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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.'"
I've been sitting here in front of a Mac (a new G5 dual 2GHz with AGP 8X and PCI-X) for about 20 minutes trying to install Star Control 2. 20 minutes. At home, on my Pentium Pro 200 running NT 4, which by all standards should be a lot slower than this Mac, the same operation would take about 2 minutes. If that.
In addition, during this file transfer, Netscape will not work. And everything else has ground to a halt. Even BBEdit Lite is straining to keep up as I type this.
I won't bore you with the laundry list of other problems that I've encountered while working on various Macs, but suffice it to say there have been many, not the least of which is I've never seen a Mac that has run faster than its Wintel counterpart, despite the Macs' faster chip architecture. My 486/66 with 8 megs of ram runs faster than this G5 dual 1.6GHz machine at times. From a productivity standpoint, I don't get how people can claim that the Macintosh is a superior machine.
Mac addicts, flame me if you'd like, but I'd rather hear some intelligent reasons why anyone would choose to use a Mac over other faster, cheaper, more stable systems.
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!
blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah
its still a dodgey benchmark. Just more crapple.
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.
G5s kick ass and Apple kicks ass! :)
"the results augur well for Apple G5 performance in technical and scientific computing environments and for playing games.'"
Playing games? Like Breakout, Super Breakout... or... Photoshop?
Escapism for Homosexuals that can't handle being gay.
Bottom line, wake up you Apple zealots there are NO games for your STINKIN' platform
hahaha! Intel sucks and so does Windows ,AMD is the king!
yeah.. but you'll always be a homosexual
If you had switched to pc, you would have been able to afford the upgrades and you would have had much faster hardware all along the way.
But why am i even talking to you? As a Apple owner, you've already proved that you can't do simple math.
-lack of games
-lack of game server browsing utilities
-lack of 3rd party gaming software (voice chat, map editors etc etc)
-lack of game server ports
-lack of timely released game patches/mods/drivers
-lack of compatible hardware gaming devices
-lack of support for said existing games
-lack of courage to bring your ugly G5 case to LAN
=lack of choice
here is my rant, it emerges after countless back button clicks prior to hitting the submit button on similar occasions
don?t get defensive and argue the point of the fact games do exist for the Mac, it is beyond me why they would even bother to advertise the mac as a quake 3 gaming machine
that is terrible, look at 3dmark top scores and argue its merits after that please, the fact of the matter is that owning a mac is too damn inconvenient if one of its primary purposes is to game. it is at best "making do" if you already have one but do not want to fork out the money for the mame version of PC.
the mac caters primarily to sectors of the industry where it already has a stronghold on the market
i.e. exclusive software titles
the fact Logic has gone mac only because of "instabilities" makes me sick, emagic recognizes that if they boast that mac is THE operating system for music production then their loyal customers will have no choice but to make the switch to an operating system where they already monopolize 75% of the market, whereas they were losing customers to the onslaught of emerging competitors in the windows environment. This is why the Industry standard is remaining the way it always has (GREED).
If everyone was computer savvy enough to properly configure their xp system (out with the bubble theme) they would find out that owning a windows system can be just as EASY and arguably stable as owning a mac, with no need to compromise when it comes to software/hardware.
If xp doesn?t fill the gap then *nix should, the spectrum should consist of black and white options if you want the standard in computing environments (my grandparents) you would chose windows as it is fairly stable with performance/compatibility/ease of use in mind. If configuration/stability is your forte then linux is the answer.
i wish someone could tell me why this isnt so, as i fail to see why a middle man exists. All current industry applications of the Mac could be done in linux with time and effort, hell i would be happy if windows was eliminated as well. As for computing environments linux possesses the most solid game plan, however because of windows being so widely adopted it is my current choice.
if you ask me all you mac fans have been
a) tainted by windows 98(with a good reason)and are too stubborn to give anything else a chance
or b) your eyes are so deteriorated from those 8" looking screens that it would be too much of a blow to your self esteem if you bothered to switch
and as for vulnerabilities when it comes to windows yes win32 software is typically much more vulnerable to virii and exploitation, this is however driven by incredibly short product life cycles brought on by the fact it is a closed source community and we are capitalists.
this weak software is targeted by the average malicious computer user who wouldn?t want to target something that isn?t the standard and thereby decrease their pool of victims, also it is worth noting these same people are quite typically the very same that learn to code in windows/know their prey.
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'm sorry, I'm just too used to the right click.
"its easier to use" yea? so is basic math. Unfortunatly to do anything in the REAL world you need something more than addition and subtraction.
Its kind of interesting, actually, because where I work there are a lot of windows advocates and a lot of Linux advocates (myself included). The one thing we can all agree on is that Apple blows.
The laptops look like barbie's makeup kit, not to mention the price.
And has anyone else noticed that they are getting significantly worse than Microsoft? Picture a world where Apple ruled. All hardware, all IM agents, browsers, film production.. pretty much everything is made by Apple. At least MS lets OEMs sell hardware that can run their OS.
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.