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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.'"
These benchmarks don't matter, everyone on Slashdot is just going to say that they're fixed anyways. That or irrelevant.
I am unamerican, and proud of it!
Except that of course, nobody makes games for Apple. Wait, I hear that Duke Nukem 3D is going to be released in a special SMP-enhanced, G5-only version!!!
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
hahaha! Intel sucks and so does Windows ,AMD is the king!
Honestly, who cares about Apple benchmarks? The only people that believe them are Apple enthusiasts and Jeff Goldblum, everyone else knows that it has been a long long time since Apple has had comparable speeds to wintel hardware. People don't buy Apple because it's fast, they buy it because its cute, allegedly easier to use, or because of blind fanaticism.
Um... Quake 3 came out on mac first... we have all the important games. Doom 3 will also be on mac, other games on pc that are actually worth playing are few and far between. PC players get a few FPS's and hardcore strategy games mac users don't, so what?
Consoles more than makeup for the shortfall, and can be had for little more than the cost of a few games. The number of pc games will decrease as the number of consoles increase, get used to it, pc AND mac users will soon be looking at gaming from the outside.
"Smokey, this isn't Nam, there are rules." -Walter
I have a sneaking suspicion for the price of a fully tricked out dual G5 mac I could build a very nice dual Opteron rig that would squash it. Not to mention I would have my choice of os to run on it, winxp 64, linux, bsd etc.
My patience is infinite, my time is not.
"The Mac is easier to use."
AFAIK, there are no actual studies that prove this (except an Apple-sponsored Gartner study that was recalled by Gartner), so this is a 100% subjective thing. Also, I'm already familiar with Windows, thus better "ease of use" means nothing to me.
"Now it's also as fast (or significantly FASTER) the the PC."
We've seen benchmarks from one company, Apple. Well, by your logic, AMD's Athlon XP 3200+ is signifigantly faster than the P4 3.2ghz. We all know how false that is. Apple's released SPECMarks don't impress me. On single processor tasks (e.g. 90% of all code), in integer mode (also 90% of code), even Apple's benchmarks say that the PC is faster. Apple only wins in the rates and in fp. If you have nice, multithreaded code, and code that requires lots of fp, you might see a benefit... or not. Apple's benchmarks use GCC; most production code will use the faster ICC. As better compilers emerge for the PPC970, the gap between optimized PC performance (over 1000 in the specints vs. ~800 on the dual G5) may shrink or even reverse, but there is no telling how long that will take.
So, "Just As Fast" or "Faster" is an extremely dubious claim to be making now.
"It runs all the commercial apps you need."
Sonic Foundry Vegas 4? Acid Pro? Sound Forge? Paint Shop Pro?
These are the tools I use regularly. They happen to be considerably cheaper than the Mac equivilents. And they fit my workflow.
Is there commercial software for the Mac? Yes. Is it "all I need"? Not even remotely.
"It can emulate proprietary in-house apps with VirtualPC."
Well, yeah, but then you need a Virtual PC license and a Windows license.
"It can play all the latest games, even if they laga couple months (get a PS2, also!)."
Hmmmm... I don't think so. "All the latest games" is a very strong claim. One that I doubt you can back up. All means everything.
"It's UNIX under the hood and runs X11 for added compatability."
It's UNIX under the hood. Wow. That's some kind of a great feature, I'm sure. For POSIX compliance, Windows has cygwin. I can even run KDE under Win32. And you can always run Linux on a PC... or a Mac.
"All of this, and it's not any more expensive than comparable PC hardware."
Bzzzt.... wrong answer. Maybe if you compare to Xeon, but Xeon is extremely overpriced. Apple's $2000 G5 (1x1.6ghz G5, 256MB PC2700 DDR, GeForceFX 5200 64M, 80GB SATA HDD) is actually a mid-range PC.
A similar HP Pavilion (2.6Ghz P4, 256M PC2700 DDR, 80GB 7200rpm HDD, 4X DVD+R/RW, GeForceFX 5200 128M) is less than half the cost ($929.99). Faster Processor (Even if you go by Apple's FP numbers; the rates don't apply on 1P systems), same amount of memory, better GPU, and a similar HDD, and a DVD burner. And it's less than half as much.
So, equivalently priced, yet twice as expensive? Quite a contradiction here.
"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."
Your right, it is time to take an objective look. The numbers don't lie. Mac's are more expensive. The're more proprietary. They have less available software. And not even Apple's $3000 computer can beat a $1200 PC (that same Pavilion, with a 3Ghz P4) in SPECInt, by their own numbers. Apple's product is the same that it's always been - spectacularly marketed, overpriced, underperforming equipment. You might say that the're the BOSE of the computer industry.