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

Mac users care =)

[Andorion]

It's a well known facts... they're fanatical, they love to say "we're better," and having numbers to back up that claim means a LOT to them. You're absolutely right, it's comparing apples and oranges, but the argument always turns into "which is the tastier fruit."

~Berj

Re:Mac users care =)

[ObviousGuy]

I had loquats this morning. Tasty!

anagrams

[mary_will_grow]

Clint Eastwood : Old West Action

Greg Joswiak : Steve Wozniak ???????????

That was fast.

[yo303]

There were only eleven Slashdot stories between the challenge and the rebuttal from high up in Apple.

That's almost as fast as some of the SCO happenings recently. Man, there's several new things a day sometimes. Things sure happen fast these days.

Is Slashdot stories the new unit of Internet Time? Will there VPs yelling at PR to get a press release out before an attack story scrolls off the front page?

yo.

The Amazing thing about liars is:

[ainsoph]

.....Once they start lying they just keep on lying, The quamire gets thicker and thicker.

See Fargo for an example.

Re:The Amazing thing about liars is:

[ainsoph]

LOL!

Anyway, I was leaving work after a day of hell.

Spell check? No thanks.

Not-quite-obscure reference? Re:Curious

[LookSharp]

"Cheater! Dirty cheater, I say!!
What, did he use GCC to compile them?! Filth!!! DIE!"

I'm way off topic here, but given the popular literature released on Saturday, that many of us are no doubt reading, did anyone else hear Sirius Black's mother screaming this at us?

"Out, ye filth! Blasphemy! Mudblood Scum!"