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Apple Issues New G5 Benchmarks
rocketjam writes "According to an article in The Register, Apple has issued SPEC benchmarks for the new dual G5 2GHz machines, comparing it to a two-way Dell Xeon and a 3Ghz Pentium 4 machine. The article says the G5 lagged behind the Dells in integer performance, however in 'the parallel "rate" benchmarks, which tax both of the CPUs in the test machines, the G5 edged out the Xeon 17.2 to 16.7 in the integer score and 15.7 to 11.1 in the floating point tests, suggesting Apple makes far better use of its two CPUs than the Xeon machine....the results augur well for Apple G5 performance in technical and scientific computing environments and for playing games.'"
Far more interested in the progress and development of AMD's Opteron line than all this G5 stuff? I mean, dont misunderstand. I'm excited about desktop 64 bit computing, but I really dont want to be locked into a whole platform. These benchmarks really say to me that the G5 is ok, a little better, but you've gotta go all apple to get it.
Just my pennies.
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I don't know if you can make the argument that "makes better use of dual CPUs" translates to "better performance at playing games." The few Opteron benchmarks I've seen have shown that it makes *much* better use of multiple CPU than the Xeons, but still lags behind single CPU system for game playing, due to the fact that dual CPUs provide little to no benefit in current games, and the SMP overhead actually reduces perfromance.
Their benchmarks won't mean a thing if there's a shortage of titles for the platform and everyone buys a PC anyway. I'd love to have one of these machines, I am sure I could find some cool things to do with it. But for the price of admission, there's not enough titles out there to make spending the extra $$$ on the hardware worth it.
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Another apple benchmark that shows intel machines running strangely slower then everybody else's benchmarks, with even fewer details then the last time we read this story. Wake me up when there's a real independent review of the state-of-the art on both systems. I wouldn't mind seeing an opteron in the mix also.
Could it be that the the operating system plays a role in the results? With data that close, can it really be conclusively said that the Apple hardware is faster?
Windows never really has been that efficient in a dual processor situation.
Well, a fast CPU certainly doesn't do any harm, but a lot of games these days are bound by either processing geometry on the GPU or by memory bandwidth for texture lookups.
Few games are multithreaded, so having two processors isn't such an advantage.
Still, I wouldn't turn one down.
Why is Apple comparing the G5 to Xeons and P4s? Shouldn't they be pitting their super 64-bit processor against other 64-bit CPUs like Opteron and Madison?
The topic Icon depicts a G4 when the topic is clearly about the G5.
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Gee, I could compare the latest, fastest Dell with one that will ship 6 months from now and the one that will ship 6 months from now will win!
They are irrelevant.
.mp3's really doesn't matter. Photoshop benchmarks? People who are going to be using photoshop professionally have most likely already decided whether or not they're going to buy an Apple. Even if the G5 was undeniably faster by a great margain, I doubt that fact would sell more than a few hundred units. However Apple, look at your site. You're still selling Powermac G4's for considerably less than the G5's. So I want to know how it compares to the G4. Because most of your sales aren't going to be from people who want to buy the fastest desktop computer. It's going to be from people who want to buy the fastest Apple.
DISCLAIMER: I am a fan of apple. I'm typing this on an iBook.
Apple's been pissing me off with the advertising of the G5. All these benchmarks are just plain stupid. They compare it to Pentium 4, Xeon, whatever. Guess what Apple, you forgot a processor. The G4. Really, tell me, inform me as to who is currently torn between a 3GHz Dell and a Dual 2GHz Apple, and needs to know which one is faster. To 99.99% of the market, a few seconds difference encoding
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I think we've been through this before.
If you want to test relative compiler technology, you use the fastest compiler for each platform. If you want to test the platform itself, you use software which is as close to identical between platforms as possible. Hence, gcc.
Pretty basic experimental technique is at work here.
ar more interested in the progress and development of AMD's Opteron line than all this G5 stuff? I mean, dont misunderstand. I'm excited about desktop 64 bit computing, but I really dont want to be locked into a whole platform.
You don't want to be "locked in" to the G5, so you'd rather be locked in to the Opteron? The only company that makes AMD Opterons is AMD. This does not make sense...
Why is Apple going to run around saying how incredibly slow the systems are that they were selling a month ago? What sense does that make for them? If you have a burning desire to see how the G4 does against the G5, wait until Macworld runs some Photoshop tests. And why are you complaning that they are making legit (or at least more legit than the old Photoshop bakeoffs) advertisements that the G5 is faster than Intel's processors?
Your neighbour of course. The guy who brags about his $5K new ultra-fast machine which will bring his to new heights of web-surfing, tax-crunching and e-mail-sending pleasure.
Oh, and people who do a lot of video encoding. If I can encode my video at 35fps instead of 29 fps, that is a large difference. It gives me more time to make sure I have tweaked all the settings nicely to give the best encode for the filesize.
"Even if the G5 was undeniably faster by a great margain, I doubt that fact would sell more than a few hundred units."
They already have 100,000 pre-orders. Of course I don't expect this rate of orders to stay steady. If you look at military enrollment statistics in Canada (and probably other countries affiiated with Britain) during the first world war, there was a large wave of fanatics joining in at the beginning and then reality set in and the numbers became more realistic.
"So I want to know how it compares to the G4. Because most of your sales aren't going to be from people who want to buy the fastest desktop computer. It's going to be from people who want to buy the fastest Apple."
I'm not entirely sure what you're implying here. Are you saying that the G4 might be faster than the G5? I find that hard to believe.
Btw: One thing that almost makes me cry is that the FSB on the 2 GHz G5 machines is faster than the CPU clock speed of my iBook. (Sniffle ... )
However, the nature of SPEC is that you perform your own tests and submit them. You certainly should not be performing any other manufacturers tests for them...
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Apple's Marketing department needs to show television commercials showing how EASY it is to network their computers to existing Windows and Linux corporate networks and continue running in the event of a virus/worm breakout in the Wintel world. Apple needs to show some compatibility with its computers if they ever intend on selling more units to new customers. Apple needs to show that its computers offer LOWER COST OF OWNERSHIP for many computing environments. I simply don't understand why Apple can't grow a spine and show a hint of agressive advertising. Apple has a really good product, both hardware and software, but people aren't going to buy their computers unless they know they aren't going to be stranded ALONE in the computing world when a slight hiccup occurs with hardware or software. One of my friends who works in business management put it like this: "I'm worried about support for software and hardware. Nobody uses Apples in business because they're not supported". While I disagree partially with my friend's statement, there is a little truth to it. If Apple's in the computer business to make money, it better start showing ADVANTAGES of its products compared to the DISADVANTAGES of competition, otherwise no one will notice their product offerings. With The Borg's long history of patches for its products not doing a very good job of protecting the security of networks, email, documents, etc... Apple could begin with an advertisement detailing those advantages.
Well, when you have Photoshop, GoLive, Illustrator, BBEdit, iTunes, Mail, iChat, Safari, Mozilla, RBrowser, MacCVS, etc all open the same time... second processor becomes very very handy.
I typically never noticed the benefits of an MP box until I start doing web development or design on a single processor system. There are noticeable delays when switching between tasks... even on a fast machine.
But, hey, Apple has been selling MP boxes for years now. There are a lot of applications and games that take advantage of SMP on OSX.
Buying an MP system from Apple was the best thing I ever did. My Dual 450 g4 still feels like new to me (as long as I'm not playing games)... even with modern software.
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While most of us use the x86 architecture, both Windows and Linux run happily on a couple different processors, so we're not really "locked in" by conventional proprietary semaphores. This is more a matter of economics; the x86 is cheap, powerful and prolific, so it's what we use. We're far from "locked in" though.
you're an idiot. it is quite obvious the 1.6 g5 is the slowest machine in this test. Who cares if it has the 2nd most benchmark wins? that's only because the fastest p4 beats the other machines on tests that it would've beaten the g5. Try adding up all the times to get a better picture.
I want to see Dual G5 vs. Dual Opteron, now *thats* a comparison :)
I have to agree, the multiple processor systems rock. I have a dual 1Ghz MDD machine, near the end of the line for the old G4 architecture (it's the last gen that can boot OS 9 natively, supposedly) and it is quite zippy. Don't underestimate the usefulness of dual processors. I use the old dead freeware gadget "Cycles" to watch both G4s in separate graphs, it's interesting seeing each processor's load. Apps like VPC monopolize one CPU for emulation, and offload OS and screen drawing tasks on the other processor. Some apps really max out everything, like Cleaner 6 or DVD Studio Pro, you can be up to about 98% CPU utilization on both processors, but the system is still responsive enough to toss it in the background and run other hefty apps, the main app will behave nicely and give up CPU cycles. My G4 CPU has improved memory bus bandwidth which made a really obvious improvement in performance doing tasks like encoding that are both I/O intensive and CPU-intensive. But the G5's memory bandwidth looks like it is at least 10x what my G4 can do.
And there's one thing I think people haven't noticed. I looked at Shake 3 and Final Cut Pro, they use a new networked clustering controller called QMaster. It is a new background system service for rendering video out of Shake or FCP Compressor. You can control a whole render farm of Macs from your workstation with QMaster. This doesn't have to be a rack of XServes, it could just be the regular macs around the office. I think Apple's moving to a more networked, distributed processing model, this could be an incredible increase in computing power.
At the most, MacPlay and Aspyr lag 2 years. To be honest, if it's that long they rarely ship with all the problems the PC version did. Obviously I'd like simultaneous release, which Blizzard has always done, but you can't have everything.
The Mac is easier to use. Now it's also as fast (or significantly FASTER) the the PC. It runs all the commercial apps you need. It can emulate proprietary in-house apps with VirtualPC. It can play all the latest games, even if they laga couple months (get a PS2, also!). It's UNIX under the hood and runs X11 for added compatability. All of this, and it's not any more expensive than comparable PC hardware.
It's time to take an objective look at these systems if you're in the market for a new machine. Just take a look. If you don't like it, then don't buy it... but the Mac is a VERY viable platform these days. More so now than ever.
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the G5 edged out the Xeon 17.2 to 16.7 in the integer score and 15.7 to 11.1 in the floating point tests, suggesting Apple makes far better use of its two CPUs than the Xeon machine
Edging out now implies that it's far better?
Simply put.
Please, be my guest and spec out a (comparable!) dual-opteron or a dual-Xenon system with AGP 8x Pro, 1 GHz FSB, 3 PCI-X slots, FireWire, USB, Optical Audio, SATA, DDR400 (8 slots, 2 GB DIMM support), ATI Radeon 9600 Pro, a 56k modem, AirPort Antenna, Bluetooth, a spacious aluminum case, quality power unit, and a CD-RW/DVD-R system for $3000. Don't forget the operating system as well (sure, you can compile Linux from the ground up for it, but I consider my time to be valuable).
That is what you get if you buy a mac for $3000.
If you aren't willing to spend $3000 on a computer, you aren't going to get the highest-end mac that you can buy. Period. Yet that is what you seem to be specifying.
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Not always. If the $500 I spend today lasts for one year, but the $800 I could have spent would have lasted two, it's better to spend the $800.
My Dell is a about 18 months old and I'm considering a replacement; the sum total of upgrades I'd have to buy to keep it going make it attractive to just replace the box. My year-old iMac is going strong, and the late-2000 Cube is still playing all the games I've bought recently.
YMMV of course, but the numbers I've seen for businesses (which jibe with my personal experience) show that Apples stay in service more than twice as long, with fewer service calls. There's more to consider when calculating cost than just the sticker price.
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