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G5 Benchmark Roundup
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.'"
That Charlie White gets off on doing nothing more than trashing the Mac and he often makes tons of things up...
A real good point, and one to points to the fact that Charlie White stats are COMPLETELY cooked up and fake, is that apparently AMD benchmarked against a SINGLE G5 2Ghz Powermac...
Hmm... Where did the Single 2ghz G5 Powermac come from? We know Apple doesn't make them...
If you're gonna lie, at least do it right. Sigh.
(And another thing, AMD has more credibility than Apple regarding self-reported benchmark scores? There is no reason for that other than bias.)
Right! He obtained them.
It's a biased opinion piece. Now I'm aware that Apple kick-started the G5 with lots of smoke, which is the nature of the business in the computer hardware world, but to discount these numbers just because of some hype during WWDC presentation is silly.
How about we wait for the REAL benchmars from Anandtech and put away some speculation from webmasters who can't even hire anyone older than 14y/olds to design their websites?
Probably because we're still talking about prerelease hardware. The Veritest results are reliable, but they're not necessarily going to be perfectly representative of what you'll see in production hardware running the final build of 10.2.7.
Apple will submit figures to SPEC when they've got final hardware and software.
Looking at everything I've seen so far, it looks like the G5 at 2.0 GHz is comparable to a current Xeon or P4 on raw speed. Maybe it lags a little bit in some areas, and in a few areas it can beat the Xeon or P4. But I think we've gotten a little too anal about the processor specs. If I'm not mistaken, Apple didn't claim "World's Fastest Processor." they claimed "World's Fastest Personal Computer."
At 2.0 GHz, the G5 is on par with the current top processors, but what I think people need to look at is that the 1GHz bus is a monster. It allows data transfer rates that smoke other desktop systems. This is where Apple picks up a lot of speed, especially with disk-hungry programs like Photoshop. So the total system is significantly faster than the PC in terms of that kind of real-world performance.
And there are two more things that give the G5 an advantage: price and GHz. If the claim of twelve months to 3.0GHz is true, then at 3.0GHz the G5 will be exponentially faster than a 3.5 or 3.6 GHz P4. I don't know precisely how fast the Intel chips will be in 12 months, but a whole GHz? Unlikely.
Lastly, price is a fantastic advantage for the G5 systems. At $3000 you can buy the fastest Mac and a machine that can run certain apps twice as fast as PC systems. And it's cheaper than these top-of-the-line PCs by more than $1000. The G5 is simply the fastest, cheapest system with the most potential in the future to get even faster. When looked at in total, there really isn't a lot of debate on those points.
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.
They showed four top-shelf apps: Photoshop, Mathematica, Emagic, and one other I'm spacing on. In each case the apps were not demoed by mac but rather by someone from the app company. And the examples they gave were clearly practical ones not special cases noone would actually want to do. In the case of Photoshop it was actually a commerical product (movie poster) that was recreated by replaying the artists commands. In the case of the Emagic it was the compositing of the actual musical composition that the musician had done. In the case of mathematical it was the calcualtion of a fractal curve: theodore grey pointed out they had to dumb down the calculations so they xeon would not run out of memory.
in all cases the Apple ran more than 2X faster than the Xeon.
now you could try to say these were tweaked apps, but that wont wash. these are pro-sumer apps that these comanies sell for a living. you better believe that would optimize the heck out of both the wintel and Apple versions. Certianly, if there was any tewaking tobe done they had lots of time and no shortage of manpower and experts to do it on the intel instruction set. Another test they did not demo live was the 40% higher frame rate in Quake
If all they had shown was some single case like photshop or Quake I might have been less convinced. but here are five different genres of applications, in the most demanding fields of Imagery, music, (real world) numerical math, Gaming and others. Okay so your application--say MS word or web browsing--isn't so demanding. That's not the pointis it: you aren't doing things where the machine is the speed limit.
I think its pretty reasonable to assume that over time compilers for the new G5 will imporve more that those for the i86 instruction set since there's new things to exploit. Likewise relatively few compilers do a good job of taking fulladvantage of the Altivec extensions yet. And with the fat, independent pipes to disk, and memory apps will need to be re-written since many of the old bottlenecks they were designed to avoid aren't there anymore
So argue all you want about SPEC tests, but were taking shaving ten or 20 minutes per hour of real world usages. Its phenomenal. In my opinion the diveristy of tests clearly shows the mac is not only the fasest currently on-sale platform, but that there is not even any wiggle room to doubt that.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
now, how come everyone is just focusing on SPEC benchmarks?! which compiler, what options were set, etc.?!
i saw the keynote, they had photoshop/mathmatica/etc. going on there... photoshop has been out on PC for a while... REALLY enhanced with MMX/SSE/SSE2... and it probably was using the intel compiler... but the G5 version was only a few months old, barely optimized, and using whatever tools apple gave them (probably GCC 3.3)... and the G5s still kicked a lot of ass.
benchmarks are important but it's not my job. if i can get shit done faster in photoshop with BSD guts, i'm all for it.
fuck the benches. welcome to the REAL world...
I think its pretty reasonable to assume that over time compilers for the new G5 will imporve more that those for the i86 instruction set since there's new things to exploit.
Actually from an optomization standpoint x86 is pretty new too. What you need to do for Pentium IV (pre HyperThreading) is very different than what is needed for Pentium III and different from what is needed for PIV w/ HT. Further the complexity is so great that compiler science of today is really not up to the task.
Conversely the G5 is much simplir problem due to better design. OTOH it also much newer. It may be that in practice (especially when people are willing to lose 32 bit and/or G3 compatability) you might get some truly wonderful improvement.
So I'm really not sure where there is more room for improvement over time. I just don't think its nearly as easy to say as you had it in the above. In my opinion its going to come down to a political choice regarding the G3s vs. advances in compiler technology.
Because the first thing my Mom does when she buys a new computer is to run over to the SPEC website and check their numbers.
At this point, does it really matter if Intel, AMD, or Apple is the slightly faster computer?
They're all extremely fast and all run one or more UNIX-like Operating Systems (Linux or BSD or OSX). For the Slashdot crowd, Windows is an afterthought, but I'll mention it as well.
What a person decides to buy is not going to be based on speed anymore. All of the fastest current machines will blaze playing Quake 3 or UT2003.
People who buy Macs may enjoy the speed, but that's not why they buy them. They buy them because they're cool, the have a really nice, easy-to-use, elegant OS that allows them to be productive. Also, they can use the commercial applications (Photoshop, Office, Filemaker, etc) they need on a stable, reliable UNIX platform.
Linux/BSD users have a very different set of criteria. They're looking for cheap, super-secure, stable, configurable or some other particular criteria, but are not particularly concerned with the UI experience or with running commercial desktop applications.
Windows users are a different group too. They want to run their commercial and vertical applications. They are not looking at Linux or Mac because their apps are not there.
That's why there's not a lot of crossover right now between Mac and Intel/AMD. The audience is just different. Thanks to things like Lindows, there may be some Windows->Linux crossover, but this too is pretty small.
- Vincit qui patitur.
ahem... the Dell wasn't running Logic.
It's not always the cycles, it's how they're spread around and how you use them.
I still have an original 25MHz NextStation. CPU is a Moto 68040, plus (Intel?) Digital Signal Processing (DSP) chip that does (most of?) the rendering for both the display and the laser printer.
Back in 1999 I compared this box in actual usability with a Mac Powerbook 5300, admittedly the slowest and lamest PPC Mac ever built.
I found that in general usage, opening windows, updating display, doing word processing, etc., the NeXT outran the PB 5300.
Compiling speed sucked big time. Stuff that took a few minutes on the PB5300 ran overnight on the NeXTstation. This demonstrated to me the advantage of having a display coprocessor.
The user interface was also better by far than the Mac that stage. I used several 3rd party enhancements, such as one that provided an infinite-size virtual window, so it's not a completely fair comparison. The NeXT also scame with a bunch of cool apps, like Mathematica, Webster's, Lotus Improv (completely unique approach to spreadsheets, so far unduplicated.)
Most impressive thing about the NextStation was the industrial design. It is still the most elegant design I have ever seen in a desktop computer. For example, the ribbon cables from the mainboard to the floppy and the disk are about 1.5 inches each - just a 90 degree curve, essentially. Those are the only wires inside the box!
I've still got the NeXT, though it's back in the original boxes. I'll probably sell it eventually. I've also got three Perq workstations from 1982-3, but I haven't benchmarked them.
It's worth noting that NextStep's complete object integration across all apps was cited as a major inspiration for Tim Berners-Lee's original proposal for the World Wide Web. In fact, I even have a running copy of that first version of TBL's code, called (surprisingly) "WWW".
It's easier to be a result of the past, but more fun to be a cause of the future! http://www.spacefinancegroup.com/
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."
I stopped reading the article when I got to the subtitle where it refers to Apple as a "Cupertino Fruit Company." Look, Mr. White, if you aren't even going to show any respect at all and even mock one of the companies in your so called comparison, how do you expect anyone to take you're evaluation seriously?
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