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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.
...and benchmark different too!
Is this truly the only Earth I can live on?
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
translation
i am too stupid to round up.
Are you MORE than your SPINAL COLUMN?
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.
He MAY have valid points but his credibility is zero.
/. you know.
Ummm...this is
Are you new here?
(yeah, yeah, pot, kettle, black)
Have you read the moderator guidelines? Well, have you, PUNK? (and I want a Karma: Gnarly option)
I watched the video. (http://stream.apple.akadns.net/ - requires QuickTime). Now, I'm sure there's many ways you could tweak the benchmarks and so forth but the Photoshop and Mathematica benchmarks rocked. The G5 was 2x faster than the Xeon.
I used to get involved doing benchmarking back in the good old days of Whetstone when I worked on supercomputers. Every manufacturer had a different nasty tweak to the compilers that were pulled out only when it was time to do benchmarks for a customer. The mantra then as now was: the best benchmark is the app you want to run (since most buyers of supercomputers write their own apps, porting them for a benchmark was a possibility).
The G5's may not be the hottest thing on the planet but they're close enough to get Apple back in the ball game. Nice systems architecture, nice case and the claim is they're quiet as well. Oh, and don't forget you can put in 8GB of RAM. Now even OS X doesn't need to swap :-)
> 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
The 1GHz backplane is the real news. No processor benchmark test really takes into account the total real speed of the system when running applications.
The fast backplane will speed up IO, which is a common bottleneck. 1GHz for a PC backplane is huge. The only machine I had seen a 1GHz backplane in so far is a HP-UX server. It cost wayyy more than $2000 or even $3000.
I really believe that with this new chip alliance with IBM Apple will finally be able to put that "the OS is really cool, but PCs are always faster" stuff behind them.
Yesterday was a good day for apple.
It seems to me that if somebody wanted to use an inferior product, the first thing they'd do is develop a thick skin and at a minimum ignore the criticism being lobbed at their platform of choice. That, or choose to adopt something that seems to work better for the majority so that they don't have to feel left out all the time; obviously when you get to the point of chewing out people who are trying to show you why your choice is flawed it's become a popularity contest for you already (competing, not computing).
Try not. Do or do not, there is no try.
-- Dr. Spock, stardate 2822-3.
Absolutely correct. I was somewhat bemused by all the hoopla yesterday about the G5 and it's 'speed'. I need to know how it will run programs that I will use. I don't run benchmark software very often. =)
I'm not a graphic artist, so Photoshop is unimportant to me. I don't render video, or manipulate sound, so that's not for me. I actually mostly use my home comp for games, the internet, watching movies and listening to music. Maybe it was optimistic of me to think that I was going to find a Mac that would fit my needs, but with all the hype about the G5, I thought I would finally have some reason to be interested in Macs. Does anybody have any numbers for any other programs other than Photoshop? At least some fps in Quake 3? (I don't play it, but it's a good game benchmark)
[SIG] It's like putting a moose in the blender -- a recipe for disaster!
--- Often in error; never in doubt!
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.
Anyone who's followed the computer industry for more than a couple minutes knows that there are lies, damned lies, and benchmarks.
Go use a machine, for tasks you'd typically perform -- that's the only benchmark that matters.
But if you must assign a number to the size of your virtual phallus, by all means, benchmark away...
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 can vouch for those unfortunate enough to have worked in the grocery industry (and have an idea of what that kind of mechandising entail) but this is hardly insightful. It happens on nearly everything that you buy.
When asking the pricing managers (which work for the chain, not an individual store) they replied that there was a study once done, indicating that there is a psychological tendancy to shy away from certain "maker" numbers as being too big. For example, the masses statistically believed that twenty dollars was too much to pay for item x, but for some reason, nineteen ninety-nine was not too much to pay for the same item. Funny thing is that with the same item, eighteen dollars would again be too much, but seventeen ninety-five wouldn't.
Even if the study is flawed or bogus, it is still being taught in the "front-line" marketing schools, (ie. grocery, drug-store, clothing, etc.) , and so I expect we will see nineteen ninety-five for many many years to come.
Well.. you can have my 8-bit commodore 64 for free.. so the bang for the buck is infinite..
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.
The author of the article makes the point that most programs use a single processor unless specifically written for using two, so we should downplay the dual processor results. A good point on the surface but examine it more deeply and it has two flaws:
1) This is Apple's Pro machine and many of the users are in the Graphic Arts, Audio and Film industry. The most siginificant programs in these fields do get optimized for the Mac platform.
2) I don't know about you, but it is normal for me to be doing several things at once on my computer. Listening to music, downloading email, munging video, plus about a hundred background tasks. The OS itself balances these separate tasks between the processors, so there is a very real and significant advantage to the dual processor even if the individual programs don't take advantage.
-I have no Sig yet I must scream...
Misleading Prices
Both Apple and Dell are guilty of using misleading prices. For example, Apple gives the price of the low-end G5 as "$1999", and the high-end G5 as "$2999". In other words, they have subtracted $1 from a $3000 computer to make it seem cheaper, which is absolutely ridiculous. This demonstrates that both Apple and Dell are willing to mislead people when stating their prices.
Next crackpot, please.
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."
hmm.. that image seems to suggest they've tested a dual g5 against a single proc p4...?
Go read Jon "Hannibal" Stokes article about the world of benchmarking., over on his site, Ars Technica.
h tm l
http://arstechnica.com/cpu/2q99/benchmarking-1.
This will give you at least a basis for understanding why benchmarking is used, and what makes or breaks any given set of results. Also, feel free to argue about anything and everything that is said about these benchmarks, since, apparently, everyone of you is in the benchmarking labs day in and day out, testing systems and looking at the results on a scientific level.
I also think benchmark scores are, quite frankly, marketing bullshit. A processor designer can tweak a program and a compiler any number of ways to increase thier scores. The true test would be to use the SPEC benchmark suite with no flags set on the compiles for either platform. That way you are testing just the base processor, with no SIMD instructions, no disabling of the software prefetch algorhythms, no "cheats" as it were. Then test those same systems with every trick in the book thrown in. Then look at the difference. This will probably give you a better picture of the performance you will see in real world activities.
If you have a machine that absulotely sucks donkey when using no "cheats" and then you see this amazing boost in performance when the "cheats" are enabled, you probably are dealing with a highly optimized and specialized instruction set, which can be either very good for specific applications, but absolutely horrible for programmers who don't have access to, or don't bother to research, the abilities of that processor.
These are the benchmarks I'm interested in most. And it'll be at least late September before we see any of that.
Also, while all this is interesting, in an intelllectual sort of way, what about the actual perfomance gains over the current crop of G4's? Why not take a look at the difference between the SPEC scores of the dual 1.42GHz G4 towers, vs. the dual 2GHz G5's? That alone will tell you more about the increase in speed and power that has been delivered. If Apple had been smart, instead of trying to impress and piss off the x86 sparkheads they should have posted those scores as well, to give a real side by side comparrison between the speed and power of the G5 vs the bottlenecked, processor starving, gimp that is the G4. But that would make too much sense, wouldn't it? And you know marketing is all about confusing your consumer into beleiving that the latest and greatest is really what they want, not some old machine from 3 months ago...
Don't Ask Questions. I don't know the answers and even if I did I wouldn't tell you.
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."
With regard to price, if you're after a high-end system, he represents that the high end of the Dell line comes in at $3680, yet rapidly returns to promoting the idea that a $2000 Dell is equivalent. In an effort to configure up an Intel system comparable to the new high-end Apple PowerMac G5, I ran the Dell configurator. It clocks in at $3939:and that's with a lesser video card and a smaller, slower IDE hard drive (add $840 for SCSI, a better comparison with Serial-ATA). I don't think I was being unfair in my selection of components. (OK, add $30 for a USB floppy on the Mac if necessary)
This guy certainly has a point about the non-optimized Intel benchmarks, but he reveals his prejudice by not offering a fair price comparison.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
I especially liked the hatemail at the end. This was my favorite:
People that go to ivory league schools that live in trailers are a very low population, lets say 1% so since there are 99% of the people living in houses then you can clearly see that people that live in trailers are stupid, when compared to they're counter parts. Or put it this way, any finite number divided by infinity results in a number so small it does not exists. So any people that live in trailers that go to ivory league school you meet in passing are just figments of your imagination. Point is if you like Macintosh use it, if you don't then well don't use it.
Heh. That sure dispels this guy's critique of Apple's benchmarks, eh?
There is much cruelty in the universe, John.
Yeah, we seem to have the tour map.
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?)
Did you notice how almost all of the hatemail was addressing him in the third person?
He went onto a discussion board somewhere about the post (probably MacNN, probably one of the worst reputation Mac websites in terms of brainpower) and just cherry picked the comments he could take apart easily.
It's not like he actually *got* that hatemail. He didn't even post an email address with the article.
Isn't it funny how you can bend things to make you look favorable - just like Apple may have done?
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.
"In other words, they have subtracted $1 from a $3000 computer to make it seem cheaper, which is absolutely ridiculous."
Those lying fucking bastards. I've never seen that before in my life. Never - I repeat - never, have I seen a product priced at anything less than a perfectly round figure. I'm so glad I read spl's soapbox. I mean, I went to the Apple store, and saw that it was $1999, and I admit it, I said "I could afford this." But thanks to the philanthropy of spl, I was forced to examine it further. If you actually sit down and do the math, $1999 is not, in fact, a thousand dollars and a little more - no, innocent consumer! $1999 is nothing less than a dollar shy of $2000!
c-hack.com |
Well, when I go to buy, say, a new processor, and one store has it for $199 and the other has it for $200, I'm going to buy the $199 for the sole reason of being able to answer "Oh, 100-something dollars" to my wife's question of "How much did that stupid thing COST?" instead of having to say "200 dollars".
MORTAR COMBAT!
There is no saying which is right, and I don't think this guy was really trying to. If you read his writeup, he says that Apple claims a certain Dell model benchmarks at value $X, while Dell claims that the same model can do $Y.
He doesn't actually say that one or the other is correct -- he says that the most charitable thing you can do is split the difference and go with the average -- and the kicker is that even that midway point is higher than what Apple claims for the G5.
You've got a good point, but I think this guy is aware of it as much as you are. He's not saying that each vendor's analysis is authoritative, but that the truth probably lies somewhere in the middle, and that middle ground might or might not look to be in Apple's favor (in fact, it doesn't seem to be in Apple's favor).
DO NOT LEAVE IT IS NOT REAL
no, everyone copies with Xerox.
Schrodinger's cat is either dead or really pissed off...
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
-Lucas
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...
At work, we just bechmarked the Dell systems a month ago and got very similar results to Apple for the "base" rate. The article seems to be quoting the "peak" rate for the Dells. It's not valid to compare peak rates yet because gcc 3.3 and os 10.3 aren't really fully optimized yet.
The article also complains that using the NAGWare compilers is not a valid test since they're too slow. But I think the NAGWare compiler is a more vallid comparison than intel's compiler because most real-world computing is done with NAGWare because it fully implements the F95 spec and is more portable. In addition NAGWare is well tested for accuracy and it also very much cheaper.
The Dell benchmark numbers are pure fantasy. They never occur in real-world use.
There are 10 types of people in this world, those who can count in binary and those who can't.
Neo: Whoa, deja vu.
Trinity: What did you just say?
Neo: Nothing, I just had a little deja vu.
Trinity: What did you see?
Cypher: What happened?
Neo: Someone posted about Xerox, and then there was another post that looked just like it.
Trinity: How much like it, was it the same post?
Neo: Might have been, I'm not sure.
Morpheus: Switch, Apoc.
Neo: What is it?
Trinity: Deja vu is usually a glitch in the Slashcode. It happens when they change something.
Shamelessly stolen from an Anonymous Hero
I just read the veritest document myself. This guy did not show the complete picture at all. First, in favour of Apple, these tests were run on Mac OS X 10.2.7. I don't think this is the 64-bit kernel that can really take advantage of the G5. I'm not a mac head, but I'm guessing this is Smeagol?
So right from the start the G5 is seriously crippled in these tests. Especially if they don't even take advantage of 64-bit as seems to be the case. Now, on the the other points that the spl dude makes.
Sure the special malloc library seems a bit unfair. But then again, do these tests really focus on memory allocation? I'd think they are limited by CPU power more than memory allocation. In any case, it'd be nice if we saw results without this library.
Now for the comfusing part. The 8300 only has a single cpu. For the base tests, they use hyperthreading and an SMP kernel. They do the exact same test for the 650's base test, hyperthreading with a single processor and an SMP kernel. The G5 system is run with a single processor as well.
So it seems this test is well balanced and fair. The confusing part is the rate tests.
For the 8300 they have no hyperthreading and a uniprocessor kernel. For the 650 they have no hyperthreading and an SMP kernel with two processors. The G5 system is run with two processors. It's unclear why they chose not to use hyperthreading on the rate test. It could be that hyperthreading actually reduced the scores of these tests. I'm no expert on the SPEC tests and hyperthreading, but what I do know is that hyperthreading is an intelligent technology. It can't always increase speed, it depends on what kind of code it's running. In the rate test it's possible that hyperthreading is unable to yeild any improvements, in which case the overhead of enabling hyperthreading may make the scores worse than without hyperthreading.
At anyrate, the tests were a LOT more fair than the dpl guy makes them out. And considering that the G5 could be seriously crippled by not running 64-bit and who knows what other optimisatoins, I'd say that the numbers are still impressive.
My guess is the did use Altivec optimizations. See this section
For the Mac
â Installed theTachyon development environment version 6K452. This provides the appropriate development tools for generating the SPEC binaries and installs Appleâ(TM)s version of the GCC compiler ( version 3.3 build 1379 ) on the test system
For the Dell
â Downloaded GCC version 3.3 ( gcc-3.3.tar.gz ) from http://gcc.gnu.org.
â Followed the documented steps to build and installed GCC v 3.3 on the system.
And here from the appendix
-fast
This flag is used with C and C++ and specifically targeted to the G5 and enables G5 specific instruction usage, tuning and 64 bit arithmetic. In addition to enabling the -O3 optimization level, it also enables the use of C99 aliasing rules and relaxed IEEE math operations.
G5 Specific instruction usage sounds suspicious. I really like the relaxed IEEE math operations.
I also like this part
â Installed a high performance, single threaded malloc library. This library implementation is geared for speed rather than memory efficiency and is single-threaded which makes it unsuitable for many uses. Special provisions are made for very small allocations (less than 4 bytes). This library is accessed through use of the â"lstmalloc flag during program linking.
Doesn't say anywhere that they did the same for the Dell.
I don't think Apple was looking for to even of a field for this test.
Here are some SPEC results I googled for, commisioned from SUN on their Xeon based Fire V65x, running a single 3.06 GHz Xeon. You'll notice that they, too, disabled Hyperthreading. Obviously, Sun would have wanted these benchies to be as fast as possible. So, probably, the single thread used for SPEC scores is best suited by TURNING HYPERTHREADING OFF.
s 20 03q2/cpu2000-20030520-02193.pdf
Meaning, if Apple's results are reliable (which I think they are...levelling both machines by optimizing them for neutral operations and having them run neutral code), they tuned the Dell FOR SPEC. They didn't decrease its performance -- they probably increased it a bit.
http://www.specbench.org/osg/cpu2000/results/re
Just because you put the words "Fast" or "Hyper" in front of a chip's feature doesn't automatically make it faster, as any BIOS hacker knows.
Hey freaks: now you're ju
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.
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In reality, icc produces really good code for Athlon/Opteron. So good in fact that the SpecInt scores of Opteron with icc in 32-bit-mode are better than the scores with gcc in 64-bit-mode. -- Despite the extra 8 registers in 64-bit-mode.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?