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NASA Benchmarks the New G5 Powermac
sockit2me9000 writes "Well NASA's Langley Research Center recently benchmarked the new G5 dual 2ghz Powermac against a dual 1ghz Xserve, a dual 1.25 ghz Powermac, a Pentium4 2 ghz, and a Pentium4 2.66 ghz. To make things fair, the second processor in the G5 was switched off, as well as the other dual sysytems. Then, they all ran Jet3d. Even with un-optimized code and one processor, the G5 performance is impressive."
Because I have a strong feeling this is going to be asked:
;)
For those of you who were wondering, you too can switch off one of your Mac's dual CPU's with the Apple CHUD Tools. Look near the bottom of the page. It'll make you appreciate your second processor
Personally though, I want to see how well it runs Seti@Home.
Vonal Declosion
I hope they didn't use gcc (the yet-another free and hopeless compiler).
It should be noted that Apple uses gcc to compile Mac OS X and most of their applications, so it would be appropriate to use gcc on the G5. Intel's compiler might be a more appropriate choice for the Xeon.
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
More relevant, perhaps, are the figures in the raw MFLOPS graph:
Alas, difficulties in cross-platform benchmarking rear their ugly head:Scalar Code:
G4 using Absoft F90 v8: f90 -s -O -lU77 -N11
P4 using Portland Group F90 v4.0-3: pgf90 -byteswapio -tp p7 -O1
The author did apparently make an effort to use the compiler and flags best suited for each architecture if I read this correctly....
I don't know how much I trust NASA tho. Afterall, they only do RealMedia and WindowsMedia streaming media. Perhaps there's some bias there in favor of Windows (yes, I realize that the testbed P4 system ran Red Hat. Lighten up)
actually you only need 3 db to double the volume (which, btw, has little to do with loudness). and 1000 dBa is, I hope, impossible.
--[Nothing important]--
How about a more fair comparison? Namely, between similarly configured high-end single-processor systems:
Apple PowerMac G5:
1.8GHz PowerPC G5
250GB Serial ATA - 7200rpm
SuperDrive (DVD-R/CD-RW)
512MB DDR400 SDRAM (PC3200)
Mac OS X
AppleWorks
ATI Radeon 9800 Pro
56k V.92 internal modem
No Monitor
$2874
Dell Dimension XPS:
3.2GHz Pentium 4
200GB Ultra ATA - 7200rpm
DVD+RW/DVD+R/CD-RW
512MB DDR400 SDRAM
Microsoft® Windows® XP Professional w/ Microsoft® Plus!
Microsoft® Works Suite 2003
ATI Radeon 9800 pro
No Monitor
$3062
And if you are to believe the benchmarks, it seems that Apple is selling the faster system for a lesser price than a similarly configured Dell.
Apple has never competed at the low end. It is not starting now.
-Mike
Schrödinger's cat is not amused—maybe.
I recently got the chance to do a testrun, doing some airflow simulation on a G5 1.8GHz demo machine, and with altivec optimizations it clocked in at roughly 2100MFLOPS average for 5 runs(I could probably get better results with a better compiler though), while the dual Opteron 1.8(which the place where I did the testrun has bought 10 boxes of for their renderfarm), running Suse Linux, and my program re-compiled for x86-64 and SSE2 performed at about 2960MFLOPS average, but that could probably be improved with a better compiler too, but I had to use GCC at this time. Both machines had 4GB RAM btw.
Go back and read the article. You have no idea what you are saying.
1) One of the Mac's processors was disabled
2) 195.3% advantage was on an MFLOP/MHz basis
That is how they are comparing the architechture of the chip and it's performance outside of a MHz pissing race. They are in the same ballpark now MHz wise so why shouldn't they take a look at how the actual chip performs. Not to mention how much more will likely come out of the chip with maturing compilers to take advantage of the arch.
Bah!