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Apple Issues New G5 Benchmarks
rocketjam writes "According to an article in The Register, Apple has issued SPEC benchmarks for the new dual G5 2GHz machines, comparing it to a two-way Dell Xeon and a 3Ghz Pentium 4 machine. The article says the G5 lagged behind the Dells in integer performance, however in 'the parallel "rate" benchmarks, which tax both of the CPUs in the test machines, the G5 edged out the Xeon 17.2 to 16.7 in the integer score and 15.7 to 11.1 in the floating point tests, suggesting Apple makes far better use of its two CPUs than the Xeon machine....the results augur well for Apple G5 performance in technical and scientific computing environments and for playing games.'"
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...
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!
According to Apple, in certain benchmarks, the G5 is faster than the NEC Earth Simulator.
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!
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?
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.
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
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
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.
Indeed ... last night I was able to do a massive Windows 2k Update while simultaneously upgrading my DSL router firmware, and could still read news and play games to pass the time ...
...
My experience with mac has always been if you do more than one thing at a time you're asking for it. Not having used OS 10.x, I was hoping to hear that multitasking would have improved, as I'd love to ditch Windoze.
Nothing, however, beats my work Debian woody dual 2GHz for speed performance and stability. I wanted to get an ibook but maybe I'll just get a Zaurus
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.
... because this time they have a CPU that doesn't suck?
Seriously, we all knew that the later G3s and all the G4s were behind the competition for all but a few very specialized operations. That's why Apple dumped Motorola, and is now working with IBM.
The G5 doesn't suck. And for the first time, its FSB and memory bandwidth don't suck either. Apple's using standard SPEC benchmarks, and it looks from their writeup like they were fair. So give it a rest.
I hereby place the above post in the public domain.
Welcome to the world of marketing. No matter what the company, the benchmarks are always going to be made to look the best to sell the product. If that means increasing certain numbers and/or decreasing others, or working in unfair enviornments, they will do it. There is no reason to spite Apple for doing what everyone else does. If you want honest benchmarks, you'd have to buy whatever systems you want to compare yourself and make your own conclusion.
At least you could spell the word of the day correctly. It's "Augur", not Auger.
Carpe Cerevisi - Seize the Beer
Why is Apple comparing the G5 to Xeons and P4s? Shouldn't they be pitting their super 64-bit processor against other 64-bit CPUs like Opteron and Madison?
"the 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 only SPEC results that matter are posted on the SPEC site and, like most benchmarks, even those are suspect.
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.
I think it would be more appropriate in this case to say:
You get what your company pays for.
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?
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.
What I heard was that Duke Nukem Forever was only going to appear on Windows if it had already appeared on Apple and Linux two months previously.
I suspect that was the an example of Godel sentence marketing: that statement is true, but is certainly unprovable.
This is all the more humorous, since you are a subscriber, and have first dibs on the articles.
Well.... I don't think they ENTIRELY dumped Motorola, after all, Motorola still has a part in the whole PowerPC group that initially designed the PowerPC.
But, I'm glad to see them ditched on the top line processor anyways.
I am unamerican, and proud of it!
Mac OS X can multi-task (The old OSes could, but I'm with you; they suck); in fact, it does so unbelievably well. I've had, in my year of Mac OS X, 1 crash. ONE.
So, maybe the Old Mac OSes sucked, but Mac OS X is better than you can imagine. It's even more stable than Linux, for me.
Nice troll. I can't believe you were moderated UP as interesting. Here's a very small list:
- SimCity 4 - released for Apple
- America's Army - released for Apple
- Dungeon Seige - released for Apple
- Neverwinter Nights - released for Apple
- Warrior Kings - released for Apple
- Warcraft III - released for Apple
- Master of Orion - released for Apple
- Unreal Tournament 2003 - released for Apple
- The Sims - released for Apple
- Quake III Arena - released for Apple
- Civilization III - released for Apple
Obviously the list goes on. So there are more games released for the PC. It could be said that there are even more games released for the console market. It seems to me though that games that tend to be commercially viable tend to be ported to the Mac. So next time you want to troll, please, at least have a specific gripe instead of spouting off on something you couldn't care to look into.
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).
I like the new OS, especially in the look and feel.. But for some reason, I could make some pretty powerful machines look like 486's. I also found out that Safari is not keen on some shockwave- checkout Nikelab.com on it.. Some of the little functions on there will crash it pretty quick
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.
I will assume that this is the case, so let me be the first to inform you that BSD errr... I mean OSX has in fact, 'improved' multitasking over your experience with OS 9 or earlier.
Drawing any conclusions about the Mac platform based on experiences with OS 9 or earlier is much like concluding that Automobiles are not useful based on your experience with a motorized skateboard.
Rambling statements aside, on my 5 year old G3 (400mhz) I happily run updates, VirtualPC with WinXP, edit my Photoshop files, use Terminal with all its Unix-y goodness, browse the net, listen to music, and play a game of DiabloII... yes, at the same time.
Now your windows machine can do all that too, but you'd need two OS's to do it
Just as irrigation is the lifeblood of the Southwest, lifeblood is the soup of cannibals. -- Jack Handy
How is this comment interesting? There are a large number of games for Apple if you even bother to pull your head out and look around:
MacSoft
Ambrosia Software
Just to name a few. Try looking around instead of spreading this crap. There are more games for the PC than Apple but that does NOT mean there are no games for OSX at all. Some of the best games are available on Apple (Unreal Tournament 2k3, Dungeon Siege, Neverwinter Nights, Masters of Orion, etc.)
Of course in my opinion, if you want video games, buy a playstation, but that is just me.
seSales, Point of Sale software for OS X.
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
Everyone always tries to list all the mac games that ARE available, how about a couple that ARE NOT:
Half Life
Battlefield 1942
Half Life 2 (almost certainly will not see a mac port)
I rest my case.
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
You obviously weren't using OS X. It's true, 9 had some bad memory/multitasking issues that made a poorly configured machine crash often, but X is Unix. I've NEVER had a system crash (only a couple kernel panics from weird peripherals). You can run all the big apps at the same time and it may slow down a bit, but everything will continue as expected.
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.
Sun machines are expensive because of reliability and other things that are needed/wanted in the enterprise space. Sun machines are NOT sold for their speed. I am betting if you put this up against a dual processor Sun workstation that the G5 would blow it away in the speed category.
Sun machines are great, all of my servers are running on Sun's but they are definitely not the fastest kid on the block but they sure are reliable.
seSales, Point of Sale software for OS X.
Actually I've found that consoles really suck for games. They are all basically the same thing with different graphics. PCs on the other hand have much more interesting games. You'd never see Battlefield 1942 on a console for example.
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
How about Planetside? Neverwinter Nights Shadows of Undrentide? Enter the Matrix? Monopoly Tycoon? Star Wars Galaxies: An Empire Divided? Madden 2004? Rise of Nations etc... oh wait, you're trolling...
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?
Honestly, however, I don't get effected by it much, and I play games, program, surf the web, etc...all on a 600mhz iBook.
And I don't run Safari, so that doesn't effect me. =p Omniweb all the way!
Apple used GCC in their P4 benchmarks.
/. story about Apple's benchmarks to read all about it.
You know what? You're right. Of course, Apple also used GCC in their G5 benchmarks, so I'm not certain what your point was. This has been debated extensively. Look at the last
t'nera semordnilap
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.
With 90+% of the people running PC's, PC's will be where the games are found.
I've seen this argument presented hundreds, if not thousands of times, and it is high-time that someone deconstructs it.
Sometimes, percentages are a good measure, such as in elections. However, in other situations, they make no sense at all. Just because 90% of X is using Platform A, and only 10% of X is using Platform B does not mean that someone producing games for Platform B is going to lose money.
The real question here is: Is there sufficient demand for Mac games? The answer is yes, and there are new titles coming out all the time. Are the games you want to play available for Macs? That's subjective, and you are free to decide for yourself.
Here's another reason why that argument doesn't hold water -- the PC hasn't always been the dominant game platform. In the 70s, PCs didn't exist yet, and all the games were for Apples, Commodores, Ataris, and various other game platforms. (By PCs, I'm referring to what used to be called IBM clones, and are now more accurately called Wintel boxes.)
In the 80s, the PC arrived and soon became the most popular computer platform, but games were still predominantly available only for Commodore Amigas, Atari STs, as well as various Nintendo and Sega platforms. (At the time, PC owners would often smugly contend that their machines were superior business machines, and that games were frivolous and superfluous. Now Mac owners use the same argument.)
It wasn't until the 90s that PCs began to dominate the game industry, and even today PC owners have to wait for ports from dedicated game platforms!
Mike van Lammeren
It will challenge your head, your brain, and your mind.
Ummmmm.... PowerPC 970 is a decendant of IBM's POWER4, which is WHIPPING SUN'S ASS! Suns have been loosing the speed race to IBM and HP for a while now. I wouldn't be surprised if the G5 system spanked any 'Solar' system.
What if it is just turtles all the way down?
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!
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
The fact is there are a large number of games available for the Mac. No not all games are available and no one is even claiming that. But to make the blanket statement that there are NO games for the Mac is just plain wrong.
seSales, Point of Sale software for OS X.
Don't forget SameGame and Tetris! Oooh!
My journal has hot
'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...
Did you read the parent post I was responding to? Clearly not ... and btw the windoze box could easily handle VMWare + updates + photoshop + 20 terminals + cygwin + XFree86 + any ancient game like DiabloII + SoundForge + Vegas with 20 tracks of audio. With ONE processor.
Since you obviously missed the point at the end, Linux still kicks ass over all of the above. Stick that in your SuperDrive and smoke it.
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.
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.
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.........
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."
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.
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
The G5 may in fact be good, but Apple is still certainly lying on their benchmarks.
Benchmarks are pretty much lies anyway. But I don't think they are lying more than anyone else.
There is no such thing as a 'standard SPEC' benchmark', as Apple is free to choose whatever compilers they want with whatever compilation settings they way.
No, but SPEC is a standard benchmark, as opposed to Apple's custom benchmarks of G4-optimized PhotoShop filters.
With the last round of Apple benchmarks a couple months ago it was shown that they seriously crippled the compiler on the PC side, thus tilting the benchmarks in their favor.
No. It was alleged that they seriously crippled the compiler. Specifically, that they disabled SSE2 and hyperthreading. The allegation that they disabled SSE2 was just plain false. And according to Apple, they did the tests with and without hyperthreading, and without HT their competition was faster, so they kept that one. And while they may spin things or doctor compilation settings, they don't straight-out lie about their procedures.
I have every reason to believe they did the same thing with these benchmarks.
I have every reason to believe that these are the same benchmarks.
I hereby place the above post in the public domain.
Hmmm, yes let's call up transmeta and get them to make a code morpher x86-64 to RISC. Hmm this will be good.
But they are only faster then the p4 that Apple
benchmark. Read the artikle.
If the parent post you were responding to was the actual article, then yes I read it. If you were responding to another post, you might take a second look at your original post... it's at the top level.
No, I did not miss your statementat the end of your post. No I was not flaming you. You stated that "in your experience" Mac OS had very poor multitasking. You didnt need to state that you hadn't tried OS X, that is self evident. I was merely pointing out that OS X has outstanding multitasking (and stability).
Jeesh, what are you so defensive about? Afraid your IT manager might have dinner and drinks with another OS?
Just as irrigation is the lifeblood of the Southwest, lifeblood is the soup of cannibals. -- Jack Handy
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.
yeah, I always start top level posts with "Re:..." ?? figure it out genius. your /. filter is set too high to see the parent post.
defensive? this is a MAC user saying this? After the requisite windoze insults and typical "ever heard of BSD" pretentiousness?
and as for tone, your sig, sir, adds a insulting flair to everything you post.
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.
The benchmarks Apple used in June had dual Xeons running Red Hat Linux.
You are seriously mental if your choice to purchase an Apple over a PC considers percentages in processor performance.
True, but who said that when Apple was sloooooow?
The main reasons for buying Apple are imo ease of use, stability, good software (even games, but not always the coolest - think Keeper 2), speed (measured in what you get done in real work instead of coaxing your computer) and maybe even coolness if I am honest.
And now raw processor speed - if not ever a real argument - at least isn't a deterrent anymore.
There you go.
I think, therefore I am...I think.
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.
you guys know you are squabbling over a troll comment that has been repeated over and over here? The parent is basically posted on every apple story.
It wasn't until the 90s that PCs began to dominate the game industry, and even today PC owners have to wait for ports from dedicated game platforms!
.01% of games (those made only for Mac OS and non-Intel platforms, since most *nix games will run on *BSD or Linux which can be installed on my Intel box for no monetary cost) on one of 5 systems. Oh, and most of the games I play on consoles just don't tend to translate well to PCs anyway (because they're designed for gamepads and/or multiplayer-on-one-screen).
It may not have been until the 90s, but the current game publishers and developers have a strong tendency to develop for the largest possible market first. A few developers that are used to and can justify multi-platform development will do it simultaneously, or port quickly afterwards, but these are still very few.
As for the dedicated game platforms (commonly refered to as consoles), this is exactly why I slowed down my purchases of graphics cards after the GeForce 2 and instead bought a console when I would have bought a card. I now have a GeForce 4 (having skipped the GF3 cards and all of the GF2 upgrades), a Dreamcast, PS2, XBox, and GameCube. I can now play all but
Now, as far why the PC became the dominant gaming platform (outside of consoles) that it is today: it all came down to a handful of games that pushed the hardcore gaming crowd to the PC. My father owned an Apple IIgs, but bought a 4x86 after he saw Wolfenstein3D and Doom (and it helped that the company he worked for was moving to Wintel and MS Word/Excel, though he's rarely done work at home). Not to mention that since that time both the Windows/x86 PC and gaming have become even bigger businesses than they were in the early 90s, and the two industries grew together.
If multiplatform or alternative platform gaming continue to grow, then we'll probably see more multiplatform games, but for now there are only two things that can really cause a shift in which platform (of computers) gets the most games: one (or a handful of) major must-have game(s) coming out on one alternative platform, or some other catalyst causing a shift to another platform in terms of market share. This is the same reason that console market share is so important to so many gamers: the platform with the largest audience gets the games. Of course, as multi-console development and PCconsole ports become more common, it may also become more common to see developers trying to get games out on multiple PC platforms, too.
-PainKilleR-[CE]
Quit crying you baby
Just as irrigation is the lifeblood of the Southwest, lifeblood is the soup of cannibals. -- Jack Handy
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.
nice. toodles
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.
To defend myself, I'm a Mac tech. I'm writing this on an iMac.
The reference was to the guys who do the blood gulch chronicles. They did a mac parody ad.
www.redvsblue.com
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.
Yes, but what about shitty games? You know, the ones that give you that sinking feeling when you realize that your impulse purchase was a mistake. Most of those don't get ported to the Mac.
Apple needs to reach out to the mediocre and uninspired developers. Churning out another lame wargame with soldiers who dance like puppets when they talk? On x86 there are thirty competing titles, but only two or three on the Mac! Contract-publishing a tedious racing game with no charm or originality? Mac users are waiting for you!
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."
> Obviously the list goes on
Why?
>It could be said that there are even more games
>released for the console market
Yes, but that would not be the truth
>It seems to me though that games that tend to be
>commercially viable tend to be ported to the Mac
I think that sentence do speak for itself.
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."
Also:
Tony Hawk 4
Tom Clancy Ghost Recon
Aliens Vs Predator 2
Soldier Of Fortune 2
NOLF 2
Tiger Woods 2003
Bloodrayne
and coming soon:
Halo
Splinter Cell
Doom 3
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
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.
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?
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.
OK, here you go:
Sun Blade 2000 (1.2GHz): 722 SPECint2000, 16.4 SPECint_rate2000.
The SPECfp results for the UltraSPARC III are useless due to the art bug.
Somebody should be crying, but it's not the Mac users.
damn, you got the last word. :(
Just as irrigation is the lifeblood of the Southwest, lifeblood is the soup of cannibals. -- Jack Handy
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.
>> Obviously the list goes on
>Why?
Because most of us have the brain cells to look it up if we are interested in what else is out there, and obviously there are more games out there considering how long the mac platform has been around.
http://www.apple.com/games/
Integrate Keynote and LaTeX
Were all those games released at the same time as the PC version or did you have to wait for a while? Last year's titles are on sale at Best Buy for $10-$20. Does the Mac get those great last year prices if the port takes longer? These are questions and not flames.
"Yes, but what about shitty games? You know, the ones that give you that sinking feeling when you realize that your impulse purchase was a mistake. Most of those don't get ported to the Mac."
Besides Blizzard titles how do you know if the game will be good or not? Its like movies, everyone wants their movie to be one of the top 10 of the year but that doesn't mean it will be. It takes lot of crap to finally get a great title. So do apple ports correctly predict which great titles are coming out and port them over? Should I only buy PC games that were ported?
Also, were the ports done at the same time or after the game rocked? I could wait a year on every game for the PC before I bought it to determine if it rocked or not but I prefer not to. Perhaps Mac buyers don't mind waiting for the ports but thats not hardcore gaming at all.
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!
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.
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
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.
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.
"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
Whaa? This should have gotten a +1 Funny. Or at least the parent post should have! Again... more clueless moderation from people who have their heads up their ass.
Un-news
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'
Hell, I can put together a brand new dual athlon system for like $700-800, used for like $500. I'm supposed to spend $3000 on a Mac? Yeah, right.
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.
China has a 'Dragon' or something processor about to launch to run GNU/Linux, and it is MIPS.
Today's high end is embedded five years hence.
Leandro Guimarães Faria Corcete DUTRA
DA, DBA, SysAdmin, Data Modeller
GNU Project, Debian GNU/Lin
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)
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
Comment removed based on user account deletion
And I bet you believe in the liberal media conspiracy and jewish conspiracies too?
Ohhh! Look out, here come the black helicopters!
That's right, whenever your own narrow worldview gets challenged fabricate up a ricoculous conspiracy theory to explain it all away so your brain can rest easy in its Happy Place.
Or you could acknowledge the fact that more people are into Mac's now then used to be thanks to OS X. And when I saw that I don't necessarily mean they own an Apple. Before I got my 12" PowerBook I was a bigtime x86 user and before that an Amiga owner. But when OS X came out I saw it was what Linux had failed to achive, a useable UNIX based desktop for novices and powerusers alike.
As far as Apples being more expensive this is true to an extent in the desktop area. Servers and laptops however I feel are comptetively priced for the hardware package you get.
Hell, I can get a brand new Kia for $12,000. Spend $30,000 on a Volvo? Yeah right!
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.
Um, what?
I made a joke about the lack of games on the Mac. I was modded down. I didn't say they were more expensive. So why accuse me of that?
What is your problem?
Forget the whales - save the babies.
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?
Nope.
;), I so want to nick one.
Suns are not very fast, they are stable, and capable of some pritty funky stuff, like hotswappable-ness (rip out a processor, without downtime, major funkyness).
> you get what you pay for
Dam right you do, I'd love to own one, we have a couple of Xerox printers running of Ultra 30s, which are no longer used (replaced all our printers with Windows solution which sucks, and no longer used as intenteded
Wow, I should not post when knackered.
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."
No, you couldn't squash it, except maybe if your PC came with a FireWire Bulldozer. First, RTFA. Do you see those benchmarks? Second, not only do you get your choice of OS on a G5 (OS X, Linux, etc.) you can also run Office natively, write programs natively that compile to X86, but you can also run X11 applications side by side with Mac OS apps, all on a system running with a BSD Core. The fact that you said, "my choice of OS" cracks me up. Do you even realize that OS X is based on BSD and is open source at the core? Need your precious Windows? Ever heard of Virtual PC? (Which will be compiled for the G5 soon according to Microsoft and Apple.)
I don't know about you, but I'm a goth. Part of that, to me, means I think for myself. In this case, it means no Intel, and no AMD. IMHO, PowerPC and *NIX are the future.
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.
http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/08/27/ 158214&mode=thread&tid=179&tid=185&tid=190&tid=201
So far MS doesn't seem to want to make VirtualPC available to Mac users. Anyway I think you missed the point the previous poster was making.
The phaomnneil pweor of the hmuan mnid. Fcuknig amzanig eh!
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
No, Microsoft doesn't want people on the Mac to use Virtual PC to emulate non-MS x86 operating systems. When Virtual PC was owned by Connectix, there was a Red Hat and IBM PC-DOS version of VPC. Now there isn't. That's the game they're playing. The point the previous poster was making was that there is no OS choice on PowerPC, which is untrue. They also were saying that you don't get bang for your buck on hardware, also very untrue. Is there some other point I missed?
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
On average now, the wait is about 3 months difference, though many games (espeisaly those by blizzard) tend to be released at the same time or within weeks of each other.
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
Wow you people are pathetic. Take your god damned USB tow button mouse off your current computer and plung the fucking thing into your mac. Instant right click.
As for math and the real world, technicaly speaking all of your "real work" is done with merely addition and multiplication, it's just a matter of how fast each item can be accomplished.
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
Mob mentality sucks doesn't it?
The laptops look like barbie's makeup kit, not to mention the price
Which ones? They grey ones? Or the white ones?
At least MS lets OEMs sell hardware that can run their OS
Repeat after me, Apple sells computers, microsoft sells hardware
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
must remember to use preview:
tow = two
and microsoft sells software, not hardware.
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
Because, as Apple so cleverly put it, Opterons are for workstations and not desktops. Or something like that.
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
"Please desist in pretending your Mac is a sports car. It's a plastic box."
Well, if you have a G5 or one of the new powerbooks (12" or 17"), its an aluminum box.
Integrate Keynote and LaTeX
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.