Apple Hardware VP Defends Benchmarks

Greg Joswiak, vice president of hardware product marketing at Apple, in a phone interview today, defended Apple's performance claims for its upcoming Power Mac G5, after they came under fire in the wake of yesterday's announcement. Read on for the details. Joswiak went over the points in turn, but first said that they set out from the beginning to do a fair and even comparison, which is why they used an independent lab and provided full disclosure of the methods used in the tests, which would be "a silly way to do things" if Apple were intending to be deceptive.

He said Veritest used gcc for both platforms, instead of Intel's compiler, simply because the benchmarks measure two things at the same time: compiler, and hardware. To test the hardware alone, you must normalize the compiler out of the equation -- using the same version and similar settings -- and, if anything, Joswiak said, gcc has been available on the Intel platform for a lot longer and is more optimized for Intel than for PowerPC.

He conceded readily that the Dell numbers would be higher with the Intel compiler, but that the Apple numbers could be higher with a different compiler too.

Joswiak added that in the Intel modifications for the tests, they chose the option that provided higher scores for the Intel machine, not lower. The scores were higher under Linux than under Windows, and in the rate test, the scores were higher with hyperthreading disabled than enabled. He also said they would be happy to do the tests on Windows and with hyperthreading enabled, if people wanted it, as it would only make the G5 look better.

In the G5 modifications, they were made because shipping systems will have those options available. For example, memory read bypass was turned on, for even though it is not on by default in the tested prototypes, it will be on by default for the shipping systems. Software-based prefetching was turned off and a high-performance malloc was used because those options will be available on the shipping systems (Joswiak did not know whether this malloc, which is faster but less memory efficient, will be the default in the shipping systems).

As to not using SSE2, Joswiak said they enabled the correct flags for it, as documented on the gcc web site, so that SSE2 was enabled (the Veritest report lists the options used for each test, which appears to include the appropriate flags).

Comments

But..but..but...

[Anonymous Coward]

He's a Corporate Drone(tm) justifying Marketing Speak and Glossy Lit numbers.

Doesn't everyone realize that this is a black and white issue?

Corporate Drones == Lies
Populist Raving == Truth

Always always always. Doesn't matter what the numbers mean. They threw in that one graph with the single processor machine slower than the Intel just to throw off the hounds. But it didn't work.

G4 story icon

[Capital_Z]

/. had better get with it! We're talking about G5s now and the G4 chip icon is still up in the story post.

The G4 is so last month.

Re:Honesty

[switcha]

If I shit in a bucket and carefully label and document everything does that make it a bucket of gold?

No. It makes it a container containing homo sapien fecal matter, deposited on June 24 at 16:21 after a lunch of onion rings and a Rodeo cheesburger from the Burger King establishment.

And to top it off, you now have to deal with a shit in a bucket.

Joswiak

[Jon Abbott]

Every time I hear the name "Joswiak", I keep thinking the guy is some hybrid between Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak -- some kind of mutant creature straight out of the R&D Labs at Apple. :^)

But he didn't refute the most damning claim!

[faust2097]

Somehow this shifty Apple exec ignored the boldest claim of the bunch:

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.

What do you have to say now mister Joswiak if that is in fact your real name?

Re:Removed one of the processors for the SPEC CPU

[dhovis]

Oh, yeah. Steve probably said "hey, vendors, come on over and do a little demo. Yeah, it'll be a duel, but don't worry about recompiling for the G5 (which is supposed to be trivial). We'll just see what happens."

Look -- they spent every last minute they could optimizing the builds they used for the demo - don't doubt it for a minute. On the other hand, every last minute probably wasn't all that long, and the demos did kick ass.

Actually, my favorite was the Mathematica guy who commented (IIRC) "We tried to come up with an example to show how being able to use more than 4GB of memory was helpful, but we couldn't come up with an example that didn't crash the Xeon"

Waiting for the ultimate benchmark

[TrekkieGod]

I'm gonna be modded as a troll on this one, but I gotta do it, because it will happen to me :)

::bangs head on keyboard for giving moderator ideas::

::Slashdot story: Tom's Hardware benchmarks the G5, and compares it to dual Xeons, dual Opterons, and (I guess), the P4::

Me: "Woohoo...I'll finally found out which is better" ::clicks link::

"Page 1: We have tested all these systems, and you will soon see our results." ::scroll down through ads, click next::

"Page 2: These tables show the systems we have tested on" ::scroll down, next::

"Page 3: Tables, cont.." ::yells out profanities, looks on table of contents, chooses "benchmark results"::

"Page 45: And now, let us take a look how the G5 stands against the current x86 and AMD64 processors" ::AAAAAAAAHHHHHH...can't stand it anymore, clicks on conclusion::

"Page 666: And thus, we conclude that the G5 is better in some ways and worse in others" ::NOOOOOOO...Now I'll never know!!!::

Re:Who cares?

[DataPath]

There are 3 kinds of lies - lies, damned lies, and benchmarks.

I think Apple will have validity (in the performance arena) when AMD or Intel start publishing benchmarks against APPLE's systems.

Re:Curious

[tbmaddux]

(he had read the arguments and already compiled his responses :-)

Cheater! Dirty cheater, I say!!

What, did he use GCC to compile them?! Filth!!! DIE!

Re:Honesty

[Sokie]

If my Mac emits smoke and kernel panics at the same time, I know I can get resolution to both problems by calling Apple.

I imagine that in that case, there is really only one problem to be solved. :)