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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.
second post
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.
Why else wouldn't guys like this be best qualified to benchmark the thing? They are just about the only guys who have even heard of it.
Cooked and biases results won't matter: the only people who will buy G5's are Apple zealots who would not even care if the thing was so slow it got smoked by a Vic-20.
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...
Mac benchmarks are brought to you by the same guys who came out with the file compression program that made the file smaller each time you ran it (so you could make a 3 meg file take up only 1 byte if you ran it enough). They'll also sell you a complete hi-res pirated version of the Daredevil movie on 1.44 meg floppy.
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.
"With default system settings, a G5 under moderate use is damn near silent"
Yes, under typical usage, the G5 is silent. This is because Mac's run hardly any software, and can't do near as many things as a PC can, so they sit there shut off so much of the time. This is why Apple has concentrated on how the case looks instead of what is inside the case: that is what matters to the Mac "user".
now we just have to wait for tonight's SCO update.
"Remember, Apple essentially invented desktop media"
No, it was around before Apple got involved.
"It's taken off in the Mac world in a way that the rest of the computing world hasn't yet seen"
You must not know anyone with a Wintel. There are more people doing desktop media stuff on those than there are total Macintoshes being used.
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?
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
Put another way, I can make a maxed out dual 1.42 G4 crawl in Photoshop. Give me a large enough hi-res, CMYK image with many layers and an art director who wants to try something new and the G4 will soon be sweating. I'm sure my ex-girlfriend the Avid editor can say the same thing with examples from her field. And, while I am neither a scientist or a programmer, I'm sure there are people in both fields who are salivating at the prospect of larger data sets and the ability to consider more complex calculations.
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 don't want to start a holy war here, but what is the deal with you Mac fanatics? I have recently upgraded from a Mac 8600/300 w/64 Megs of RAM to a new G4 dual 1.42GHz with AGP 8X and PCI-X to help me at my freelance gig where I copy a 17 Meg file from one folder on the hard drive to another folder. On the G4 I spent about 20 minutes trying to install Adobe Photoshop 7. 20 minutes. At home, on my Pentium Pro 200 running NT 4, which by all standards should be a lot slower than this Mac, the same operation would take about 2 minutes. If that.
In addition, during this file transfer, my iPod will not work. And everything else has ground to a halt. Even Safari is straining to keep up as I type this.
I won't bore you with the laundry list of other problems that I've encountered while working on various Macs, but suffice it to say there have been many, not the least of which is I've never seen a Mac that has run faster than its Wintel counterpart, despite the Macs' faster chip architecture. My 486/66 with 8MB of ram running MS Windows for Workgroups 3.11 is faster than this G4 dual 1.42GHz machine at times. From a productivity standpoint, I don't get how people can claim that the Macintosh is a superior machine.
Mac addicts, flame me if you'd like, but I'd rather hear some intelligent reasons why anyone would choose to use a Mac over other faster, cheaper, more stable systems.
"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.
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.
weeoooweeoooweeooo
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.
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.
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...