Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
...first post.
;)
See, the benchmarks weren't faked all along
Comment removed based on user account deletion
what does auger mean in this context. I was thinking he meant to type favor but the keys aren't even remotely in the same place...
not first post
I love the spin! It's like when apple said they had the first shipping 64bit desktops!
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.
I like it when results augur well.
Here.
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!
You know what I'm saying?
Awww, are you having a bad -1 day today?
According to Apple, in certain benchmarks, the G5 is faster than the NEC Earth Simulator.
blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah
its still a dodgey benchmark. Just more crapple.
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.
---
Jedimom.com, go banana!
StrategyTalk.com, PC Game Forums
Yes, but when are they gonna test it against the other noble gases?
Five bucks says Argon wipes the floor with the G5, :)
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.
Be excellent to each other. And... PARTY ON, DUDES!
Anyone got any Cheetos or Twinkies? I need to eat something now! Jesus K-Riste! Uh oh... I think I hear the cops outside my door...
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.
Would anyone who happens to be lucky enough to own a G5 like to comment on how much heat it puts out in comparison to say, a Xenon? Just looking at the case is seems as if Apple has taken great care to make it as quiet, as well as cool, however it seems that there is a lot of space in that case.
On the PC, very very few games take advantage of SMP. DirectX itself seems to make zero effort, and games seem to be starting the draw from the same thread that runs the rest of the game logic. At best, you benefit a little (almost immeasurably) on I/O handling or some of the audio processing.
Since SMP is more pervasive on Mac than on PC, do Mac games take more advantage of SMP? Does GL on the Mac render retained mode data outside of the calling thread or otherwise significantly distribute game-related work in the OS itself?
I've long since given up believing any Apple-published benchmarks. In over ten years of following Apple, I have yet to see even *one* benchmark that so much as tried to be fair. So I won't even read this benchmark -- why would it be any different than the last 50 dishonest benchmarks they've published?
What is really being tested here, I would imaging the test has to run on some OS, but how much is this benchmark effected by the OS?
These are the same numbers that have been up on Apple's G5 site for how long now? Since June or something? What are you people? Blind? Or just lazy. Wake me up when you get with the present. People have been arguing the validity and what not of these SPEC scores represent for months now.
Don't Ask Questions. I don't know the answers and even if I did I wouldn't tell you.
I'm posting this from my new G5 and if the benchmarks are true, then i should not fail it. In your face slower DELL first posters!
Hey wait a minute, this isn't first post!?
now is to be able to play Battlefield 1942 on OS X/Motorolla. I really like the OS X window manager and the fact that I wouldn't have to patch my system every time a new worm came out for wintel.
Is there some sort of free product like Wine for running wintel software on OS X?
More than enough BS
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.
Who ever said you cant learn something by reading slashdot..
Your goal today is to use the 'word of the day' at least 10 times today.
Tomrrow's word will be....
---- Booth was a patriot ----
After seeing the benchmarks for the G5's and AMD opterons I'm not really blown away by the speed, in most cases they are slower than todays 32 bit cpus. While the programs they are running are mostly 32 bit, I still don't see the need to upgrade unless you really need to have more memory (Ie CAD people and real big servers). It will be weird to keep the same cpu for 2 years...
Everyone that disagrees with me is a paid shill
G5s kick ass and Apple kicks ass! :)
Yes, games would be good on such a box if the vast majority of games were released to run on said box. With 90+% of the people running PC's, PC's will be where the games are found.
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
Don't the chaosmint show a bit of a different story from a real user?
In 'Time' magazine they have an ad every week on page 2, and this week it says the numbers are 16.9 against 16.7 for integer calculations and 15.8 against 11.1 for floating point calculations compared to a dual 3.06 GHz Xeon.
New year Resolution: Don't change sig this year
what? : )
no text
I hereby place the above post in the public domain.
Apple has issued a new release of the "Fastest Personal Computer" advertisement. The ad now reads "#1 Personal Computer Alphabetically". In a statement to the press, Apple CEO Steve Jobbs said, "Our engineers are considering alternative spellings such as Aaple in order to insure that we maintain this exciting edge in the Personal Computer marketplace."
Amazing magic tricks
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.
before some rigging of test discovered by someone, or dell comes up with his own benchmarks, stating that dell N times faster in this or that. Important thing what I can use this computer for.
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?
Test that computer or any of your generic dual-proc PC's against a Sun dual-proc Ultrasparc box and be prepared to cry. There's a reason that Sun's multiprocessor machines are expensive -- you get what you pay for.
stuff |
"the results augur well for Apple G5 performance in technical and scientific computing environments and for playing games."
:)
Right.. because of these tests every pc game developer is now going to make a port to MAC OS of all the games they are developing..
I can see that Apple wants to emphasize that this is one really fast PC, trying to prove it by using 'un-cheatable' numbers as opposed to marketing speech, but I really think they'd look even better if they'd do some comparisions that show what a bandwidth monster those G5s are, which I have been informed is the key to how those Xeons were crushed in the showdown at MW a while ago.
The topic Icon depicts a G4 when the topic is clearly about the G5.
From excellent karma to terible karma with a single +5 funny post...
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!
The Enquirer is getting ready to run pictures of it cheating on J-Lo with a stripper.
Remember, these scores are testing a dual xeon platform using windows, and the g5 using unix. If the dual xeons were running linux or bsd it would scale alot higher and use both cpus better. Here is my top output: Cpu0 : 52.8% user, 10.6% system, 0.0% nice, 36.5% idle, 0.0% IO-wait Cpu1 : 32.9% user, 4.0% system, 0.0% nice, 63.1% idle, 0.0% IO-wait Cpu2 : 48.0% user, 1.0% system, 0.0% nice, 51.0% idle, 0.0% IO-wait Cpu3 : 32.9% user, 1.3% system, 0.0% nice, 65.8% idle, 0.0% IO-wait And here is my /proc/cpuinfo
processor : 0
vendor_id : GenuineIntel
cpu family : 15
model : 2
model name : Intel(R) Xeon(TM) CPU 2.40GHz
stepping : 7
cpu MHz : 3001.309
cache size : 512 KB
physical id : 0
siblings : 2
fdiv_bug : no
hlt_bug : no
f00f_bug : no
coma_bug : no
fpu : yes
fpu_exception : yes
cpuid level : 2
wp : yes
flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflus h dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht tm pbe cid
bogomips : 5931.00
processor : 1
vendor_id : GenuineIntel
cpu family : 15
model : 2
model name : Intel(R) Xeon(TM) CPU 2.40GHz
stepping : 7
cpu MHz : 3001.309
cache size : 512 KB
physical id : 0
siblings : 2
fdiv_bug : no
hlt_bug : no
f00f_bug : no
coma_bug : no
fpu : yes
fpu_exception : yes
cpuid level : 2
wp : yes
flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflus h dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht tm pbe cid
bogomips : 5996.54
processor : 2
vendor_id : GenuineIntel
cpu family : 15
model : 2
model name : Intel(R) Xeon(TM) CPU 2.40GHz
stepping : 7
cpu MHz : 3001.309
cache size : 512 KB
physical id : 3
siblings : 2
fdiv_bug : no
hlt_bug : no
f00f_bug : no
coma_bug : no
fpu : yes
fpu_exception : yes
cpuid level : 2
wp : yes
flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflus h dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht tm pbe cid
bogomips : 5996.54
processor : 3
vendor_id : GenuineIntel
cpu family : 15
model : 2
model name : Intel(R) Xeon(TM) CPU 2.40GHz
stepping : 7
cpu MHz : 3001.309
cache size : 512 KB
physical id : 3
siblings : 2
fdiv_bug : no
hlt_bug : no
f00f_bug : no
coma_bug : no
fpu : yes
fpu_exception : yes
cpuid level : 2
wp : yes
flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflus h dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht tm pbe cid
bogomips : 5980.16
keanmarine.com
I tried to buy a G5 and my credit card was rejected for insufficient funds. I guess that equal to and slightly better performance under certain conditions is REALLY expensive.
* I for one welcome our new benchmark overlards. ...
* In societ russia, the bench marks you!
* Imagine a beowulf cloister of benchmarks!
* Oh wait
The only SPEC results that matter are posted on the SPEC site and, like most benchmarks, even those are suspect.
Haha, all of this blinding new speed is really helping with my first posts now!
An auger would be too big for the holes perforating the G5. The QS G4 speedholes are more auger-sized.
SMP support should be OK for handling the AIs in an FPS, but for a simulation game like Sim City it would be fantastic. Don't know how Sim City is written, but if it's already multithreaded it should scale already. And a game like that should be multithreaded given how many discrete (and sometimes asynchronous) events happen across the simulation. Also, it should benefit greatly from the move to 64 bit both in the greater VM address space and the increased number of threads/processes one can thus spawn. I'm definitely looking forward to the move to cheap 64 bit SMP for this alone. :) --M
Mainstreat Intel based OS will see the same problems I guess, 32 and 64 bit versions, linux, windows versions...
But I bet you if id software releases doom3 for a dual g2 64 bits mac... it'll be fabulous performance compared to intel architectures.
Of those to whom much is given, much is required.
Running all of those compute intensive apps that are available for the mac....
Having been forced to use Macs throughout my college career, I've used them quite a bit. While the lack of software sucks, my biggest problem has always been Macs inherent inability to multitask. Most Macs simply can't handle the way I work. I can crash most if them in a matter of seconds, given they have any memory intensive programs. The latest models I used were dual processor G4's with several gigs of memory. How I crashed these, I don't know, but I assure you it didn't take very long. On the other hand, I've had my PC crash once in 6 months of use. I contend that MacOS isn't nearly as stable as some might contend.
I agree that dual CPUs provide little benefit to games, perhaps if Apple standardised on two processors developers might take advantage of them?
do a few points on some benchmark really matter? we all know apple has "caught up" to wintel now. the real question is CAN THEY KEEP UP? or will they fall behind again in a year or two? There is a 3 ghz G5 due out suposedly next summer, but how much will it cost and what will be the availablity?
also, even the low-end G5 is pretty expensive right now. if you want a bargain, you have to go with a G4. you can buy a faster athlon-based pc for that money. am i wrong?
Here they come! /me watches as the wintel damage controllers spew their FUD and confuse the moderators.
I knew someone else would be annoyed by that.
The generic Apple would have been better, but since it's a "hardware" thing, CPU, specifically, we got the G Fo'.
Time to submit a snazzy G5 icon!
Chasomint has here a table comparing the 1.6 Ghz G5 (slowest available) to 6 other windows machines. It is a complicated photoshop benchmark. The 1.6 Ghz G5 gets beat by the single P4 3.06, however it is the 2nd fastest machine there by benchmark wins. Note that the 1.6 Ghz machine is the lowend G5, and has nowhere near the performance of the dual 2.0 ghz G5's that apple uses to test.
"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?
The g5 is the fastest PC.
The problem is not the mac, it's the compiler!
Apple used GCC in their P4 benchmarks. It's a well known fact that GCC doesn't produce very fast code.
Here are some real results:
Spec Int base, 1 CPU:
2GHz Opteron: 1248
3.06GHz Xeon with 1MB of L3: 1242
3.2GHz Pentium 4: 1221
Apple score:
2GHz G5: 800
Spec FP base, 1 CPU:
2GHz Opteron: 1209
3.06GHz Xeon with 1MB of L3: 1173
3.2GHz Pentium 4: 1271
Apple score:
2GHz G5: 840
Spec Int rate, 2 CPUs:
2GHz Opteron: 28.8
3.06Ghz Xeon with 1MB of L3: 25.8
Apple score:
2GHz G5: 17.2
Spec FP rate, 2 CPUs:
2GHz Opteron: 28.1
3.06Ghz Xeon with 1MB of L3: 19.6
Apple score:
2GHz G5: 15.7
In single CPU benchmarks new G5 reaches 2/3 of Opterons/P4s performance. In dual CPU benchmarks Opteron is twice as fast as G5!
..its still almost completely useless as a gamer rig
In any case there was much consternation in the past about the VeriTest benchmarks becuase they did not use the same compilers that Dell used. Also VeriTest used things like an optimized malloc library on the G5's and faster memory with semi-secret memory timing tweaks in OF. If you want to take these benchmarks with a grain of salt, you should compare the DELL numbers from the SPEC site to those of the G5 from Veritest.
Maybe it's time to update the 'G4' logo to a PPC970 picture, like this one (bandwidth warning).
the results augur well for Apple G5 performance in technical and scientific computing environments and for playing games.'"
Now all they have to do is get the game publishers to release titles than play on the Mac as well as Windows. Seriously, what a ridiculous statement.
Flame on!
If it only edged out then why should I bother to push out the cash.
The only benchmarks that should matter are: does it run Photoshop/Premiere/Final Cut Pro faster? I could care less that my computer is a 11.5 compared to 10.32 on another machine. That means nothing to the end user.
Yeah, like Breakout, Super Breakout....
...
... photoshop..
Forget the whales - save the babies.
Wow. That's just great. It's a shame that Apple will never be able to compete with the speed of Pentium 4s, though.
2.0 GHz? That technology is what, two and a half years old in Pentium 4s? Come on Apple, time to play catch up.
Also, OS X is great for beginners, but even my four year old needs more power and flexability from an operating system than this OS can provide. It's pretty but non-functional, which is a shame.
Abortion is advocated only by persons who have themselves been born.
--Ronald Reagan
Escapism for Homosexuals that can't handle being gay.
Or as the guys from redvsblue put it here:
The confusing thing about PCs is just that you go to the store, and there is just so many games... everywhere you look! While on the Mac, its just six. And you know which ones are good, 'cause you have already played them on the PC like five or six years ago.
"There is no teacher but the enemy."-Mazer Rackham
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.
Ummm... not that the availability of games for macs hasn't been traditionally terrible. And they have been getting better with the move to OSX, but I still have a problem with this augur conclusion.
How is running a dual proc machine going to help software that isn't traditionally multi-threaded? The OS might have a fun time swapping which proc gets the game for the next 10 million cycles, but auguring well for performance.... what a farce.
Fnord.sig
But you responded, thus prolonging the troll! Who is worse, the troll, or the reader who feeds him?
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
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...
Next intel will issue a benchmark that tells the exact opposite, and then a third party benchmark will tell that there really isn't that much difference between them after all.
This article is tag number AF16E82R665TLS8.
Agur is the basque word for bye...
;)
I think you meant to write "Say agur to Apple if you want to play games"
I'm a chainsmokin' alcoholic sociopath, so-ci-o-path
The UK Apple Store is selling 1.6GHz G5s for 1549 pounds, which doesn't seem too bad compared to the competition. I've specced up a Dell Precision 650 with about the same equipment and it comes out to 1649 pounds. Obviously, a disposable white-box PC is going to be cheaper.
The G4s are cheaper though, at least at the low end.
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?
The Apple Developer Connection Student Program is a low-cost membership program (USD $99 / year), providing tools and special discounts for students 18 or over interested in developing for the Mac platform. Members receieve a once-per-lifetime 20% discount on hardware. Hardware can be purchased through the ADC version of the Apple Store (click the 'ADC Hardware Purchase Program Store' link). Without the discount a Dual 2 GHz G5 would be USD $2999, and with the discount a Dual 2 GHz G5 would be USD $2499. Details of the program are covered in the FAQ.
--- Fox
I read it on Slashdot that no one makes games for Macs, so it must be true. I better let Aspyr, MacPlay, MacSoft, Westlake Interactive, Ambrosia, Freeverse, The Omni Group, Blizzard, GraphSim, and Feral Interactive among many other commercial operations and hundreds of shareware developers that no one at all makes games for the Macintosh and that they should all shut down immediately. Additionally, Inside Mac Games should shut down their operation immediately as they are a waste of server space because they will never have any news to report ever.
I heard it on Slashdot so it must be true.
Come on, they've got that one sweet game...what's it called...oh yeah, Photoshop. Adobe makes it. You can't go wrong with a game that has seven sequels, all of which are best sellers!
..the fastest hunk-a-junk in the galaxy
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...
Trust me. This is an inactive account. Regardless of what the
Perhaps developers of scientific software would be more interested in the Mac as a compute platform if there were any easy ways to port existing *nix applications (just the compute engines and the inter-process communications tools, never mind the GUIs). It would also help if Apple would make it play nice in a heterogeneous environment (say, actually paying attention to NIS and NFS properly).
'Cause the G5 is dual CPU someone enterprising slashdotter would probable create an Icon that would no doubt would look like a pair of hooters...
From excellent karma to terible karma with a single +5 funny post...
What that hell is this?!?!
These exactly disclosures were available on the day of the G5 launch. The link with the raw data is here:
Veritest PDF
And you can find a thorough debunking of the whole thing on my site here
This is very, very old news.
For the love of God who cares. I like a good Game just as much as the rest of you. Is it a primary concern? NO! Thats because I am not 12 years old any more. I run a Design business on my Mac. The G5 is all about pumping out killer visuals. If its a better game platform great. Only a complete idiot would be a G5 for game performance.
My karma is getting better everyday.
Games aren't multithreaded? Bring up a process viewer next time you are playing a game and tell me they run single threaded. The main game loop might be in a single thread and eat up as much CPU time as it can, but I assure you that games will use extra threads for various tasks.
Those SPEC scores for the G5 look like the same ones Apple gave when they first announced the G5s.
This article is a dupe.
"The worst tyrannies were the ones where a governance required its own logic on every embedded node." - Vernor Vinge
..but does it play DIVX? You know, Apple always sucked when I wanted to play less-professional stuff like just a DIVX movie on it.
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.
"...and for playing games."
If you happen to be playing a game that actually supports multiple CPUs. Most games aren't.
Chances are that the programmers won't spend time optimizing their x86 SSE/3DNow game engines for the G5 multimedia instructions. Good luck keeping up with x86 there.
Nvidia fans are also semi-screwed, because Apply only sells the G5 computers with ATI cards; I hope you enjoy gaming with wacky ATI drivers.
The new G5 systems are nice, and have their place, but Apple continues to suck in the high-performance gamining arena.
I'd like to have an augur-ment please... Certainly Sir, will this be the half hour augur-ment or the full course of 12?
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
http://www.veritest.com/clients/reports/apple/appl e_performance.pdf
The mac used 1.5 GB of ram as seen on page 5
dell used 2GB as seen at bottom of page 6
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.
"Things are more moderner than before- bigger, and yet smaller- it's computers-- San Dimas High School football RULES!"
Who cares if its faster? The computers themselves are still over priced. The average user or company is not going to spend the money for a small increase of performance.
http://www.forum-addicts.com
Marketing, pure and simple -- and effective.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Opterons are out. Dual w/2 gigs of ram and an 80 gig hd for $1,700. Find me a dual G5 for that.
:)
So far, it runs XP very nicely and the RedHat Opteron beta incredibly fast.
They are in the consumer market. They are backwards compatible with all the existing X86 software. They are incredibly fast, accept huge amounts of RAM (8 gig per cpu), have native Linux support, native Windows soon....
Why would anyone consider a Mac or an Itanium? There is no downside to an Opteron.
Ports being the operative word here. The big stumbling block to gaming on the mac isn't performance, it's titles. Only the very biggest games (read: blizzard) release concurrently for the mac and PC.
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
How is running a dual proc machine going to help software that isn't traditionally multi-threaded?
By allowing more than one program at a time to run well.
For example, I might have iMovie capturing DV to an external FW drive while I also doing something like play one of the games that are available for the Mac. I've actually tried and been unable to get iMovie drop out on a dual 1 GHz Mac. No matter what I throw at it, including Finder copies to/from the same external FW drive iMovie is captuing to or firing up Win XP in VPC, iMovie keeps capturing that video without dropping a frame.
Try that with a single processor machine!
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.
I see the Apple zealots have mod points today. :-)
Yeah, go ahead, mod this one down too.
Forget the whales - save the babies.
and usually it will wait for the other threads to finish before continuing.
.plan files from the time when he was developing Q3 to see how SMP came out in the first tries with the Q2 code base (hint: he actually slowed the game down by using both processors).
Very few games take advantage of multiple CPUs. It takes a lot of work to get a modest advantage from a dual-CPU system when developing a game. Take a look at Carmack's
-PainKilleR-[CE]
Benchmarking results brought to you by the new Apple Information Minister.
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
Hey /. editors, its time to change that G4 icon
Measurements of speed and processing power are irrelevant with the exception of PC Gamers and AutoCAD/Graphic Designers, which are a niche community anyway.
You are seriously mental if your choice to purchase an Apple over a PC considers percentages in processor performance.
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!
But they are only faster then the p4 that Apple
benchmark. Read the artikle.
Apple's G5 is just a baby IBM mainframe - in a silver chassis.
So you do have an upgrade path...
and the IBM Mainframe upgrade is CHEAPER too!
the results augur well for Apple G5 performance
normal english words pls todd...
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.'"
But isn't life just a game? =)
Quod scripsi, scripsi.
when the G5 was first unveiled they did have some data showing the G5 compared with a top of the line G4 and then the Intel offerings.
I don't remember what the tests were, and if they did pull those down it might be to keep the rest of the machines looking valid. Xserve is not G5 yet, let alone iMac and everything else.
i can tell you that when i played with a G5 (not in my house unfortunately) that it was WAY faster than any G4 i had used. yes, it was a 2 x 2 GHz... and it really made me think how old and slow my G4 at home was feeling. This is the first time i have really wanted to buy a newly released Mac right off the bat. if i had the money i think i would have pre-ordered. when people eventually play with them in stores, the machine will speak for itself. as for switchers, i dont know. but any Mac user will realize how fast they are right off the bat.
This is different from the desktop market where Apple's sales were much slower than their notebooks and they were getting crushed by AMD/Intel desktops in benchmarks. That is why they needed to start selling the G5 desktops ASAP but it doesn't make business sense to do the same with their notebooks right now.
Speed is important in notebooks but not nearly as much as in desktops. Other factors like battery life, size and weight are sometimes more important to consumers (which is why most of us don't lug 8 lbs "desktop replacement" notebooks).
The G4 notebooks are selling briskly so the smart thing to do for Apple is to wait until they sell enough existing G4 notebooks before introducing the G5 version. Announcing G5 notebooks now will hurt their notebook sales and selling G5 notebooks now might not dramatically increase their sales. It simply makes more sense for Apple to wait 1-2 years.
Am I the only one that noticed that the Apple benchmarks use GCC? Everyone knows that the Intel compilers slaughter GCC 3.x in performance comparisons especially where floating point performance is concerned. I'm all for the belief that the G5 is a superior CPU. However, I live in the real world where CPU performance is only part of the equation. If you look at spec's page, you can see the submitted results from Dell and Intel show the P4/Xeon scoring much higher than the G5. A more interesting test would be to see the two platforms compared using the best available compilers for each. I'm really an Apple fan. In fact, I'm writing this on a PowerBook so don't pick on me as an Apple hater.
A clutch of other benchmarks have been released by Apple, including a Quake 3 benchmark at 1024x768 giving the G5 a score of 337 frames per second compared to the Pentium's 275.
------ Take away the right to say fuck and you take away the right to say fuck the government.
If you don't like VeriTest's testing methods, you don't get to use them in either case. I did a bit of digging on this and wrote it up on my website a while ago.
Back in October 2002, IBM gave estimated SPEC results for the 1.8 GHz PPC970 with a SPECfp of 1057 and a SPECint of 937. Intel's own results for the 3.06 GHz P4 are SPECfp 1077 and SPECint 1088. Given that the P4 is running at a 70% higher clock speed and in the better integer case is only 16% faster--and in floating point operations is closer to 1%--I think it's difficult to make the case that the P4 is blowing any doors off. (If you extrapolate IBM's figures for what the 2 GHz G5 would do, it comes very close to parity with the P4 on integer and outstrips it on floating point.) The contention that two 2 GHz PPC970s would outperform two 3 GHz Xeons doesn't seem to be stretching things.
Jedi Knight 2 IIRC is optimized for dual processors for the multiplayer games (which makes a LOT of sense), and UT2003 for the Mac will run sound routines on the other processor.
Again, this is not sure, just trying to recall from what I read in the readme files.
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
What parts of web development require one process to still be using up your CPU when you've switched to another app? I do web development/programming for a living and I never have more than one program actively doing anything at one time, with the exception of ftp'ing an entire directory in the background.
;)
The one thing that really makes a difference in how many apps you can have open and still be able to switch between apps quickly is the amount of RAM you have available. I noticed a huge difference when I went from 512M to 1G. If you don't have enough RAM for all of the applications to be loaded at the same time, you have to do a lot of disk swapping and your HD is a lot slower than your RAM.
I want to see Dual G5 vs. Dual Opteron, now *thats* a comparison :)
Specifically, can I avoid booting the G5 on Mac OS and install RedHat Linux on the hard drive? Are there ROM chips (within the G5) that lock you into the Mac OS?
... and since you can get an ATI 9800 pro, the (arguably) fastest consumer graphics card in one, the games should fly.
Most any good game that I want to play comes to the mac. I love my mac for gaming. If it doesn't come to the mac, I just play my PS2.
"Politicians find new names for institutions which under old names have become odious to the people."
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.
"Politicians find new names for institutions which under old names have become odious to the people."
Please stop spreading FUD. This is NOT old news. It's new. Apple updated their scores, and now there are production low end machines that have been tested.
And, we've all seen the "I'm jealous so I'm going to debunk this" website. Next.
You can chose to use a Mac or not. At worst case scenario the Mac is maybe 5 to 10% slower, which is not perceivable to a human unless you're running a multiple day long task. At best, the Mac is 200% faster. That's noticable in the timeframe of a second.
"Politicians find new names for institutions which under old names have become odious to the people."
Or maybe the author is just a Gene Wolfe fan. Go, Silk!
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
I mean, all companies lie a little on their benchmarks but they are usually smart enough not to rub their 'enhanced' numbers in your face. They know that people will catch on and think them really dishonest. Apple hasn't quite figured that out. I may buy a 'G5' system, but it won't be from apple.
Blar.
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?
You left out that little part about a WELL REGULATED militia: 2nd Amendment: A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed. Read the rest of the constitution to see how it uses the word militia to get an understanding of what was intended. I support the right to own guns, but don't hide behind an improper quoting of the constitution. USE THE WHOLE SENTENCE!
the results augur well for Apple G5 performance in technical and scientific computing environments and for playing games.'"
What this means is that Apple is roughly keeping up in the CPU race: they just shipped a new CPU. You expect newly shipping CPUs to have an edge. But since it's only moderately faster than the currently shipping P4 or Opteron systems and only in certain situations, it means they are really just keeping up, not leaping ahead.
Given the higher price of G5 systems, bang for the buck still goes to the x86-based systems.
Not being able to run OS X is the downside of an Opteron. As far as I'm concerned, Apple hardware is just an expensive hardware key required to run OS X.
Jedi Knight 2 IIRC is optimized for dual processors for the multiplayer games (which makes a LOT of sense),
This makes sense if you're hosting and playing on the same machine, but otherwise I don't see the reasoning for it. For the most part, the processing done in Quake-based games (as JK2 is iirc) is the same in a single player game as a multiplayer game, except that in most multiplayer games you aren't running the server process on your own computer (in single player you spawn a server that runs the single player routines and doesn't utilize the network).
and UT2003 for the Mac will run sound routines on the other processor.
This might make sense if you're using it to run background sounds or you're just triggering the sounds on a thread run on a seperate processor. I fail to see how this helps much, though, unless you don't have good sound hardware to begin with (hmm, I wonder what sound API they're using in UT for the Mac and Linux ports). Of course, UT (and UT2k3 I would assume, though I haven't looked at a lot of UT2k3 benchmarks) does tend to be more CPU-limited than most games, so maybe every little bit helps.
-PainKilleR-[CE]
Most interesting is that The G5 seems to perform extremely well on a few tests and very very poorly on a few tests. This could easily be because Photoshop7, even with the plug-in, is not yet fully optimized for the G5. I would find this likely, seeing as when the plugin was released and its relative size compared to photoshop. It is the only platform, for this test, where the first 12 tests performed radically different than the last 9--the first 12 being selected arbitrarily based on someone telling me that those were the ones that he used in real life.
I would say to look to Photoshop 8 for the most significant performance gains--such as a complete recompile for the G5, removal of all of the vec_dst() commands everywhere, etc.
Also I've heard a couple anecdotes that people's computers have been running photoshop faster when they installed panther development code. Panther should also be more heavily optimized to take advantage of the G5's, so it should be interesting to see the results.
Finally, the PSBench test that was run was on a 50 MB file. The one from Apple, which scored so well, was on a 600 MB file. 50 MB files don't stress the pipelines in any of the systems, but a 600 MB file almost certainly would. For that kind of work the G5 would rapidly close the gap in those areas where it is lagging, simply because of the size of its pipes. The G5 is going to absolutely shine when a lot of data transfer with the processor is required.
Integrate Keynote and LaTeX
I think I remember one of the guys that did Giants: Citizen Kabuto for Macintosh saying how they were taking advantage of multiprocessing for things like sound and so, and how they were seeing a real advantage in fps, etc.
Ah, here it is:
"...MacPlay is thrilled to bring a graphical marvel like Giants: Citizen Kabuto to Mac OS X," said Mark Cottam, President of MacPlay. "The talented engineers at Omni Group have implemented SMP (Symmetric Multi Processor) support into Giants, which takes advantage of Mac OS X's symmetric multiprocessing feature when running the dual processor Power Mac G4..."
"To illustrate the point, he discussed Giants: Citizen Kabuto - the game recently ported to OS X by the Omni Group: "It was originally written in Direct3D, a Windows environment. We not only got the game working in a month, but also got it running faster on a year-old Mac than it runs on the fastest PC we could buy today.
We did this by taking their code and rewriting parts of it so it's actually multi-threaded now, so that on a multi-processor machine it'll use both processors. This is the first time, to our knowledge, that any game-porting company has taken an existing game and made it use symmetric multiprocessing when it wasn't originally designed to do so..."
Another lame slashdot post that offers no real insight regardless of it's mod and takes the tired, tired approach of snubbing apple for no other reason than they appear upset apple is making products that might actually be competing for the cutting edge. Oh god, not that! NOOOO! Yawn Yawn, I need to stop reading slashdot, the trolls rule this town, the level of intelligence is so low it is sad. Look at this post for gods sake. Oye.
If I had an Intel/AMD box, I'd be more locked into a platform than with my Mac. Why? Virtual PC allows me to run Windows (or any x86 operating system) simultaneously with Mac OS X. You can even copy-'n-paste between Windows apps and Mac apps.
In fact, Virtual PC allows me to run multiple x86 operating systems (say, Win '98, Win XP, OpenStep, and QNX) simultaneously with each other, too.
Does the x86 emulation cause a performace hit? It's only noticable in the most demanding apps.
And of course, Linux runs natively on Macs.
In summary, I can run Windows apps on my Mac, but you can't run Mac apps on your PC. I'm less locked into a platform than you.
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
Im sick of this. Everybody buys apples own benchmark. Hello, Hello, anybody home. Why would they benchmark something that the G5 doesnt do good.
m l
Take a look at this link. I tried to post a story about it but it got rejected. Probably because the reader was a great apple addict.
http://www.theandyzone.com/Computer/shootout.ht
I dont know about how they did the test but acording to it a G4 or a G5 doesnt perform better then a Athlon Xp 2000+.
So we might consider that for a while also. I know that the real performance might be in betwean but why do people think that Apples benchmark is the ultimate truths.
Otto Matic. You'll never need another game.
Then you make the comparison totally meaningless. That's like saying my friend on the bus beats me when I'm walking, therefore my friend on the bus is a faster. He may weigh 600lbs and need a walker to pee without falling over, but by the logic you're describing, he'd be faster.
You're right, GCC is not making good code for a P4, compared to what Intel's mature compiler can do. Apple, having just migrated to a very new type of PPC processor, has NO MATURE COMPILER. None. So the code they're making on GCC is also quite suboptimal. In fact, the code from GCC generated for a 970 is probably significantly worse than the code generated for a P4 on average. P4s are older, and there is a larger developer interest in almost every case.
So, it's not like Apple is somehow tying the P4 up and leaving it on the train tracks. Apple still gives Intel products the advantage. Until they can get a good optimizing compiler they have to do so. Apple is pulling dead even with machines much more expensive, faster, and with better tricks for accessing RAM in a speedy fashion. They are matching throughput against machines that, by Intel's numbers, should be beating them hands down no question.
Everyone likes to say a cheap-ish P4 is coming up dead even with Apple's most expensive system. I'd also like to point out the flipside of that coin, P4s are tying with Xeons which are much more expensive and are "supposed to be better". What do you suppose that means? Does it mean that this whole G5 and Xeon thing is stupid, and we should all just use P4s?
Maybe it means these benchmarks, while standard, are stupid, and not taking everything into account. It could also mean that Intel is HEAVILY optimizing for the SPECmarks. We know that Intel does it, by their own admission and people pointing out code generation hints.
So yeah, right now, Apple has a machine with no optimized compiler, and no OS to take advantage of it. However, it's keeping up with the best that intel has to offer in an even playing field, compared completely optimized Intel it only comes out slightly behind. These benchmarks show that the G5 is insanely fast, not insanely behind. Apple is taking every handicap and still coming up dead even. All they ask is that the field itself isn't at a ridiculous slant against them, hence the use of GCC to make the comparisons meaningful in any way.
Doesn't anyone get this?
Slashdot. It's Not For Common Sense
I wont go into this deeply as I'm tired of explaining it to people.
The militia is composed of the private citizens of a country. ( non professional military ).
Therefore the people have this right.
Using a shortened version of the amendment for a signature does nothing to diminish the statement. I only left out the reasoning of why, not its intent.
Also, well regulated translates to well trained, when you account for the difference in definition over time.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Anyone want to explain that?
Advanced Micro Devices: A4800 (1.4GHz Opterons, 4GB RAM ): 2 CPU: 21.0 base : 22.2 peak
Apple Computer: Dual PowerPC G5 2GHz: 2 CPU: 15.7 base: no peak
Dell: PowerEdge 2650 (3.06 GHz Xeon): 2CPU: 16.7 base:17.0 peak
Dell: Precision WorkStation 350 (3.06 GHz P4): 1 CPU: 12.7 base: 12.8 peak
Or this: http://www.specbench.org/cpu2000/results/cfp2000.h tml
Intel Corporation: D850MD motherboard (2.4 GHz, P4): 1 CPU: 806 base: 812 peak
Apple: G5 2GHz: 1 CPU: 840 base: no peak
HP: ProLiant DL380 G3(3.06GHz, Intel Xeon): 1 CPU: 1150 base: no peak
I could go on, these just happen to be ones I selected. I abreviated some names (HP=Hewlett-Packard Company) and procs (P4) etc, but did not change the information, the numbers for apple were taken from http://www.apple.com/powermac/
The real benefit is when you're running multiple applications, so you can dedicate one processor to the game and one processor to the rest of your applications, and hopefully minimize the performance hit from multi-tasking.
Either that or run the game on one CPU and the bots on the other.
Will I retire or break 10K?
-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.
The misspelling was intentional, as a test to see if anyone actually reads comments.. Congratulations you win!
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I'm pretty sure that the parent was speaking specifically of games. Not something you usually iMovie running alongside.
bad sig...no donut.
'i got a mac (blah blah blah) i got a gamecube'
/. poll
Interesting. I kinda think of Apple and Nintendo as similar. The styling of their boxen, i guess. I wonder how the two types of hardware ownership correlate...
new
I have:
_Mac and Gamecube
_Mac and PS2
_Mac and Xbox
_PC and Gamecube
_PC and PS2
_PC and Xbox
_COWBOY NEAL AND DREAMCAST, BABY! OH YEAH!
Adam
Well, John Carmack did implement SMP for Quake2 or Quake3(don't remember which one at the moment). But I clearly remember it resulted in a 20-25% performance boost that really helped in heavy firefights.
The Quake2 source is available, but I haven't tested it on my smp rig.
Kashif
Under OS X, the benefits of dual processors are quite evident. I find that a dual-450 MHz G4 Mac "feels" decidedly more snappy than my 800 MHz G4 Powerbook. It didn't seem nearly as fast under OS9; OS X seems to do a very good job of distributing the load over two processors.
Gee I wonder why?
We all know the Xeon is P3.5-class, dual P4s (if available) would likely urinate on the G5.
Dual Opterons would likely urinate on the G5s with enough force to knock it off the table...
And I can buy a dual-proc Opteron board at Fry's TODAY.
Cmon Apple...
I browse at +5 Flamebait- moderation for all or moderation for none.
And you always have more than one program running; minimally, the Finder and various OS services.
I just verified the $2499 you mentioned -- this price includes the $99 student membership fee.
Slashdot's first reaction to VMware
After the usual bashing of Intel's chips they have a little paragraph in fine print: "World's fastest" based on SPEC(R) CPU 2000 benchmark results and leading professional application performance tests against 3 GHz Pentium 4-based Dell Dimension 8300 and 3.06 GHz Dual Xeon-based Dell Precision 650. SPEC(R) CPU 2000 benchmarks run with GCC 3.3 and independently tested, full report available from Veritest; professional applications tested by Apple, June 2003." ..professional application tested by Apple....
Will we ever see unbiased benchmarks?
The phaomnneil pweor of the hmuan mnid. Fcuknig amzanig eh!
Because it's a closed platform you don't have multiple vendors for things like motherboards. Also things like video cards and everything else costs twice as much as the pc version.
Besides, even with the G5 the price is still not worth buying the mac. Have you looked at their G5 series? The hardware choice in it is very poor. The systems without the dual cpu system comes with extremely poor graphics cards. They come with the geforcefx 5200 which is far slower then the older generation 4200 by nvidia. It's hard to believe they'd put a $60 pc video card in a $2000 dollar machine.
You can easily build a $2000 dollar PC with a very fast processor (a p4 3.2 ghz is more then enough) and very fast everything else. With that kind of money you can easily get a rocket raid card and have a raid 0 array of multiple hard drives for awesome disk performance. You can also spend up to $400 to get an awesome video card for extreme graphics.
Hmmm... Pie...
Parent comment is correct. Game companies have no motivation to optimize games for multiple CPU's. Over 99 percent of game consumers have single-CPU systems, and the game developers and publishers will always choose (correctly) to assign a programmer to some game feature rather than to assign a programmer to make the game ~twice as fast on the systems of 1% of their consumers.
The Parrent is correct. Check the old article for yourself.
These are the same old SPEC numbers, not anything new.
that while the G5 is much faster at floating point math, Apple has cleverly designed their graphics subsystem to be based on floating point math.
One of the things I was struck by when I started using Quartz (the new graphics system) is that all the coordinate systems are based on floats. (For example, CGRect is all floats.) Plus, NSTimer (CFTimer) uses floats for everything. So does the event system.
So, the upshot is that the better performance for floating point isn't as isolated as you might think if you're coming from the x86 world or MacOS 9.
Avoid Missing Ball for High Score
Why aren't they comparing the G5 against the new AMD 64 bit chips?
It's because those new 64 bit AMD chips are much faster than the G5. The Platform that apple is running on is _still_ a generation behind x86 performance.
Not quite true and not the full story. According to this article, the G5 dissipates about 42 watts at 1.8 Ghz. The dual processor systems would dissipate about 84 watts. The P4 2.8 Ghz chips dissipate 68.4 watts.
The heat is too high for a laptop though. The 1.2 Ghz 970s run around 20 watts. [source]
Manufacturers like Dell tend to use the compiler that produces the fastest benchmarks. Sometimes, that is a compiler that isn't really reliable enough to be used for anything other than benchmarks. It's worth noting that when Craig Hunter at NASA tried to compare the G5 against other processors, he found that some of the compilers that produced the fastest code (such as the Intel compiler) failed to produce correct results.
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
Just picked up Neverwinter Nights for $5 from MacPlay... I think that is as cheap if not cheaper than you can find it for Windows.
I am not sure what the parent meant about China going to MIPS, but MIPS cores rarely end up in high end chips. Instead they end up in all sorts of embedded stuff or with coprocessors. Only SGI, so far as I know, tries to keep MIPS ISA based designs close to the high end.
"This bitch is so fast, I'm getting younger just standing next to it."
when asked to clarify, he responded
"I want my mommy"
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
What parts of web development require one process to still be using up your CPU when you've switched to another app? I do web development/programming for a living and I never have more than one program actively doing anything at one time, with the exception of ftp'ing an entire directory in the background.
so you're doing mostly static pages? more web *design* than development if that's the case. if you're actually coding pages, you can chew up the cpu pretty well.
The render farm aspect of Shake 3 and FCP was very intersting to us - we use a Dual 450 G4 as the primary editing machine (backed up with a 667Mhz Powerbook).
Handing off renders to multiple machines would be a big benefit to us, even if it's only to make the Powermac and Powerbook work together - three processors has to be better than two in this sort of task.
If it really works well, for a small outlay it would be pretty easy to put together a little farm of old G4 boxes - dual 450s and 500s to use them purely for the times you hit "render all" in FCP and have 22 layers of video and photoshop files to put together.
I am continually amazed at the performance we get out of our 'humble' Dual 450 machine in Final Cut Pro. It's a tribute to Apple's hardware and software shops that it's so good. Makes me wonder just how mind blowing FCP is on a G5 box!
Sorry for the pun, but does anyone know where I can find a comparison between the G5 vs the older G4? Apple doesn't have any g4 vs g5 benchmarks My guess is that they don't want people to use inductive reasoning to compare the g4 to the current crop of Pentiums.
i have written multithreaded test for intel cpu's many times using hundreds to thousands of threads and see virtually no performance hit compared to a single thread doing the same computations. IE 2 cpu's speeds it up exactly 2 times. Are they claiming that they speed it up more than 2 times for 2 cpus? that would be a sweet trick, almost quantum computer like in it's ability to know stuff faster than it knows it
Medal of Honor is one game dsigned to take advantage of both procs. So there.
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.
OK, troll....
NewEgg has 2 GHz Opterons (OEM) for $830 each.
2G of PC3200 memory comes in at around $325.
For just the processors and the memory, you are looking at $1985.
No case, no motherboard, no quiet fans and power supply (your machine is no louder than 38dbs, right?), no DVD-R/CDRW burner, no SATA hard drive.
What are the specs of this magical 2-way Opteron box you speak of?
Look at my K6-300 here:
load averages: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00 up 3+07:16:20
I think it cannot go below 0.
If you look at the numbers Apple is claiming vs. the latest numbers posted at the SPEC site, then it would appear that the G5 is getting creamed by the Pentium 4 / Xeon.
First, single CPU performance. Apple claims 840 for SPECfp_base2000, and 800 for SPECint_base2000. A Dell Precision 360 with 3.2GHz P4 and DDR400 memory gives 1267 and 1242, respectively.
Next, dual-CPU. Apple claims 15.7 for SPECfp_rate_base2000 and 17.2 for SPECint_rate_base2000. A Dell Precision Workstation 650 with dual 3.06 GHz Xeons gives 18.0 and 25.6, respectively.
Of course, there are lies, damn lies, and benchmarks, but in this case I think it's fair to compare actual SPEC numbers with vendor claims.
And don't get me wrong, I think Apples are wonderful systems. I recommend them to many of my friends. But for raw CPU power, they lag the Intel powerhouse.
LILO boot: linux init=/usr/bin/emacs
I would still have to sell my house to buy one :^)
(while I'd only have to sell my car to buy the
PC). Okay, so I have a crappy house, and a
crappy car, still...
It boggles my mind why Apple insists on pricing
their equipment as they do. I STILL own an
Apple II+, IIe, IIc and IIgs, so I am NOT
anti-Apple. But I also own a business, and
I know that you increase sales, and profit, by
lowering price and CAPTURING MORE OF THE MARKET.
Why does Apple not know this simply truth?
What good does it do to be perpetually at 10%
of the computer market? Running ads saying how
easy it is to adjust to a switch in computer
formats is wonderful, but try reducing your
prices, which will increase your customer base
when more people can AFFORD to make the switch!
Regarding the story of origin, the performance
(G5 vs. Xeon) sounds great.
the results augur well for Apple G5 performance in technical and scientific computing environments and for playing games.
Awesome! This is just awesome news!! My next big question is: how is it surfing for pr0n???
Spread the RC luvin'
What I've been hearing from apple for a while now is "Our processors are the best thing since sliced bread, they will get anything you want done far faster than any other architecture, and will do it cheaper for the same performance"
So what I want to know is why have I never heard of any REALLY cpu intensive applications being run on G5 cpu's. For example Weta Studios uses intel CPU's for it's render farm for LOTR,
Where are the really hard applications being run on theise things, where are the Beowolfe clusters?
Someone must have a least tried it, what were the results?
-Anon Coward
Not if you have a G5, which can't run VirtualPC.
In fact, Virtual PC allows me to run multiple x86 operating systems (say, Win '98, Win XP, OpenStep, and QNX) simultaneously with each other, too.
Of course, there's no guarantee that it will stay that way, as VirtualPC is owned by Microsoft.
I can run Windows apps on my Mac, but you can't run Mac apps on your PC.
The Mac applications that I want to run are also available for PC.
Show me on the doll where his noodly appendage touched you.
Actully at work I do have a dual 1.25Ghz G4 with 1 GB of ram and the second processor really helps. Hopefully at the end of the year, as VP of Infromation Tech maybe I will get one of those new G5's after X.3 comes out and my current machine will become humble Intern fodder.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
Last mac version came out in 1996 (v.2.5). The current version is 4.1 and runs great under Linux/Wine. What about a MacOSX version?
Gabe Newell talked a bit about MT in Half-Life 2.
Implementing and maintaining a "deeply" multi-threaded version of Source would be a pain (i.e. multi-threading the renderer). Implementing a hacky version (e.g. having a discreet physics thread or running the client and server in different threads) is something we may do depending upon how much bandwidth we have before we ship. Right now we don't get nearly as much bang for the buck working on hyperthreading as we do on other optimizations. That may change as we run out of things to optimize.
64-bits, in contrast, is a one-time cost and is fairly simple to take advantage of. It's a huge win for tools as it not only gets more work done per instruction, but it also gets us past the current memory limitations, which are a problem for us today on tools.
Distributed computing is harder than hyperthreading but it has the potential to increase performance by a huge amount (8X on our tools) as opposed to hyperthreading (30%). All of our tools are going to a distributed approach.
So the taxonomy looks like this:
- general algorithmic optimization (general good thing to do)
- DX9 optimization (big gains, long term direction)
- 64-bits (not that hard, solves memory problem as well as performance gains)
- hyperthreading (hard initial cost, on-going code maintainence cost, limited unpredictable performance gains, benefits in multiprocessor environments as well)
- distributed computing (hardest to do, biggest potential gains, great for tools, may be great for servers, not sure how it works with clients)
Um... Quake 3 came out on mac first...
Um... Bullshit.
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.
Integrate Keynote and LaTeX
I think he got the Nobel Prize for the Auger effect but I am not sure.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Ha, apple zealot mods r teh ghey again!
You should know that these people are far too ghey to handle the truth, they only want the spoon fed fiction that jobs shoves in their ass every night.
They believe what they want, I will pity their ignorance and hope they die quickly and quietly.
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.
Um... actually, the Quake III test did come out first on the Mac, back in April of '99, then on Linux and Windows. id wanted the initial release of the test version to be on the platform with the fewest/most controlled variations in configurations. Windows users got to try the test a couple weeks after Mac users did.
I don't really understand why there's such a big stink over whether the G5 (in general or specific models) is faster or slower than PCs (in general or specific models). Even if it's 5% slower on some benchmark, it's still pretty fucking fast.
I haven't seen anyone disagree with that much, and yet lots of people are demanding that Apple (and only Apple) back up their marketing.
Don't become a regular here -- you will become retarded.
Answer a really important question: does Drop Bear Repellent actually work, or is it just a scam?
As I sit here typing on my $1800 dual Opteron running a 64 bit OS (United Linux), I can't help wonder that this shouldn't have been available on the market TWO MONTHS AGO when I bout it...hmmm.
[RIAA] says its concern is artists. That's true, in just the sense that a cattle rancher is concerned about its cattle.
>The Mac is easier to use.
:-)
Arguable. Mostly depends on what you're used to. I've been around plenty of noobs with their shiny new boxes. I've seen people take to Windows with no problem, and I've seen people trip up over Mac OS X. Could go either way. The other question is what do your friends, who will (hopefully) guide you through your dark days, use?
>Now it's also as fast (or significantly FASTER) the the PC.
For the sake of argument, let's just say that both are equally well suited for common consumer tasks: web browsing, digital cameras, email, burning CDs, average 3D games. Stay away from fancy stuff for a second--no firewire 800, no DVD burning, etc. Still with me? OK, good.
>It runs all the commercial apps you need.
Unless you want games, or cheap clip art, or scores of other things. Most people do *not* buy MS Office for their home computers--the use MS Works or AppleWorks or whatever comes with them. Most also steer towards cheap photo editors (more than jusr rotate & enhance that iPhoto offers) like PSP or the cheap Adobe products, rather than Quark-Photoshop-Illustrator stuff.
>It can emulate proprietary in-house apps with VirtualPC.
For only $300 more (Win XP version). Yes, you can put your pirated copy of Win98 on if you buy the $120 DOS-only version, but how many noobs know to do that?
>It can play all the latest games, even if they laga couple months (get a PS2, also!).
So after you've bought your expensive (see below) Mac, you recommend a $150 console too?
>It's UNIX under the hood and runs X11 for added compatability.
True. But what do noobs want UNIX for? Without a nearby geek, they don't. Period.
>All of this, and it's not any more expensive than comparable PC hardware.
store.apple.com: base 1.6 GHz G5, $2000. (no monitor.) 1.4 GHz G4s, get'em while you can, $1300. Base 800 MHz eMac, $800.
dell.com/tv: 2.4 GHz P4, 17" monitor, sometimes a free upgrade to a 15" LCD: $500.
PCs will continue to dominate (what is it, 20:1?) due to economics alone. Will they cost more in the long run due to viruses and whatnot? Who knows. Will the user have a more pleasurable experience with one or the other? Who knows. Is it better to spend $500 today than $800 today? Yes--*everyone* knows that one.
Not saying Macs aren't great (I'm sure the last few major viruses changed some minds), just saying what reality is. Also, I'm not saying Apple is going under. Far from it--they've got high-margin hardware (plus iPods and iTMS and whatnot) that sells just fine, thakyouverymuch. The BMW/Ford analogy explains it all.
PS--FYI, I work (two jobs, no less) as a (primarily) Mac tech and own both Macs and PCs.
PPS--the Red v. Blue page was a joke, a parody, that made use of exaggeration. Just so you know.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
I use the old dead freeware gadget "Cycles" to watch both G4s in separate graphs, it's interesting seeing each processor's load.
/Applications/Utilities/CPU Monitor. :-) I recommend "extended view". Green = user, red = system, blue = niced. Close the main window, open the prefs, and tell it to use Extended view in the app's dock icon. Then go to system prefs and drop it into the login items folder, and tell it "hide" so it isn't the active app when you log in.
There's also
Course, that's all OS X. Not sure if you're using it or not.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
>It is ***a*** [emphasis added] complicated photoshop benchmark.
:-)
Well, if you're going to do that exact task (rotate 90 degrees, then 9, then 0.9?!?!?*), the G5 is obviously the way to go. Now read this little nugget from barefeats.com, a great pro-Mac site that pits Macs against PCs but is honest enough to admit when Macs fall short:
"I tested a 1.3GHz Centrino laptop (12" screen) recently. At first I was going to compare it to the 12" PowerBook. But it ran CineBench 2003 100% faster than the PowerBook G4/1GHz (17" screen). It ran Photoshop 20% faster. It ran Quake3 103% faster in 640x480 "Fastest" mode. The 17" PowerBook did, however, run Quake3 84% faster in 1024x768 "Max" mode. Probably has more video memory."
The point is, any CPU can beat any other CPU at certain tasks. Depends on what you're measuring. I once tested (years ago) an AMD K6/2-450 against a dual-PPro. Thanks to more MHz and a faster system bus, the AMD edged out the PPros in most tasks by a consistant 10-20%. But the PPro *spanked* the AMD (I mean, by 3:1 or 4:1) on some tests. Whatever the strength was--FPU, integer, whatever--there were some things it was *great* at. If I would have published just those results, would you have bought one?
* I bet my old dual-PPro would win if I rotated the image 99.9 degrees in one step. 90 & 9 took 3.5 seconds for the Mac.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
I use Cycles because I think it's aesthetics are better than the Apple CPU Monitor. Just a personal thing.
What they convienently left out is the fact that Apple has been steadily coding improvements for the PowerPC flavor of GCC, leaving x86 GCC in the dust speed-wise. X86 GCC does not have the same kind of corporate sponsorship. Even so, this "benchmark", compared to the same code compiled with Intel's compiler, eats Intel's dust.
You hit the nail on the head.
No, Thursday's out. How about never - is never good for you?
Yes, it's very observant at this point to notice yet again that this kind of thing is primarily a marketing move... yadda yadda... but what does it matter? The reason I stick with my Mac is that, even at half the speed of a PC, I'm more productive than with Windows. It's mostly because of the care and thought that goes into the interface and the way you can interact with the machine. There's a lot to that. For example, my boss (a PC user) is constantly blown away by the consistent implementation of drag-and-drop on the Mac desktop, along with the concept of text clippings. From what I've seen Windows is still struggling to catch up with where the Mac was way back in System 7.
That's one example, but it's simple, well thought out stuff like that that keeps me on a Mac. I'm not interested in the whole Computing Speed Circle Jerk and I wonder why it matters so much that people get into these divisive arguments about the validity of SPEC numbers and all. Who cares?
--Rick "If it isn't broken, take it apart and find out why."
However, as is well know, Virtual PC doesn't run on a G5 box.
And just how much does a Dell with dual P4s, a 23" LCD, SATA, PCI-X, Firewire 800, Superdrive, etc. cost?
Priceless.
(hint: there's no such thing as a dual P4!)
Who modded this down? It should be a +5 Funny!
Near the end, the article links to one of their previous articles on the G5, and mentions that interestingly their earlier article had slightly different SPEC results for the G5. The funny thing is, that article talks about the MOTOROLA G5, ie the PowerPC 8500, not the IBM PowerPC 970! Yeah, they were both referred to as the G5, they must be the same chip.
Whatchu talkin' about, Willis? Even this post, with its sly play on modding "up" or "down," is funnier than your imitation of a two-faced donut-eatin' po-lice!
First off, this is SO FREAKING OLD it's not even funny. Secondly, does it matter now that the Opterons are whomping ass against Xeons in multiproc configs?
It's been a long time.
>>The Mac is easier to use.
:-)
.Mac were still free it would really be no contest.
>
>Arguable. Mostly depends on what you're used to. I've
>been around plenty of noobs with their shiny new boxes.
>I've seen people take to Windows with no problem, and
>I've seen people trip up over Mac OS X.
But - easier to use for advanced users? I'd have to give that to a Mac. I could care less what is easier to learn... Or, if not easier to use, how about less frustrating.
>Could go either way. The other question is what do your
>friends, who will (hopefully) guide you through your
>dark days, use?
Counterpoint - 10 people come up to me and say "my computer keeps rebooting...". I just shrung and say "Sorry mac, I have an Apple". Sometimes it's good to be alone.
>>Now it's also as fast (or significantly FASTER) the the PC.
>For the sake of argument, let's just say that both are
>equally well suited for common consumer tasks: web
>browsing, digital cameras, email, burning CDs, average
>3D games. Stay away from fancy stuff for a second--no
>firewire 800, no DVD burning, etc. Still with me? OK,
>good.
Lost me at the first one. Web browsing? Safari at least lets you block popups. I don't know how many people I've directed to the google toolbar - after I've pointed them to AdAware because they have a large number of very suspicious popups (hey look, the company intranet just added popunders! don't think so...). Oddly, I have yet to need AdAware or the like on my Powerbook.
Email? I get bayesian filtering out of the box. If
Burning CD's? PC's (even modern ones) still seem a bit more fragile in that regard.
Digital camera support might be about equal... but what about digital video? I hate hate hate trying to edit video on a PC. I will never do it again, and I will do everything in my power to save others from doing so as well.
Only a PC user considers burning a DVD "fancy". I consider it nessicary for backups and great for pictures too (for large slideshows). That kind of thing should be basic sttuff for all computers by now, all the parts are there.
You do have a point at games.
>>It runs all the commercial apps you need.
>
>Unless you want games, or cheap clip art, or scores of >other things. Most people do *not* buy MS Office for their
>home computers--the use MS Works or AppleWorks or
>whatever comes with them. Most also steer towards
>cheap photo editors (more than jusr rotate & enhance
> that iPhoto offers) like PSP or the cheap Adobe products, >rather than Quark-Photoshop-Illustrator stuff.
So what's wrong with Appleworks for what most people really do? Why can't I use any of the thousands of cheap clip-art or font CD's? I can... If they need office to read work files, they will just buy (or pirate) Office X. End of story. Windows makes it a little easier to pirate Office if it was not bundled. I can access my corperate intranet just fine from the mac with Citrix and RDC clients for OS X.
And as for Photoshop, you have Elements on both platforms. And the Mac also has GraphicConverter, a really good program for very little money. It even works with 16-bit Tiff's which Elements does not accept... I'm not sure what you were getting at there. Again, games are really the only thing where you have a significantly better library of software.
>It can play all the latest games, even if they laga couple months (get a PS2, also!).
>So after you've bought your expensive (see below) Mac,
> you recommend a $150 console too?
How many PC owners have an XBox? What's up with that? You need as console anyway if you are really into games. Personally I bought a PS2 some time before my Mac because I was tired of the PC merry-go-round of upgrades and driver failures.
>>It's UNIX u
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Same here, well that and the fact the Cycles is also lower CPU use.
http://www.jc-news.com/parse.cgi?pc/benchmarking/x plat/ppc-x86
Who cares? An Opteron may not run OS X, but it will run...
CPM
MS/PC/DR/Real32 DOS
Win 9x/ME
Win NT/2K/XP
Redhat/Mandrake/Debian/SuSE/Slackware Linux
Free/Open/Net BSD
Solaris
QNX
AtheOS
BeOS
And those will run literally thousands (if not millions) of more applications than OS X will. I may not use all of those operating systems or applications, but those choices will remain open should I ever want to.
Well, I should note that the QMaster render clients run on Linux and Irix (windoze client is discontinued) but those are paid licensed versions and Apple's giving away the QMaster Mac version free. They're giving an incentive to run Apple hardware across the board, obviously.
It's easier to create a cluster computing gadget like QMaster if you've got a few apps that operate around a common task like FCP/Shake rendering, and Apple has barely begun to develop this so it's still a little rough around the edges and geeky. But I don't see any reason why this clustering couldn't be applied to general apps. I figure eventually you'll have a dual proc system handling local OS tasks and I/O, plus any number of extra "virtual processors" available through a cluster.
Digdug had an auger, I'm pretty sure anyway...
Anticipating a Debian or Gentoo distribution for this architecture, I'm curious whether it is possible to purchase one of these systems from Apple without OS X installed; the "Apple tax", so to speak.
I know that Slashdot readers have in the past made some noise about Microsoft's practices in this area, specifically concerning laptops.
Have any Slashdot readers have researched this at all, that is, how one might obtain such a system from Apple, and if so, what they have turned up?
.sig Realistic fines for copyright in
Also remember that the performance of 2GHz G5s and 2GHz (or any other version) Opterons are not readily comparable.
Yellow Dog Linux sells Macs pre-installed with Linux. Dunno if they have G5s yet. They also sell G4 based small-footprint machines called "briQs".
Clear, Dark Skies
Is that where you take charge and plug yourself into current events?
Clear, Dark Skies
I'm confused...
"If I had an Intel/AMD box, I'd be more locked into a platform than with my Mac.
--Not if you have a G5, which can't run VirtualPC. "
>>yet
"In fact, Virtual PC allows me to run multiple x86 operating systems (say, Win '98, Win XP, OpenStep, and QNX) simultaneously with each other, too.
Of course, there's no guarantee that it will stay that way, as VirtualPC is owned by Microsoft. "
>> I see you have the magic 8-ball
"I can run Windows apps on my Mac, but you can't run Mac apps on your PC.
The Mac applications that I want to run are also available for PC."
>>And vice-versa...I don't see your point...Are you a fan of MS(totally acceptable, BTW)? And in that case, is your beef with Apple based purely on price points rather than it's 'propreitary-ness'.
I am loathe to make a car comparison yet again, however I never hear people complaining about how an expensive car is a bad choice seeing as we all are supposed to obey the speed limit. Sure we can all drive Kias, but we don't all want to. Why does extra money spent on a computer have to be taken out of context as more than choosing a car with leather and a Navigation system. I don't see how MS is any less propreitary than Apple. I think you are really just a PC gamer(Totally acceptable, BTW) who like many of your brethren are perpetually unable to differentiate computer use as a tool and computer use as a toy.
We apologise for the fault in this post. Those responsible have been sacked. -- Signed RICHARD M. NIXON
must remember to use preview:
tow = two
and microsoft sells software, not hardware.
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
Um... if your a skilled pc builder then $800 is easy to build for a quality system. This involves knowing which things like which processor you can buy that can be overclocked big time. Their are still some sub $100 dollar amd processors then can be overclocked over 50% and perform better then their $300 dollar counterparts while producing less heat then the newest p4's.
Also most mac components tend to be cheap... Did you know that the ati radeon 9600 pro is slower then the ati radeon 9500 pro? In fact you can overclock a ati radeon 9500 np to run faster then both. So if you take extreme hardware knowledge into mind you can easily build a quality system for $1200. Also Prove to me that you can run the apple system at ddr400 with eight memory slots... Most motherboards have a hard time running at that spec after filling 3 slots.
I can keep on giving examples but i'm tired.
Hmmm... Pie...
Good to know. I'll check it out. Nuttin' wrong wit' pretty. :-)
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
>>>The Mac is easier to use.
:-)
:-)
:-)
>>Arguable. Mostly depends on what you're used to. I've...
>But - easier to use for advanced users?...
For me, actually, yes--the PC is still miles ahead of Mac when it comes to keyboard shortcuts, especially at the OS level. I like the fact that I have control-F to find things in any app but can always, instantly, get an OS-find with Windows-F, compared to the Mac where you have to click the desktop, then command-F. And so on, and so on. Nothing more than personal preference. To each his own. If you like OS X more, you won't hear an argument from me.
>Could go either way. The other question is what do your
>friends, who will (hopefully) guide you through your
>dark days, use?
>Counterpoint - 10 people come up to me and say "my
> computer keeps rebooting...". I just shrung and say
>"Sorry mac, I have an Apple". Sometimes it's good to be
> alone.
On our side, true. But new users will go with the majority to avoid people like you.
You next points were all good and I have little argument with any. My main point is that most people (and many companies) look at two things: "what is cheapest today?" and "what are most people using?" They don't see past the end of their nose and don't know what they're missing (fewer viruses, better built-in mail client*, etc.) by not going the Mac route.
* good point about Mail.app. I didn't think of that since I have never, ever a) used LookOut or b) used a Mac for email. Eudora 1.5.4, ca. 1996, not a virus yet.
>Peace of mind and lack of spyware - priceless.
LOL.
>Only the PC is the gift that keeps on taking, as it were.
Good line.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
The point is, you can't run it now on a G5. Microsoft dropped the ball on this one. Why is there no patch for the existing product? What is their timeframe for the new product?
I see you have the magic 8-ball
LOL! Neither do you.
And vice-versa...I don't see your point...Are you a fan of MS(totally acceptable, BTW)?
No, I have no love of Microsoft, which is why I won't buy VirtualPC.
And in that case, is your beef with Apple based
Where did you get the idea I had a beef with Apple? I don't have a beef with Apple.
I have owned several Apple products in the past. I had one of the first Mac Centris 610's to be sold. My parents owned a "Woz" machine - one of the original Apple IIgs machines signed by Steve Wozniak (which was really l337 at the time - 1986). Some of the products that I still keep are my Apple II+ and Newton 2100. I would consider purchasing more Apple products in the future, and I have on several occasions.
purely on price points rather than it's 'propreitary-ness'.
If you're asking about why I have not purchased an Apple product recently, no, it was not primarily price related. It had to do with features. Examples:
- More than quite a few years ago, I purchased a Power Computing machine (they made Apple clones), not because it was cheaper, but because it fscking kicked ASS! It had a bigger hard drive than Apple offered, more memory, a better video digitizer, a faster CDROM (a big deal at the time), and an integrated ZIP drive (FREE, because I went to MacWorld).
- The last time I bought a laptop, I considered buying the PowerBook G4. I didn't purchase it, because after using a laptop with 1400x1050 for a few years, I needed more screen
real estate than the 1280x854 Apple was willing to sell me. The Apple just happened to be more expensive than the PC I did buy with the same features (and a bigger screen 1600x1200).
- I was also thinking about purchasing an iPod. I instead ended up purchasing an Archos, primarily because I don't need to use external software to add music to the Archos, the Archos can record music, and the Archos displays my pictures. It just so happened that the Archos was also less expensive than the iPod.
So basically, the price didn't make much difference, because the features weren't as good.I am loathe to make a car comparison yet again, however I never hear people complaining about how an expensive car is a bad choice seeing as we all are supposed to obey the speed limit.
I won't make that comparision either. However, I will offer the suggestion that an expensive car would be a bad choice when that car is both more expensive and offers less features, which was my experience recently with Apple products (although not in the past). It's also the reason why several years ago, I bought a Mazda instead of a Volkswagon. Now I have a VW instead of a Mazda, because VW changed their feature set to something more useful.
Sure we can all drive Kias, but we don't all want to. Why does extra money spent on a computer have to be taken out of context as more than choosing a car with leather and a Navigation system.
Because the computer simply doesn't offer as many features, especially the ones that I need.
I don't see how MS is any less propreitary than Apple.
Because, even if you strip all the software off an Apple, the firmware and hardware architecture are still proprietary. In fact, for a long time, you couldn't remove MacOS from a Mac if you wanted to run a different OS, because the way the firmware was written, only MacOS could be booted (I don't know if it's still this way or not). On a PC, the firmware and hardware are open and many different vendors make them. There is no issue with booting an OS that isn't Windows, because of this.
I think you are really just a PC gamer(Totally acceptable, BTW) who like many of your brethren are perpetually unable to differentiate computer use as a tool and computer use as a toy.
Actually, no, I'm just a guy that uses PCs to do programming work, pay my taxes, write e-mail, browse the web, etc. I do play the occasional game, but I do that on a console. Last game I bought for PC was UT several years ago.
Show me on the doll where his noodly appendage touched you.
Now how would overclocking void any warranties? In any case even if some company doesn't allow overclocking how would they find out. I looked at the specs at the apple site and the dual g5 only supports 4 slots. That makes more sense for a desktop cpu.
Hmmm... Pie...
>Now how would overclocking void any warranties?
Tell you what, call ATI up and ask them.
" I looked at the specs at the apple site and the dual g5 only supports 4 slots. That makes more sense for a desktop cpu."
No, the 1.6 GHz only supports 4 slots.
" The dual processor system has eight DIMM slots...:"
http://www.apple.com/powermac/architecture.html
Look under heading 5.
"The dual processor system can hold
up to eight DIMMs for up to 8GB of memory."
The latter comes from the technical overview.
"
Eight DIMM slots supporting up to 8GB of main memory"
From the techsheet:
http://www.apple.com/powermac/printversion.html
Integrate Keynote and LaTeX
Whatever shall I do???
Yours humbly,
Ta bu shi da yu
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
On a PC, the firmware and hardware are open
Funny you should claim that. Apple uses OpenFirmware. x86 PCs don't.
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
Even if he is a gamer, he should not rule out the Mac. See http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=75595&cid=6763 125.
That that is is that that that that is not is not.