it's an optimization" is almost like saying "don't use shift instructions for power-of-two multiplies -- it's an optimization". Or "don't keep loop variables in registers -- it's an optimization." If the compiler can do it without weird tweaky flags turned on, then let it be done, i say!
The following sentence is true. The preceding sentence was false.
OMG, you mean benchmarks are subjective?
No, the benchmarks aren't subjective, that's why this is such a big deal. A benchmark consists of a well-specified objective task a computer can do, with objective measurements of how quickly that task was completed.
That's why, if Apple really tweaked the Intel computers sufficiently to nearly cut their performance in half, it's not a "matter of interpretation", it's not "a thing valid for Apple but not valid for me", it's a lie. A computer that can score a 24 can score a 24, period; if you tweak it until it only scores a 15, it can still score a 24, and your tweaks are lies.
You should be able to assemble identical computers, run identical tests, and get the same numbers within an error factor. That's almost the very definition of objective in a scientific sense.
Now, how you interpret the benchmarks is subjective, because no benchmark can possible match everybody's daily use of the computer, so even though Machine A gets a 24 on an integer test and Machine B gets a 22, Machine B may significantly faster for the real-world tasks I do, whereas Machine A may be even faster then B then the test numbers would indicate for somebody else's tasks.
But the whole point of benchmarks is to provide an objective measurement.
(Which you probably knew, but careless word usage leads to careless thinking; "subjective" is the wrong word here. The phrase is "open to interpretation", but you see, that doesn't let Apple off the hook for lying the way that "subjective" would.)
Nobody is claiming Apple turned off hyperthreading and SSE2 for the photoshop runoff.
;-)
The claims levelled against Apple:
1. hyperthreading was turned off for the SPECrate benchmarks, *and* that this actually impaired the P4 somehow in those tests. Frankly, I'm not sure it doesn't actually help those results. When a benchmark has 2 threads running in parallel, would you rather they run on 2 real CPUs or share a single CPU? For all we know, the hyperthreading was disable to avoid being called cheats by allowing threads to compete for a single CPU rather than forcing them onto their own. (What we need to know is the setting Intel/Dell used - and I don't think we know that)
2. That Apple disabled SSE2 in the SPEC benchmarks as well. In fact they didn't. What they did was use a compiler which only optimized for SSE. Since the G5 compiler didn't optimize for Altivec at all, I'd hardly call this "cheating" on a processor benchmark. Most people in the know agree that Altivec trounces SSE2. So, using two compilers that each optimized for SIMD would probably favor the G5 anyway (but GCC doesn't do that - maybe xlC from IBM will).
What we really should be taking from all this: How come Intel/Dell's numbers are so much higher than what you can get from a compile you can do yourself with a compiler that is supposed to generate pretty good results on IA32?
Maybe that the Intel compiler is designed to cheat/be-hand-optimized for code that it recognizes as "SPEC" code? And when IBM/Apple actually get around to submit real results to SPEC themselves, they'll probably do it with a compiler that cheats equally well?
Nah! Couldn't be!
Apple tweaks the specs to make their system look faster.
Dell tweaks the specs to make their system look faster.
Apple does not use Dell's tweaked specs but instead chooses to cripple Dell's machine for benchmarking purposes. Dell did not cripple an Apple machine for comparison.
Any questions?
Ayup
Then again 'typical desktop usage' has changed quite a lot lately. Many people consider that using a word-processor with animated help while listening to MP3s, burning a CD, downloading stuff from the internet on an emulated modem and spooling a huge printing file is typical desktop usage. This is a workload that can be split between multiple processors easily.
However, speeds of processors asside, if you want the Mac, buy the Mac, if you want a Windows machine, buy a windows machine. If you don't want to pay either the Apple Tax or the Microsoft Tax, buy a machine without an operating system and install GNU/Linux or BSD.
Galium Arsenide is the material of the future, and always will be.
I find this "article" highly dubious... and am amazed slashdot let this slide... actualy im not... it seems /. is intent on fueling the platform war fires for more hits and such, because this was blatant flmae-bait trash.
While it has been discussed that the differences between GCC and ICC(??) on the two platforms makes for a supposed im-balance, the subjects are highly subjective. The main grip is that it is extremely hard to determine what IS a fair test of raw CPU power. This guy continuously claims that the number one score to rate by should be the specint_2000 test (which favors intel considerably) because most people will "never" use FP...
that is a pile of bullshit... aqua alone (doing all of your interface goodies) must use FP constantly, in fact i would dare say that FP is constant and highly important on OSX, it contributes immensly to the look and feel of it. dual-processing is NOT an exclusive to specialy coded programs. That was true to OS 9, but more recent builds split tasks far better than before (although nowhere near a perfect balence).... and so buying a dual machine isnt a pointless expenditure.
the guy claims that you can buy a dell at 3.06 for less than 2.5k with ALL of the equivilent features of the powermac..... i encourage you ALL to go to dell.com and config a dell with a DVD-r along with firewire, serial-ata (cant do it), bluetooth, 1gig ethernet, 802.11g, PCI-x (cant do it), 8gb RAM cpacity (cant do it) etc.... Now you cant add some of these features from dell... which will send some of you off to www.pricewatch.com to find the ABSOLUTE rock bottom prices on the extra parts and pieces... but you can all see the price difference for an equivilent system is tiny if not reversed.
if someone could link me to a PC with equivlient features (pci-x, agp 8x, 802.11g, 1gig ethernet, serial-ata, p4 3.06, bluetooth, etc...) i would love to see honest comparisons of the price. The 8gb limit simply can't be done, so the value of it is hard to quantify, as a music guy myself i can actualy see it's value, but many people can effectivly argue it is above and beyond current consumer demands. but current consumers arent looking for pro boxes.
my main point of contention is that there is too much LACK of knowledge in regards to spec and architecture. We don't know if these tests are balenced or not, or why they were performed however they were performed. This may have been the best way to compare the two on a bit for bit level, or maybe not. Apple has it's own intrests, how solid is veritests credibility? did money change hands? how much? etc.... GCC has been reputed to being apples baby as far as compliing.... but does that mean it was fully optimized towards PPC, and the vice versa agasint the PC?
What we DO know is that the PPC is scalable in MP configs, it is a FP monster, and the P4 is NOT MP (hence the xeon tests, which really are not consumer class chips) and the P4 is an INT monster. I expected the P4 to smoke the G5 on int, and it didn't (smoke it, just beat it well). As well i find it laughable that the first fab of a new chip (970) running 30% slower (in mhz) performs so well against the top p4. The G5 has come out the gate on a level of extreme competitivness and has a significant space to grow in... 3ghz in under 12 months? putting the G5 at 3ghz about when the p4 will hit 4ghz. The speed tests there will probably favor the G5 FAR MORE than these.
One last point, we can say much about how these tests are scewed towards apple in that the Compiler along with the "cheats" all seem to point towards manipulation.... but at the same time two HUGE benefits of the G5 arent being quantified either.... 64 bits AND 8gb of RAM are huge advantages that if fully utilized would lend such a huge performance gap it isnt funny (look at the genome matching with 40 bit words). So in a sense maybe these tests were balanced.
Too many variables to call this one, the G5 i suspect is faster on FP, but not on int (as apple indicated)... but
--Idiots, Every single one of YOU, A flaming mass of conglomerated morons, hey wait a second, isnt that how RAID works?
Okay, I did RTFA, and well, as boring and tedious as benchmark tests result analysis is to me, I generally glossed right over it. What I found to be the most compelling part of this article was the "hate mail" section at the bottom. I read each one, and came away scratching my head.
I simply do not understand how people can be so consumed with obvious hatred for another person debating COMPUTERS! Why do Mac users feel so threatened? Why do Linux users feel so threatened? Why do Microsoft users feel so threatened?
I've been using Macs (since 92), Windows (since 93) and Linux (since 96) and FreeBSD (since 96) for years and well, I have yet to find anything about these systems that demand that I stand up and scream at the top of my lungs how wonderful any of them are, and to attack with such spiteful hate those who don't just fall in line.
Having started out in the computer world as a designer, I used Macs. I like them, they are cute, and fun and make many things easy. They are also slow, crash a lot and the cause of a lot of frustration. I started using Windows (3.0) because I wanted a PC, but couldn't afford a Mac at the time. Windows was cool, it crashed a lot, and I had the hardest time trying to configure hardware with it, but I got the job done. I was introduced to Linux looking for a way to get up to speed with Unix. I had a hell of time first installing it, it was cool, seemed very powerful (I was in over my head) and never crashed. Same with FreeBSD. But I still have yet to understand the mindset required to say things like: "This guy is an idiot, and his article should be pulled and his email box should be flamed."
or:
"I can't believe the haxial web site is still up, you would think by now someone would have hacked it."
Good grief, what is WRONG with people???
A while back I chose Linux as my primary OS for my day-to-day computing, on an Intel chip. I love it, its fun, its cute (thanks KDE) and it hardly crashes, and low and behold, I get my work done. My girlfriend (she's a designer) has a few Macs. I like them, but, well, it doesn't feel right to me so I stick with Linux. Sure, we get into our little OSX vs. Linux debates, but it never gets down to where she threatens my life and I launch DoS attacks on her machine. They usually end as "we should all just go back to Amiga" or something like that.
I would love to ask someone who is so delluded in their thinking to feel real hatred for someone who simply prefers not to use the computer/os/whatever that they use, what exactly do they have to fear? Why the need to act like a savage? Is it just because they are posting in a message board, and well, its time to be macho, because its safe and anonymous, and well, the need to act the tough-guy just overwelms better judgement?
sad robot making broken music
Duh. Intel knows everything about Intel chips. They designed them.
Intel's ICC won't produce code nearly as good on AMDs, and won't produce anything on non x86.
Let's not go around talking about how gcc sucks because it doesn't -- and can't, and never will be able to, unless Intel opens up all of the specs -- compete with Intel's ICC.
GCC is designed to compile code on many different platforms, to unite development efforts as much as possible accross different CPU types.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
All of the talk about benchmarks is basically noise to me. I could care less about the tests that ALL companies in this industry run. Here are some suggested benchmark tests that WOULD matter to me (an average user):
- Time it takes to order the computer.
- Time it takes for computer to arrive.
- Time it takes to unpack and set up hardware.
- Time it takes to first boot up and configure for use.
- Time it takes to install standard applications (MS Office, Netscape Communicator, or Kazaa for example).
- Time it takes to start up said applications on subsequent uses.
- Time it takes to access removable storage devices (like CDs or DVDs) for directory listings, opening files and playing media.
- Time it takes to shut down machine.
- Time it takes to "restart" machine.
- Time it takes to change users.
These are some basic tasks that most average users perform day to day. The configuration of the machine mentioned in step 4 should be basic, with no "options" that the average user wouldn't know to use. I have no idea who would win these tests. Now, I don't know if this is the market that Apple is going after, it's just me.More important that speed is what I can run. Can I run my favorite games? My favorite browser? My favorite office applications? Apple does fairly well here except in the game category (at least last I checked... which as an average user was a while ago).
Come play Moral Decay!
I have to, respectfully, disagree. If you interact with the OS at all from that application, you gain a benefit. In a single processor system, your precious Quake has to be interrupted in order to process a network packet. That can be several milliseconds of missed frame updates. Do an asynchronous I/O to get the next room's textures, and, on a UP, your application still has to be preempted to copyout the results. Again, milliseconds wasted.
On an MP, with proper system support (like in Mac OS X), these activities happen on system-provided threads on the other processor.
Now consider the same results when you aren't playing a game, but instead are doing Audio mixing. Now it's a really big deal.
And all this is still only talking about a single application.
And how do you imagine Apple did that?
Eeeeuh, they might have just turned off the option 'Hyperthreading' in the BIOS. And yes it's there, I can know, I own a precision myself.
---
"The chances of a demonic possession spreading are remote -- relax."
A lot of people seem to be missing his point here, saying that "Well, AMD and Intel probably manipulated their results too, but he accepts those." His point isn't that Apple optimized the benchmark so that their system would perform well, his point is that they crippled the competition, turning off important new features. There is no doubt that AMD and Intel had every optimization turned on when they did their tests, and that's fine. The problem that he raises is that Apple disabled the competition in their own tests.
How much does it cost to add an extra Intel 3GHz CPU to your personal desktop? Certainly not enough to make up the difference between the Dell's and Apple's 2CPU computer.
In terms of price/performance, x86's are still the best. You just need to add and extra CPU for ?300? bucks (I haven't kept up to date on CPU prcies). So, why would anyone who wants CPU-performance waste the money on a Mac?
All of this obsession with CPU-performance is pretty lame, in my opinion. My 1.1GHz is still plenty fast. More important than a fast CPU is a fast hard drive. Most wait-time is waiting for programs to load, since most ordinary uses of a computer aren't CPU-intensive. And of course RAM.
Spend your money getting faster hard-drives (e.g., 10,000rpm ATA-166 hard-drives) and faster RAM (e.g., DDR RAM).
If your a gamer, don't be fooled by the CPU-obsession. GPU's is where gaming performance is at. Getting a CPU twice as fast might increase your fps by 2 frames per ssecond -- for another $100 bucks. If you're a multi-media person, again, the graphics card (GPU) is where it's at. If you're a casual or amatuer, you can just get the gamer-line GPUs. If you need perfect quality, you'll probably want the QUADRO GeForces.
The only people who really *need* CPUs faster than 1GHz are people who do a lot of number-crunching. Usually scientists. And maybe people who compile their own software, if you want it to compile faster (though the whole point of compiling yourself is to get better performance without having to upgrade your CPU). A better thing to do if you want to compile your own software (e.g., if you use Debian, *BSD, or are a developer), would be to find a high-end *nix computer that you can use to compile it on, with options for your computer.
Don't buy the GHz hype. More GHz will not make your programs load faster, and will most certainly not make your computer much more responsive.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
...right up until he wrote about how Apple and Dell are "misleading" customers by pricing their their boxes at $x-1 instead of $x. As if their sales really are dependent on nitwits saying "hot damn, I can get that machine for under $x! I never would've bought it for that much!" In short, his whining about a "marketing ploy" is a complaint about a pricing policy so common that, well, almost everyone, from computer companies to car companies to the corner grocer selling apples for 99 cents a pound are "misleading the public". And if people can be so mislead by a one cent/dollar reduction in price, who would be intelligent enough to read his review?
He also casually mentions that "most people use Integer (not FP) most of the time. Therefore, integer results (SPECint) are much more important than floating-point results (SPECfp)." What qualifies as "most people" using integer "most of the time"? Doesn't he have any data on FP usage?
And was I the only person that noticed almost all the results he posted had a caveat that such a benchmark "is a single-processor test, so in the following results, where the computer has a second processor, it is either disabled or not used."? Aren't these dual processor Apples we're comparing with single processor Oranges? (sorry, couldn't resist.) It might make sense if Apple actually ships machines with useless second processors where architecture and OS make them essentially uniprocessor machines. But if Apple does indeed sell multiprocessor machines, and I understand it, they are, shouldn't that be taken into account? What I read was not that Apple claimed that the PPC 970 is the fastest chip, but rather the dual processor G5 is the fastest desktop computer.
About all he convinced me of is that Apple perhaps twisting benchmarks for their own ends. But his review is hardly a clear and unambiguous refutation of Apple's statements.
B
"I'm payin' taxes, but what am I buyin'?" -- James Brown
- Sticky menus : you could trace their origin to others sources than windows (damn, even on my old Atari I didn't have to click to get a menu)
- Apples TextEdit program in MacOS X produces files in RTF format, a format developed by Microsoft. : what a big deal
:-) microsoft crippled their own format in fact. And TextEdit come directly from NeXTSTEP, were the RTF format was the default to save enriched text
- A major idea that Apple borrowed from Microsoft is Context Menus. Contexts menus didn't existed on Unix then ?
- In MacOS X, when you move the mouse over the close box in the window titlebar, it shows an "X" for the close box, a dash for minimize, and a plus for maximize, just like MS Windoze. And you never looked at the NeXTSTEP UI vs Windows 95 UI ?
- And then there is the Dock in MacOS X. It's a suspiciously similar idea to the Start/Task Bar in Windoze -- the things you have open listed horizontally on a bar across the bottom of the screen. Honnestly, I think he's kidding... The Dock's origin is obviously NeXTSTEP, even if the behavior is a bit different
-
MacOS X also has the "Computer" icon, like the "My Computer" in Windoze.No, NeXTSTEP strikes again.
- MacOS X is shifting towards using file name extensions ("myfile.doc") instead of type/creator codes.Nope, again, a NeXTSTEP's heritage.
- Apple noticed how well the
.DLL (Dynamic Link Library) idea worked in Windoze so they copied the idea and produced their own version of it called a "Shared Library". Ok, that one is stupid. Shared libraries came from Unix, and as NeXTSTEP, MacOS X use them.
-
Also worth mentioning is that Apple copied GUI ideas from Xerox PARC. NO, they LICENSED it ! I'm not at all in favor of software patents and such, but Apple licensed the idea, they didn't copied it. And they came with a bunch of their own improvments.
Then, what I didn't answered :- In MacOS X, next to the time there is a little sound icon, same as Windoze.
-
The way that you sort columns in a file list has changed to the Windoze way -- instead of the ascending/descending triangle being in the right-top corner like MacOS 9, now in MacOS X it is actually on the column itself, like Windoze.
- Apple copied the idea of showing a little arrow on aliases/shortcuts.
-
And the idea of arrow cursors with an extra symbol added, such as arrow and a plus sign (copy).
-
For a long time, MS Windows could update your clock for Daylight Savings Time automatically, whereas Mac users had to do it manually. Apple eventually realized that automatic updating was a good idea, and copied the idea.
Indeed, what a bunch of astounding ideas. Come on, they are pretty straightforward improvements.The emagic comparison seems a little fishy though
Not sure if it's on the site, or just on the tech specs pdf (where I'm pretty sure I saw it), but the audio comparison is really bugged out. First of all, the title bar says "Logic vs. Cubase," but we're not comparing apps, we're comparing procs. Does that mean they're running Logic on the Macs and Cubase on the PCs? If so, the comparison is absolutely meaningless.
Then they say "with 5 plug-ins." Which ones? Which brands? Waves? Different plug-ins take up different amounts of proc usage. I can only do one high-quality reverb at a time, but lots of eq's. And were there 5 plug-in on each track, or 5 plugins that each track was routed through?
Then their results: 52 track, 115 tracks, etc. That's a lot of tracks. But again, meaningless.
A good benchmark would be:
Digidesign's Pro Tools Free, no audio hardware except what came with the computer. Record 8 tracks of 24-bit/96khz audio (or whatever). Then pile the plugins on, and use the exact same ones in the exact same places on each machine. Let us know when the interface gets sluggish, and then when it craps out. Also let us know how it craps out. Crash? Doesn't respond? But for crying out loud, don't give us worthless numbers.
c-hack.com |
I love how Linux/BSD users refer to the price of an operating system as a "tax." Tell me, when you buy a house, do you ask if you have to pay the "foundation tax?" Are you upset about the insidious "chassis tax" when you buy a car, or the diabolical "stiching tax" we have to pay for new shirts?
I mean, come on. The OS on a new machine costs about $50 (okay, $100 if your vendor doesn't have a deal with MS). Is $50 worth your time to download, configure and install an OS, as well as downloading, configuring, and installing any applications you want because you can't buy them at a store?
I have a machine running Gentoo -- but it's a SERVER. Window's SERVER OS is too expensive for a home user, so it was worth the hassle. But it's not worth the hassle to save $50 over the cost of computer that's already running me close to $2000.
Geez. When you read this, are you going to complain about the ".sig" tax?
Hey freaks: now you're ju
Apple has so THOROUGHLY cheated
Just because one guy posted an argument and used what facts he felt backed his claims, doesn't nearly support your statement. I think the only thing that EVER settles any of the damn benchmark arguments is real-world, side-by-side testing of applications people use every day.
It's long been known almost all types of benchmarks can be skewed, and cross-platform benching is a completely subjective science. This fuss is ridiculous. Let's wait until someone gets their hands on a box, and lets us know what it really is like.
It's only when we've lost everything, that we are free to do anything...
Well smart guy, if you bought a house and you were forced to buy an extra foundation that you didn't want and planned to rip up anyway, then you WOULD call it the foundation tax!
Little known fact, but it's true.
Do you have a cite? I don't believe it for a second. It doesn't take sales tax into consideration.
A $20 item, plus 6% sales tax, comes out to $21.20.
A $19.99 item, plus 6% sales tax, comes out to $21.19.
What are the chances a cashier would be able to provide exact change for either of those without opening the register?
It would be interesting to see intel's C on x86 vs IBM's C on PPC.
Actually, that would NOT be interesting. It wouldn't tell you anything. You can't test with two variables; the results of such a test are meaningless.
I don't. However, his analysis is easily replicated and interpreted. Instead of discounting what he says because he frequently debunks Mac propaganda, why don't you attack him on the points that he made? I'd be interested in seeing that.
Additionally, being a mac user, why would it make sense for him to have it out for the mac?
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
Except that GCC for PPC and GCC for x86 are already different beasts. So it's no different. You simply change the test from "which chip is fastest with the GCC compiler for that chip" to "which chip is fastest with the manufacturer's compiler for that chip".
..because most people have apparently not read through the whole thing.
"[...] In other words, most people should ignore floating-point results because they do not use floating-point anyway (or not much)."
This is utter bullshit. Floating point is extremely important for many productivity applications--anything graphics, 3D, modelling, scientific, CAD, etc. Ignore floating point?! What the hell crack is he smoking?
The whole article is filled with this kind of fart-biting. The data are far more interesting without his stupid inane conclusions muddying the waters.
Gee, a manufacturer (in any field) messes with the numbers to make its product look better... imagine that!
But did anyone notice that the author plugs his own business while stating the obvious?
-A
no, it's not:
http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a3_166.html
Are G5 faster than the G4 machines they replaced?
Yes, they are. The real argument is just about *how much* faster? (That and "did Apple cheat?", which is simple to answer: yes, they all do - all the time).
While the processor may not be suitable for the title of "fastest desktop" out there, you still have to give Apple credit for redesigning the entire architecture, which is more important than raw CPU power for Mac users. Because, you see, Mac OS X with all its little gizmos is really hungry for hardware acceleration of any kind. So graphics and memory throughput are important. While the G5 may not "compute" as fast as the newest Pentium, it will finally resolve the sluggishness problems of Apple's operating system. It will feel really fast. Who's going to notice raw CPU speed anyway? *cough* OK, but that may not have been the most pressing issue with Macs.
There's always a way to contrive some benchmark that will make system x seems faster than system y -- try hard enough, and you'll find a way.
But what matters is whether or not the benchmark is in some way relevant to the work you're doing. I can tell you, for the stuff that I'm doing, this benchmark has relevance. The article's biggest complaint is that gcc3 is being used on all the processors -- well welcome to the real world buddy!
I use a an analysis package called Root all day long. Go looking through the makefile for Root and you'll see that when it's compiled on macosx it uses gcc3 and when it's compiled on linux running on intel processors, it uses gcc3. So these benchmarks reflect the kind of performance I should see -- hence it's relevant to me and thousands of other people... that makes it a pretty good benchmark IMO.
DFDie Menschen verhoehnen was sie nicht verstehen. -- Goethe.
Um, that happens all the time man. When I bought my house it had a bunch of carpet over the hardwood floors, I had to pay to have it removed. There was a bunch of peeling paint I had to strip and redo. There was a broken water supply system.
You see, in the real world, things aren't always as cheap as we want them to be, nor are they in perfect condition. Sellets have an opinion of how much they want for an item, and buyers have an opinion of how much they'll pay. Once the price has been set, then you haggle over the conditions of the sale.
Another condition of the sale was that we had to pay for insurance for the "title." This protected the house during the 5 minute period between the seller surrenderring the title and us receiving it. I didn't want to pay it, but nobody would deal with us unless we did. I didn't want to pay it, but it wasn't a tax.
One of the conditions of sale for a Windows PC is that it has Windows on it. Because their deal with Microsoft probably demands that they do so. This is to establish partnership between the two, so Microsoft is more accountable and more likely to help the vendor out if and when there's a problem such as hardware compatibility. I guarantee you that a Dell works flawlessly with windows, whereas a noname machine, even if it has "better" parts, might have trouble. The noname vendor just doesn't have any pull. So the "Windows Tax" is better for their business, better for Microsoft, and if you want Windows, it's better for you.
If you don't want Windows...find a vendor that doesn't have the deal. But it's not a fucking "tax" for the vendor to help protect its business and deliver what 90% of the world wants anyway (foolish mortals).
Hey freaks: now you're ju
Did someone really have to go through all that
trouble to prove to everyone that benchmarks were
rigged? People just need to learn to use the
hardware/software they like and not get up in a
rage when other people don't.
As I watch the keynote yesterday, I was dismayed by a couple of the claims Steve made. I use Macs, Wintel, and several "proprietary" Unix workstations heavily and am quite familiar with the advantages and disadvantages of each. That said, I am undeniably fond of my macs running OS X, and use my iBook 600 more than any of my other computers.
But when Steve introduced the new PowerMac G5 as the "worlds first 64 bit desktop personal computer" that tweaked me a bit. I've used 64-bit DEC, SGI, and Sun desktop systems for more than a decade. Don't flame me with the "PC vs Workstation" argument. Most of those Unix workstations were smaller than the G5. And yesterday's demos show Apple is undeniably targeting the same high end multimedia, graphics, software development and scientific markets.
But the SPEC benchmark claims set my BS senses tingling. I too checked out the Veritest results yesterday after Apple's claimed Intel SPEC results didn't jibe with the official published numbers for the same Dell 650. I was annoyed to read that the "independent" tester didn't attempt to maximize the results for all contestants. Granted Apple [probably] paid for the testing, but they should be outsource the evaluation for objectivity, not to have someone lie on their behalf.
It has been known for years that SPECmarks are an indication of CPU performance, but a poor predictor of overall system performance. There are several application benchmarks that are better indicators of performance for certain classes of applications (database, web serving, desktop applications, etc). Apple doesn't seem to publicize these, (other than the perennial Photoshop demo). If "honest" benchmarks don't support your marketing case, I believe it is better to remain silent than to deceive.
I do believe that the PowerMac G5 really will be a very strong contender in the high end desktop market. I do believe that the new PowerMac G5s are probably performance and price comparable to the high end 1st tier Intel boxes. I don't believe the old "macs cost %50 more" or the new "the G5 is $1000 less" arguments. I know from experience that when you kit out these things with the hardware and software needed to get real work done, the prices are comparable. I did say 1st tier manufacturers - not some OC'd LAN party generic white box that's been riced out with mercury cooling and neon.
However, for more than %80 of the work I do, my 600Mhz G3 iBook is more than sufficient. And it's easy to carry around. The other %20, however, pegs my PowerMac G4. It also pegs my Athlon 2200 box. I will probably replace the G4 within the year. The only question is: Dual 2Ghz G5 this fall, or Dual 3Ghz G5 next year?
It's been said a hundred time before; however, I'm going to say it again.... every other major PC and Semicondcutor manufacturer does this stuff.
:)
Intel says they have the fastest solutions, AMD says they have the fastest solutions, and Apple/IBM says they have the fastest solutions. People have been putting skewed test results on the web for years.
Honestly, I'm not going to take any of these benchmarks for real. I want to see a review from ARS Technica or John Carmack.
"Things are more moderner than before- bigger, and yet smaller- it's computers-- San Dimas High School football RULES!"
The author claims the test is biased mostly because:
1. On x86 hyperthreading was disabled
2. on x86 SSE was disabled
3. on PPC a custom malloc was used
4. on PPC a different set of optimizations were used
1. I admit is seems odd that this was disabled. I think it's effect would be little, but it should be turned on
2. So was the PPC's AltiVec. I recall that SPEC wants FP and INT performance from the ALU sections, not SIMD
3. And I'm sure that there are many "tweaks" for x86 that are transparent within the GCC 3.3 code generators
4. Again, each CPU has different optimizations, either allow them all or disable them all - on both platforms, command line switched or embedded
What I think would be interesting for Apple to do to help settle all this (You know, spread around some of that $4B+ they have lying around):
Purchase two of the fastest model of 1st tier systems they can get that run on x86.
Using four different testing labs, send one machine to each lab (2 x86, 2 G5). Instruct each lab to perform any software/configuration optimizations they feel necessary to get the most performance out of the machine. Then they run a standardized set of benchmarks. They each fully document the changes they've made and the results.
Apple (or perhaps a 5th lab) colates the data and produces a final result.
Or some open source minded person with some extra bandwidth(ha) could create a web site where PCers and Macers could post their own results from the benchmarks. With sufficient results posted, the "noise" would get filtered out and the results would become statistically useful.
Article X: The powers not delegated... by the Constitution...are reserved...to the people
I don't think I've ever seen a numerical benchmark that has been really satisfying. Cook-offs are really the way to go IMO, and Apple blew the Dell away with Photoshop, PDF viewing, and Mathematica. What should matter is how well your applications perform, not what arbitrary benchmark number you've managed to come up with.
It's amazing how much flaming the author received for his analysis. People were calling him all sorts of names simply for pointing out that Apple's benchmarks were not fair. I think it's important to keep companies honest.
But as is often said, the CPU processing speed isn't the main selling point of a Mac. They've been behind for quite some time now, but people are still buying them. This is a great advancement, bringing Macs up to speeds relatively comparable to that of the rest of the market. The 970 is a new chip, and IBM needs time to ramp up the clock speed. P4's didn't get to 3.2ghz in one day.
If you went to buy a *new* house that hadn't been built yet, and the builder insisted on installing and charging you for wall-to-wall carpet over the hardwood floor you'd specified, and then charged you extra to take it out and fill the holes he'd nailed in the floor, you probably wouldn't be so philosophical about it... :'/
I don't recall Steve or anyone else of concequence stating that these G5 systems are the first desktop 64bit machines. They HAVE stated that they are the first 64bit personal computers. Desktop != Personal.
Desktop is a size/form factor description
Persona is a usability/functionality description
Most people would not want to take home a Sun or HP 64bit Unix worksation and use it for email and light web browsing. They'd look at CDE and stare blankly. The machine would become a nice space heater and perhaps nightlight. The G5 is a 64bit Unix workstation class desktop that is configured hardware and software wise to fit in to your personal life.
Article X: The powers not delegated... by the Constitution...are reserved...to the people
would like to send my $6000 to buy a top end G5 as well as a top end PC, I would be glad to perform independant, unbiased benchmarks on productions systems :) Anyway, I think that all this crap about arguing over Mac and PC is really dumb. Use what appeals to you. I think that OS X is probably a great os, even though I have not used it very often. I use Windows XP every day and I can say it is also great. The one thing I can say is that I think that Windows has a much better way of managing individual windows, even with the new Expose system mac has devised. To me the way OS X switches windows seems like something akin to what I find on my pocket pc (at least the old way, I'm guessing Expose is a huge improvement, but still not as good as having the task bar.) Anyway, this is just my opinion, I think that everyone should just save their energy when trying to argue that Mac is better than PC or that PC is better than Mac. I use an Alienware box, and I must say that I absolutely love it and I'm sure that Mac users feel the same about their purchases.
SIGFAULT
Who cares about SPEC benchmarks. Get real-world tests, which the G5 clearly spanked the Xeon system on.
It's like saying I get higher 3dMark scores than you do, but I get less FPS in games. Which computer would you rather have? You want real benchmarks, not artificial ones.
Orange
Does anyone have benchmark information on the IO abilities of the G5? Raw CPU power isn't the only important factor in a modern computer's performance.
he clearly states that the Dell benchmarks are higher from using an optimized compiler and even makes a comparison to prove the point between the low apple score and the dell one which is double that... and he goes on about hyperthreading etc
if you're refering to the part where he's taking quotes of the veritest results pdf and showing where apple used G5 optimizations for their benchmarks etc well, does Dell have that kind of information even available about the desktop model he is talking about? my guess would be no since it's not there and this guy went out of his way to be thorough in every other aspect
Maybe I'll be accused of trolling (again), but I have to ask, what's wrong with just basing evaluations like this on unoptimized vanilla out-of-the-box systems using only software available to all systems?
I do understand though that when it comes to GCC, the PPC support is less mature than x86 support, resulting in a possible disadvantage.
Well, if SPEC benefits from a "malloc that is sufficient to run the benchmark but not capable of running general applications and doesn't actually behave the way apps expect malloc to behave", then it fails as a benchmark supposedly being real-app(s) like.
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
When I looked at the benchmarks as posted by VeriTest, and then read this article I thought, wow this guy is really worked up today. Apple produces a new machine using a very fast processor from IBM, they hire a independant firm called VeriTest to benchmark it, and they publish the full results, as well as their take on them in their marketing information. Whats the problem? We all know it is impossible to make a fair benchmark, and that the only real test is to use it for your application and see how it performs. I read the benchmark and thought it was less biased than about 80% of the ones I've seen. Could it have been better? Probably, but the nitpicking this guy goes into is a little extreme. You can tell he's really reaching when he starts to complain about the $1999 pricing as being deceptive, I mean come on already, this is done for just about every product sold in this wacko country. The photoshop test was all it took to sell me, since it is an app I actually use on a regular basis, and the tasks performed were real world, rather than theoretical. The only real question for me (and many others I know) is, when can I get one in a powerbook?
The OP is a doofus, but there is a specific, reasonable meaning for the "Microsoft Tax". It's nonsesical applied to Apple. The "Microsoft Tax" is the additional cost to ALL computers from an OEM, because MS licensing requires them to pay for an OEM version of Windows for every machine shipped, not just the ones actually sold. This means that even an empty machine from one of the OEMs with this kind of licensing (every major one, at least at the time people started using this term) has it's price increased by the cost (to them) of an OEM Windows license. That's the Microsoft Tax.
(read other fucking articles) :)
As other people have pointed out, Altivec was also disabled, so the SSE2 argument is a red herring. This also makes the rest of the article suspect: the guy looks at what was disabled on the PC, but ignores what was disabled on the Mac.
What I would like to see, is someone from SPEC to comment on what flags they used/didn't use.
Funnily enough, Mac users have been almost completely ignorant of SPEC up until now precisely BECAUSE Apple hadn't been trotting out these "bogus benchmarks".
FWIW, it makes sense to me why Apple would use GCC and why they would have SSE2 optimisations (and Altivec) disabled.
Quite why they decided to disable HT on the Xeon is completely beyond me - maybe someone could clue me in on that one...
That was classic intercourse!
Your analogy is not quite right. Consider instead that you buy a brand new house with hardwood floors but a condition of sale is you have to buy brand new carpets from a specific company. You have no choice in colour nor weave and the carpets are poorly laid over your new hardwood floors. You then have to pay additional money to have the carpets removed and the floors sanded and sealed. You complain to the real-estate agent that this isn't fair but he informs you that all real-estate agents do this and it's perfectly fair because otherwise some people will steal carpets. Somebody tells you that you should have bought from a different real-estate agent, one that isn't bound by this carpet-scam, but that's not very helpful when you wanted THAT particular house not some OTHER crappy house. In the end you simply bear the cost of carpets you didn't want, you tear them out, you chuck them on the tip, and you contribute to the coffers of a carpet company who then uses sales figures to proclaim that 95% of the world prefers carpets instead of hardwood floors.
It's nothing to do with being "as cheap as we want them to be". It's about being forced to pay for something you didn't want and didn't need.
>> Also, they disabled SSE2 on the PC.
This is only fair because Apple didn't use Altivec on the G5 either, otherwise the G5 would have a even greater advantage.