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:I can't take it any longer..

[Anonymous Coward]

1: the on-stage demonstrations are meaningless
Nope. They are not conclusive, but unless you think apple was just playing trumped up movies, and somehow managed to get four different major software developers to somehow go along with it, I'd say we saw a pretty good indication of what we will see in some real world situations.

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.
Again, nope. Apple hired an independant benchmarking firm to test their machines against some others and fully disclose the methods and results. This puts them two steps up on most every other company's benchmarks that I've seen. If you don't agree with the methodology of the benchmarking, fine, but merely the fact that you have that information on the Apple sponsored tests should tell you that Apple is playing aboveboard.

I have yet to see one person argue that the numbers on the Intel/AMD machines were cooked who has actually recreated those tests, rather than just copied other numbers from some other company's benchmark, with undisclosed testing methodology. Arguing that the benchmarks are too low because the PC in question had the sound on while running Quake strikes me as silly.

OK, that's enough troll food for now.