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MacWorld Magazine Benchmarks the G5s
La Temperanza writes "Macworld has released yet another set of benchmarks of the full line-up of G5 desktops, along with Dual 1.42GHz and single 1GHz G4s. The results are very interesting indeed, and I think I can safely say they're not biased in the G5's favor." I dunno, it should not come as too much of a shock that a dual G4 can beat a single G5 in many tests.
...that it's nice that a totally independant and unbiased organisation is benchmarking the G5.
More benchmarks are becoming available. Some like MacAddict's start to point out what a huge effect having a lot of memory means to the G5.
http://www.macaddict.com/news/news_007.html
This just goes to show that, depsite the FSB bottleneck, the G4 DP still has a lot of life left in it. With the love affair of the new G5's in full force, maybe I can pick up a G4 DP dirt cheap now:)
every time a republican dies a queer angel gets his wings
It'll be anti-climactic when real computers start shipping!
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
One would wonder what the downside of setting the energy saver preference to 'best performance' really is. Seems odd for Apple not to be shipping the machines running at full speed if there isn't any difference when it comes to processor life, etc. Energy use can't be the issue here.
I have been reading all the G5 benchmarks with mixed feelings lately. First of all I should clarify that I am a fan of Macs, and so I am glad to see that there is any interest in the platform at all.
However, I do most of my real computing on a home-grown linux cluster using Rocks. These intel machines are simply so cheap if you step slightly back from the bleeding edge, that I don't know if I could justify spending a significant amount on an equivilent Mac cluster (although I am watching V. Tech's apple cluster, just like everyone else apparently is...).
Is there really much need for so much desktop power? How many users will utilize the full potential of a dual G5? Keep in mind that if even slashdot users can't keep two procs going, the general public has little hope.
Of course, this will not stop me from buying one.. It's just so cool looking... I am just confessing that I realize it is wasteful...
...or not 2p. That is the question!
Two words that together will suck up all the resources of a machine. I think you'll see plenty of home users maxxing out their G5s once they start doing home videos. The market may swing back to the home users from corporations because the general home users do have a few apps that will need it.
now we just have to wait for tonight's SCO update.
The obvious ways this thing should be different are huge memory moves: the true independent DDR and fast bus means this thing can move a DVD's worth of data in ten seconds. The other way this should be better is that the processor should be able to have multiple floating moint commands being processed at once (in addition to altivec). neither of these are showing up in the app-based benchmarks.
these difference should be huge and impossible to miss. something is wrong. maybe some debug codes in the new OS or the compilers are crippling the G5.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
I know it's a little off topic, but it is sorta related. Just croos your eyes.
Does anyone have a decent estimate for when the G5 will make it to the powerbooks? I know they have to cool them off, but how long is that likely to take?
Nice try. In 1998, when I bought my first Mac, it was by far the best solution for digital video. People with PCs had to suffer through a ton of flakiness just to set up their systems, much less get anything done with them. I was editing video almost out of the box.
Shortly after I got my system, the iMac came up and really introduced desktop video to the masses with the iMac DV.
Back in those days, if you wanted the best computing had to offer, you needed a Mac for video, a PC for work and a Unix box for web stuff. Now you can put all those functions into a Mac and still do well.
These are happy days for Mac fans. It's not the world's most popular computer, but it's by far the best in terms of usability and fun.
D
If using it, or even looking at it, gives you joy, and you have the bucks, what's the harm?
:-(.
You're helping keep Apple in business, so it can make more cool things, so you can buy them. If we stop buying them, then they can't make cool things anymore
That being said, for my purposes, anything that increases real time capacity and reduces rendering time in Final Cut is bound to pay off big-time. And, judging by the rest of the responses, most serious PowerMac users feel the same way.
D
Mac addict shows that in photoshop a G5 with 2Gigs of memory is 20x faster than one with 512MB. While more memory is better always, this probably is showing that g5 can really access is effectively.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
I used to love mac hardware but nowdays macs are basically pc's with a sweet risc processor and same bloated OS. I guess I'm the oddball, I never found anything intuitive about dragging the cd-rom to the trash can to eject the cd. I never found anything appealing about a system that was "user friendly" at the sacrifice of performance.
The underlying OS is now Unix and that is a major plus for the mac, but they still have a bloated gui. Don't mention graphics processing enhancements to the system, because those enhancements DO make the gui much snappier, they would make it ungodly fast if weren't so bloated. Such a waste of a good machine.
You can put video, work, and internet all in a MacOS and do well now, of course you can do the same with a pc, you can certainly do the same with a mac or pc running a *nix OS without the bloated GUI.
"Nice try. In 1998, when I bought my first Mac, it was by far the best solution for digital video"
This was years after Amiga pioneered personal computer sized desktop video and for a time ran away with the market. By 1998, they had fallen by the wayside compared to Apple. But they did invent it.
bloated adj. swollen or inflated
I don't think it means what you think it means.
For me, the major advantage of the G5 is not that it is 64 bit or that it reaches speads up to 2.0 Ghz. For me, it is that there is finally a single chip that can process at the same rate as two G4's (see benchmark results for the 1.6Ghz G5 vs 2 1.4Ghz G4s).
This is important because there is once again - in many years - a single Apple box one may purchase and upgrade as demands increase. THAT IS as long as a single 1.6 or 1.8 Ghz G5 has the option of upgrading to a second processor (of the same clock speed of course).
Does anyone know if this is possible or is the 2 Ghz the only configuration able to support dual G5's? (Can one purchase a single 2.0Ghz and add a proc later?)
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I only came here to do two things; kick some ass, and drink some beer...looks like we're almost out of beer.
I finally got to play with a G5 display model this evening. My biggest dissapointment with the G5, and this is coming from a casual observer, is the..latency? of window resizing. Is this just a function of RAM? I understand there alot of crunching to render the screen, but shouldn't the Radeon 9600 cruise through something like a window resize?
Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known. -- Carl Sagan
Does anyone know if this is possible or is the 2 Ghz the only configuration able to support dual G5's?
It's not easy; the socket for the second processor is missing on the single-processor model.
Can one purchase a single 2.0Ghz and add a proc later?
No. This question is answered on Apple's site BTW.
You know you can use a mac without OS X's GUI
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World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
O_o
Highly unlikely.
Based on history - I don't recall Apple every offering a "dual processor capable" (at least not without third-party upgrades) machine that only shipped with one CPU - and some of the (few) pictures around the place that actually show the inside of the single-CPU models, there doesn't seem to be anywhere to plug an extra CPU in.
There certainly isn't a BTO option on the dual 2Ghz model to only order a single CPU and I don't recall there ever being a similar option for earlier dual CPU machines from Apple.
Of course, what magic the third-party upgraders can weave remains to be seen.
Trust me, Panther's GUI is ***FAST***. So fast I'm no longer saving to upgrade my Powerbook G4/500.
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Remember the Daystar Millennium? That thing could hold 4 processors (the fastest were 604es I believe). Imagine one of those that could hold G4s or 5s.... That was an exciting year for clones, right before Apple pulled the plug. Arguably, though, had Apple not done that, there would be no OS X or G4- and 5-based Macs. I hated them for it at the time, but it probably was the right move. Then again, I would love to see the boxes other companies would come up with if Apple licensed clones again....
Let's not forget that these systems are running nearly identical binaries, which, while it seems fair, is not.
The binaries are optimized for the G4. Optimization for the G5 will create quite different binaries which could run _much_ faster on the G5.
While these tests are a great comparison for performance we'll see today, apps compiled with newer G5 optimizing compilers will push the top numbers even a bit farther, as will future OS updates. Users with G5 a year from now might look back on these numbers and wonder why they were so low...
I don't know of any widely used operating systems that are NOT bloated. Clearly bloat is what the modern OS consumer wants.
Personally, I love the MacOS X eye candy because it just looks good. I find that it makes me feel better overall, which is a very nice plus if you think about the amount of time most of us spend in front of our monitors.
My company's PowerMac G4/1.25 dual processor and my PowerBook G4/1.0ghz are both very snappy machines, I assume largely due to successful offloading of display tasks to their graphics cards. Is this somehow morally wrong?
I like and appreciate beauty in design, so for me the MacOS X GUI is a big winner now that it doesn't slow the machine down, as it used to in older machines.
D
"I like and appreciate beauty in design, so for me the MacOS X GUI is a big winner now that it doesn't slow the machine down, as it used to in older machines."
Perhaps a difference in mindset, to me beauty in design has nothing to do with graphics, it has to do with efficient functionality. Efficient functionality in the UI means intuitive, it means being able to do as much as possible with as little overhead as possible.
What you seem to be missing is the entire point of my post. The macOS GUI DOES slow down your machine, just because the machine is not as slow as your older machines and therefore runs the gui faster as well as everything else. Doesn't mean that the gui couldn't be more efficient and that same machine faster yet.
Offloading graphics isn't morally wrong persay, designing a gui that is so bloated this is neccesary is the problem. Graphics tasks should be offloaded, things like rendering, and games, and image manipulation and various video related tasks... yes these should be offloaded. The gui itself should such a small insignifanct factor compared to the speed of a G4 that the performance gained shouldn't be visible should it be offloaded!
Mac's are fine machines, they are examples of both the things we want a computer to be, and that we definately don't. They highly proprietary, that is the thing we want nothing to do with. They have powerful risc processors and other bells and whistles that handle graphics, that's the part we do want. But the only real excuse for loading macOS is to demonstrate how powerful the machine really is... I mean it takes some kind of horsepower to load an app as system intensive as the desktop in MacOS!
ummm yup, the next time you open a menu in macos tell me if you can even do that much without the system displaying and processing in ways that aren't needed to implement that concept in a graphical environment.
Why do you feel that it's somehow immoral to waste computer power, when most people use computers to surf the web, write documents and deal with their email? None of those functions take more than a tiny share of a modern CPU.
I administrate a network of Windows machines (the one exception being the Macs and Linux systems I use for software development for the company). I notice that everyone loves the extra eye candy, whether it be a huge desktop image or things like HotBar and the like. Those things slow down computers hugely, but in the real world, users love them and do not want to see them gone.
Personally, I want to see beautiful fonts and perfectly anti-aliased text, even though I know these things sap power like crazy. But they make it easier and more enjoyable for me, and in the end, my viewpoint is that this is exactly why we have powerful computers in the first place.
As long as our typical desktop computers aren't using After Effects or doing long renders with Final Cut Pro (as my home machines do), what's the problem with "waste" of CPU?
D
anti-aliased fonts while using computer power at least serve a function, they make text easier to read.
Most people with things like HotBar and the huge desktop image don't actually want them. If you explained to them that those things are why their computer runs like dogshit and are the reason for all thier problems they'll get rid of them or ask you to.
Just out of curiousity... if you administrate a network, why on earth do you allow users to install programs and things like hotbar? Don't explain to the users now that I think about it, explain to the boss that the employee's are installing crap that makes every piece of work they do on the computer take twice as long and therefore makes them half as productive and him/her to pay for double the staff to get the same amount of work done. See what the boss thinks about keeping that crap on the desktop.
You love your desktop eyecandy, woot for you. Explain to me again why the solution to that problem isn't disabling that eyecandy by default and making those who want their computers to chug along go out of THIER way to get rid of it?
More and more typical desktop computers are handling video editing tasks. I'd venture to say that most computer users want things to run faster in general. There are at least as many gamers as their are "web and email grannies" and the web and email grannies are a relic of the past.... they will get older and die off, the younger generations DON'T just use their machine to browse the web. True they still don't utilize it on average the way a tech will utilize his home machine, but that's mostly because they don't know many capabilities exist or have the first clue how to utilize them if they do... that will continue to change.
Right now if I take a pentium 1 233, put about 96mb of EDO ram in it, and a promise controller with a modern hard drive and install win98 on it, that machine will comfortably sit next to a low end p4 with 256mb ddr running winxp and be every bit as snappy or in some cases faster than the p4 (this doesn't hold true in more intense processing of course or number crunching). That is sick. Hardware doesn't get faster so that software can get more bloated and the end result is a system that runs the same speed. Computers get faster so that the system can get faster!
I administrate a network of Windows machines...
;) (Pedant)
Are you aure you don't mean "administer," as opposed to administrate?
Or do you also rebooterate the machines when they have issuatudes?