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

Nvidia, ATI and now Apple?

[dark-br]

It's a shame if Apple have resorted to this sort of thing, I thought it was bad enough that nVidia had produced drivers designed to give false results, but actually crippling your opponents hardware, to show that your product beats it, is pretty low.

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.

Re:Mac users care =)

[cioxx]

how can my opinion be flamebait dumbass? :)

Lets see, shall we?

• You didn't say anything positive about Apple Computer Corporation
  
• "Steve Jobs is a genius" quote was nowhere to be found in your entire comment
  
• "Mac Heads" term is racist and inflamatory. We prefer the term "The imminent owners of the Fastest 64-bit Personal Computer in the World"
  
• Your post did not hint that you will be switching to Macs as soon as you get enough money
  
• And lastly, you work in a mixed pc and mac environment. Macs and PCs don't mix and by working in such a clueless place you're just helping to sponsor x86 Terrorism.
  

p.s. Steve Jobs is a genius!

Re:simple solution

[TobyWong]

Because I think macs are great I just can't fucking stand fanbois like you.

Re:Who cares?

[Xerithane]

Some people have something called ethical considerations. They believe that only users should have certain freedoms in regards to the software they user. Thus, Free Software should be used, even if it is not necessarily the best tool for the job. Furthermore, this prevents vendor-lockouts and allows users a self-determined upgrade cycle. This explains those who will only use Free Software.

Ok, if you use an inferior tool for a job that pays your bills because you have some philosophical issues with people making money to pay people just like you, than you deserve to get shit-canned right after your inferior solution shows it's true colors.

Having ethical considerations does not make one a zealot, so please stop being so insulting.

Having ethical considerations that cloud judgement, does. I'm not being insulting, I'm being real.

Re:My turn to bitch!

[evilviper]

if Apple had a build it yourself, parts in a bag option for $500 less, then people would still bitch that for that price, it should come
fully assembled.

you have to acknowledge what a beautiful
$3000 machine the G5 is.

I like Apple's machines, the same way I like super computers... "Man, wouldn't it be cool to have one of those (if I didn't have to pay for it)."

Personally, I'm just getting very tired of hearing about Apple... The Apple evangelists (as will as the naysayers) are just so relentless that it drives me crazy... Any time there is a story about an OS, you can bet there will be a post saying that Apple/Mac OS X is so much better, and the same old comment always gets moderated up.

I'm not the Anti-Apple type I assume you were talking about, but I can sympathize with them to some extent, because there are times that the Apple fans look like a bunch of loud mouth elitists, who are ironically acting sheepish themselves. That's not to put down all Apple users, it's just that sometimes I'd be willing to go blow up Apple HQ, and suffer the collateral damage of lossing Apple, if just to shut up the few that make the most noise.