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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.
I am a believer of momentum and curves.
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.
How many users will utilize the full potential of a dual G5?
Everybody who rips CD's with iTunes, or uses iPhoto, or iMovie. In other words, pretty much everybody who owns a Mac.
Remember, Apple essentially invented desktop media. It's taken off in the Mac world in a way that the rest of the computing world hasn't yet seen. And the tools that Apple provides for dealing with media are all multithreaded and highly optimized. They'll use every ounce of CPU power you throw at them.
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.
Is there really much need for so much desktop power?
In a word, Yes.
Think about all the compute-intensive tasks that were overnight jobs a few years ago, that have become real-time or near-real-time work today. Did you ever use a video editing system that made you wait to render transitions? (And I do mean *wait*.)
There are many situations where any double-digit improvement in processing speed translates directly into thousands of dollars of productivity per user per year.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
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
> Anyone who does serious work in Photoshop, After Effects, Final Cut Pro/Avid, etc.
Yes, but that's an extraordinarily tiny percentage of computer users. Most own a Lite version of a photo editing app that came with their scanner or digital camera, if that. And therein lies the problem. I love the MacOS, but there are good reasons the Mac as a whole has become largely a niche product. When you aim for the graphics artists, you miss the chance to gain a larger userbase. When you aim for the educational market but are being undercut by commodity PC hardware, every inroad will be met by two bridge collapses.
Don't get me wrong and assume I'm playing with flamebait here, I've been a big fan of the MacOS ever since I started using System 7 back in college. I just wish Apple would *really* target a line of machines to more mainstream users, but they continue to remain in their niches. Comfy, I'm sure, but standing still in the face of others who are expanding quite surely is a recipe for eventual extinction. Just MHO though...
Chasing Amy
(We all chase Amy...)
"The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws"-Tacitus
No, it shows that as soon as you start swapping, a 20x slowdown is not unexpected.
Not dirt cheap perhaps but $600 is damn inexpensive considering what you're getting for your money; it's not cutting edge, but a 450 DP G4 is nothing to sneeze at.
Window resizing is non-trivial. For things like spreadsheets, you could just render a larger chunk to an off-screen buffer and clip it correctly for the screen. For most apps, however, you have to calculate the positions of the widgets (which are relative to the size of the window), and then draw them. For this to appear smooth, you must do this at least 25 times per second while the user drags the size. GPU power has very little to do with it except for in special case, like resizing a video clip (which is done entirely on the graphics card).
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
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...