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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.
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.
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
I was going to mod you down, but...
Apple has deliberately turned off processor features on the other platforms that would have led to their 'fastest in the world' claim being untrue. That's the point of the article. Cross-platform benchmarking IS hard, but deliberately crippling what you benchmark against in order to look better makes it seem that your software/hardware/whatever just isn't as good as what you're comparing it to...
Game dev and music blog
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.
Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
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.
While the article linked does indeed make it look somewhat shady, it's worth pointing out that a major weakness of his argument is that he implies (credibly) that this lab test commissioned by Apple is not trustworthy, and then compares it with tests by Dell and Intel, which he seems to present as implicitly true. How do we know that's the case? If Apple did indeed gain anything by mucking about with the configurations (and it sounds like they did), who's to say that they did anything more than offset similar mucking about on the other side of the fence?
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".
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
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 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???
The G5 benches were provided by Apple, they optimised it as much as they could.
The Dell/Intel benches were provided by Dell/Intel, they optimised them as much as they could.
However, what he didn't include was benchmarks for a G5 which had been crippled by Dell and Intel..
I usually hate analogies, but sometimes it's my only way of getting my point across:
If Ford tweaks their engines and suspension set up before a test. OK!
If Nissan tweaks their engines and suspension set up before a test. OK!
If Nissan tweaks their engines and suspension set up, and pours sugar in the Ford's "gas" tank before the test. NOT OK!
I've never used a Mac... but I disagree that it wouldn't meet your needs.
I'm running 1.3Ghz Athlon at home and a 1.2Ghz dell laptop at work. These machines are obsolescent by today's marketing standards.
With the exception of Sim City 4000 (which is a fundamentally slow program) I've never had any kind of chronic performance problem.
The organziation where I work has over 75,000 PCs and about 2,500 servers. 75% of these are 700Mhz or less and about 40% are 350-500Mhz. The only performance problems we run into are network problems... nobody has complained about a slow PC in years.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
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.
Appended to the end of comments you post. 120 chars.
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."
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.
OK, I mostly skimmed the article, but he's among other things complaining that they turned off SSE2. May I mention that from what I could gather, the benchmarks used on the Apple platforms had NO Altivec optimisation? With that in mind it seems that disabling SSE2 was simply done to level the field. If there had been Altivec optimisations, then for comparison's sake it would make much better sense to use Altivec and SSE2. Actually, they might have chosen to disable SSE too, but they didn't!
The other feature he's complaining about is the disabling of hyperthreading. From other benchmarks I've seen before, hyperthreading in SMP systems usually results in equal or slower performance, or at most a 10% addition in certain benchmarks. It was probably better to leave it off.
Finally, about the discrepancy between Veritest's/Dell's/Intel's benchmarks, this is to be expected. Veritest compiled the benchmarks with GCC 3.3, and certainly used different compiling options and different testing options than Dell used. Unless you use the same options and methodology on every test, comparing benchmarks is useless.
I'm not saying Veritest and Apple didn't do their best to look good, of course they did! But at least you have to give them credit for going with an independent firm with a full report (where everything is laid out), instead of absurd and evidently fabricated application benchmarks like they've done in the past.
As another poster mentioned, benchmarking is HARD, and harder across platforms, especially on a new CPU platform with no optimizations and no way to use some of the CPU features. When we get a benchmark version that allows for full use of al the features of the 970 (G5) and the x86 CPUs, then we might get a clearer picture. It also doesn't remove the fact that these machines are MUCH, MUCH better than the G4s, or that Apple also promised the processor would scale to at least 3GHz within a year.
Oh of course one of his arguments about his righteousness is "Look at all these Mac fanatics who flame me". He's not much better than them, from what I can see. One fanatic from one camp doesn't make all of them fanatics, and doesn't validate his points one iota (neither does flaming him destroy his points, which is why intelligent rebuttal would be better, but I have the feeling he would most likely not publish that).
If he explores all forms and substances Straight homeward to their symbol-essences; He shall not die.
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.
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
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...
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?
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
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