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."

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NASA Verifies Apple Benchmarks?

[Dak RIT]

Though dual processor benchmarks are not presented in detail here, it is worth noting that the G5 system benchmarked at 498 MFLOPS and 0.125 MFLOPS/MHz for scalar Jet3D performance when two processors were used.

By adding a second processor, the MFLOPS/Mhz output only dropped from 0.127 to 0.125 MFLOPS/Mhz. This chip can definitely perform in a multi-processor environment. The P4 scored 0.096 MFLOPS/MHz with a single processor.

Apple's benchmarks which were highly criticized by some, gave the Dual 2GHz Power Mac G5 a 194.5% performance advantage over a 3GHz P4 in SPECfp_rate_base2000. The G5 getting a score of 15.7, and the P4 getting an 8.07.

NASA's study found the Dual 2GHz Power Mac G5 to score 498 MFLOPS for their Jet3D performance. A P4 running at 2.66GHz scored 255 MFLOPS: a 195.3% performance advantage for the G5 in this test. If we assume a direct correlation between MHz and MFLOPS for the P4 (which would actually overstate the performance of the P4) and increase the P4's score by 12.782% this would give the 3GHz P4 a score of 287.594 MFLOPS. This is still a 173.16% performance advantage for the G5, and NASA states that a 20% increase in performance for the G5 would be reasonable "when G5-aware compiler tools become available."

So it would seem NASA's benchmarks go a long way in validating the benchmarks for the G5 that Apple released last month at the WWDC. In fact, NASA appears to be giving the G5 even better scores than Apple and Veritest did.

The vector tests that NASA performed to test the G5's AltiVec instruction set produce some even more impressive results, and would be a good indication for why the G5 outpaced the Xeon and P4 by such dramatic amounts on real world tests (at times more than 700% faster than a 3GHz P4). "The vector version of Jet3D runs an order of magnitude faster than the scalar version (speedups of 10X-13X are typical)." The dual 2GHz G5 was benchmarked at 5177 MFLOPS (a 1040% increase over the scalar test) and 1.29 MFLOPS/MHz. This also seems accurate considering Ars Technica's claim that the AltiVec engine wasn't as well integrated into the G5 as it was in the G4. The 2GHz G5 (single cpu) scored 2755 MFLOPS, or 1.378 MFLOPS/MHz, which shows a slightly larger performance hit for vector operations than floating point operations when moving to a dual G5.

Dak

Interesting Thought

[ciroknight]

Apple has been making better software for years, everyone agrees; They just never had the hardware to back them up. Then every time they do crop up with better hardware, everyone criticizes them and says that it's just not possible, PC hardware is always better they say. But now they've proven you wrong... TWICE, and some trolls STILL don't believe them. It's a sad world. I just wish Apple would open up at least their motherboards a little more, make Macs more customizable, more like PC's so they can start dominating again.

There's also one benchmark I'de love to see. Power Mac G5 vs Sun UltraSPARC III. It's fair: they're both 64-bit procs, and it would really make people look at it in businesses that only look at supercomputers as viable. Then maybe people would start giving Apple and IBM some credit.

My 2 cents (Canadian). Thanks.

MFLOPS per $

[mgkimsal2]

Why not show an mflops/$ chart? Related to my 'cost' post as well, but I felt it deserved its own post. :)

This seems to confirm my belief that most mac people don't buy their own hardware, but get it through work or school.

Re:Turn the optimizations on first.

[dhovis]

I think the thing that most people on /. seem to keep missing is this: MacOS X and Linux both use GCC as their primary compiler. The Linux kernel is compiled with GCC, as is Darwin. Most software for each platform is compiled with GCC.

Now, with all these Linux-heads around here insisting that Linux is faster than Windows on x86, you'd think GCC for x86 might be a good compiler. Certainly the SPEC tests Apple (and Veritest) did with GCC on the G5 with OS X and the dual Xeon Dell with Red Hat had to have been a valid comparison between those two situations.

I also keep seeing all these comparisons to Dell computers without full specs of the Dell. The base configurations for the PowerMac G5 is positively loaded. How many $500 Dells come with Gigabit Ethernet? How many have the same level of engineering into the thermal managment?

Only time will tell for sure. In the mean time, remember that IBM will be producing blade systems with the 970. We'll get a chance to compare those as well eventually.