G5 Benchmark Roundup

"The G5 is the fastest PC in the world." "Yes, it is." "No, it's not!" Whatever. Read on for more on the subject, if you really want to. Matt Johnson writes "Well it looks like we finally have our first comparison of G5 vs. AMD Opteron, completed by none other than Charlie White, the individual which gained much oh his fame by publishing misleading benchmarks to make Apple's Final Cut Pro Software look like a bad performer. Mr. White's latest comparison shows the Opteron operating roughly 50% faster but what he doesn't say is which compiler was used to generate those SPEC scores. When Apple declared its benchmarks I feared that whoever made the first comparison would likely make this mistake. It seems only appropriate that Charlie White would be first."

An anonymous reader writes "In an ironic twist to the recent benchmark wars, Intel referred the Mac site MacFixIt to an analyst at Gartner Group who actually backed the PowerPC G5 platform with this assertion: 'These models certainly equal Intel's advanced 875 platform and should allow Apple to go until 2005 without a major platform refresh.'"

Another anonymous user writes, "While browsing the Xbench benchmark comparison site, I discovered some G5 benchmarks! The 'G5 Lab Machine at WWDC' got an overall score of 164.78, but much higher scores in certain areas. All of the tests are calibrated to give 100 on an 800MHz DP Quicksilver G4."

vitaboy writes "Sound Technology, one of the "leading UK distributors specialising in musical instruments, music software and pro-audio equipment," seems to have some data regarding the real-world performance of the G5 compared to the high-end PC. They state, 'The dual 2GHz Power Mac G5 with Logic Platinum 6.1 can play 115 tracks, compared with a maximum of 35 tracks on the Dell Dimension 8300 and 81 tracks on the Dell Precision 650 each with Cubase SX 1.051 ... More impressively, the 1.6GHz single-processor Power Mac G5 played 50 percent more tracks than the 3GHz Pentium 4-based system.'"

Comments

Re:Can't find SPEC results at spec.org for Apple??

[Anonymous Coward]

Because then they couldn't dumb down the other PC's SPEC scores and make them look worse - they'd be up there compared to the best PC performers, and the macs would finally be decent performers, but still slower across the board. Same reason there were never any G4 scores up there.

Duh. ;)

I can't take it any longer..

[7-Vodka]

Every post I have read so far is by someone who's obviously on crack.

I didn't know there were so many mac enthusiasts so completely mislead.
I too was salivating at the G5 stuff. I too was mislead by all the apple stuff on launch day. But geez. get a clue.

1: the on-stage demonstrations are meaningless
I've seen perpetual motion machines convincingly demonstrated on stage, surprise surprise they didn't work. I've seen david copperfield on stage to and it really looked like he was flying

2: It should be very clear by now that while apple didn't lie about their machine's spec scores, they totally fucked the other machines they used as comparisons.

I guess they figured it was easier to make other spec scores lower and not get caught then to inflate theirs. Oh well, that's apple for you. The one that really got to me was the quake3 score. Their 300 something fps is probably true, but the intel machine they say gets low 300's, actually gets high 400's.

What I don't get is why apple has to make statements like "worlds fastest PC" and "worlds first 64bit PC". I mean shit, it's actually neither. Why not just publish their benchmarks and let them stand on their own merit. After all, their machine is fast enough to please most people. Why do they have to 'conduct' their own intel benchmarks and compare?

If you're buying an apple, you're not doing it for price/performance or even just performance, you're doing it because you like OS10 and you like mac hardware.

Editor Moron: The base SPEC marks: tsarkon reports

[Anonymous Coward]

The base spec mark is very conservatively compiled, the peak is more of the all out see if you can "cheat" with the compiler. The official published results, something Apple hasn't done, very clearly discloses peak tweaks. And Opteron uses the FUCKING INTEL COMPILER to get its maximum SPEC mark. He got the fucking numbers from the published results at www.spec.org / www.specbench.org . Why don't you try reading the tests on specbench.org and ask yourself this. Why the fuck has Apple NEVER published results there? Huh? Maybe you should look at this for a little clarity, asshole. Or this, a blinding SPEC_fp score.

Why are you stupid Mac zealots unable to accept that the G5 is a fucking farce and a lie, just as everything Apple has done in the way of performance since the days when the machines were truly more interesting the PC. Talk about riding your apron string on your dollar, zealots.

Why not talk about POWER 4+ or the upcoming POWER 5, accept that a piece of shit OS like OS X will never run on hardware of that power level, and move on with life. The best CPU for the buck and the best 4, 2 and 1 way systems will be Opteron for some time to come. You guys are like Intel pissing on the Opteron. Big marketing machines discrediting superior technology by pointing out corner cases and lying about benchmarks to look better.

FreeBSD or die - fo shizzle the nizzle biznatch fat sexless live in basement of parents jobless zealots.

Moderation: -1, true

[Anonymous Coward]

OMG! Can't point out when Apple's lying about stuff! That's bad, and must be moderated down so that people can't see it!

Re:benchmarks, stenchmarks

[RzUpAnmsCwrds]

Don't bet on it for long. There are now PowerPC emulators that can run Linux PPC. It's only a matter of time before there is a PPC mac emulator.

OK, it's not really "running" Mac OS X, but you get the point.