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:benchmarks; can't live with or without them...

[Anonymous Coward]

People obviously shouldn't form an opinion on a new platform in the first week following its much hyped anouncement.

Of course they should. That opinion is perfectly valid. And it is, "Wow. Those are going to be really fast. They look cool. I'm excited."

Or else, why would these PC-centric doofus post early benchmarks and make asses out of themselves if not to try to defuse an apparent threat?

In my experience, PC doofuses have always been big with the benchmarks. It's like a bragging right to them. "I tweaked my dual Smockron 4500 and got it up to 313.3 on SPECdickweed_base!"

Meanwhile, us Mac doofuses (and I use the term with the greatest affection) spend that same time actually working. Because we need the extra cash to feed our $4000-a-year Mac habit.

What I want are options.

Oh, come on now. No you don't. What you really want is a computer that satisfies all of whatever your personal criteria for goodness are. If there were only one computer in the world but it were perfect, you'd be happy.

The whole "what we really want is choice" thing just ain't so.

Re:This is worse than political campaigning...

[Maelikai]

ahem... the Dell wasn't running Logic.

Re:I need a G5 to keep track of all the claims

[Anonymous Coward]

The dimms used are standard 64bit parts, so you need a matched pair for 128-bit access. muchlike an i875 chipset needs dimms to be added as identical pairs.

Re:No Appropriate Fortran compiler

[Jeremy Erwin]

Why don't you read the benchmarks before speculating? Some of the benchmarks are written in Fortran 90. Neither f2c nor g77 (available from fink) support this code, so Apple used NAG Fortran f95 v4.2

Yes, there is a GNU Fortran95 compiler, but it's "in a pupal state."