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PC Mag Compares G5 to Xeon
zpok writes "PC Magazine did a comparison between a dual 2.0-GHz Power Mac G5 and an equally expensive Dell Precision 650 Workstation running dual 3.06-GHz Xeon processors. Their conclusion: 'we see that indeed the G5 is generally as fast as the best Intel-based workstations currently available.' But of course 'our cousin Ned can build you a better'un at half the dough.'"
It's great to see so many people excited about the things they accomplished at Apple. The things we did were wonderful, they improved people's lives, and they are worth celebrating.
But I think we should not lose sight of the fact that Apple Computer as a whole was a massive failure. Our fundamental goal, if you remember, was to transform the world by setting people free from bad computer design and stifling corporate dictates. "The Computer for the Rest of Us," we promised.
Today "the rest of us" are a passionate but small personal computing clique. The company is treated as the eccentric uncle of the computer industry -- still interesting, still beloved, but no longer as powerful or dangerous at it once was.
Although we successfully forced personal computing to move to the graphical interface, since then fundamental innovation in personal computing has ground to a stop. The operating system most computers users work with every day is stuck in 1993, with very little fundamental improvement in the last decade. The applications on users' desktops, bloated beasts like Word and PowerPoint, haven't substantially improved in years.
Why? Because they don't have to change. Because there's no effective competition. Because Apple failed.
Those of us who use Windows every day at work are reminded constantly of our company's failure. Unfortunately, the rest of the world is being punished along with us.
Yet no one takes responsibility for what happened. In fact, most of the people who were at Apple claim passionately that the company's collapse wasn't their fault. Some have written whole books to prove that they had no blame for what happened.
It's a terrible gap in company's history that no one takes responsibility for its fall. So let me fill in that gap and let you know who was responsible.
I did it. I killed Apple Computer.
Of course you helped too, if you worked there. Sure, we were assisted by a number of feckless executives, and by venal behavior at Microsoft. But more than anything else, Apple -- the old Apple we knew and loved, the one we're celebrating here -- was destroyed by its own diseased and dysfunctional culture. By the time Steve Jobs returned to the scene, very little could be saved. I salute him for what he accomplished; I don't think anyone else on this Earth could have pulled it off. And maybe the new Apple he's building will someday have the same authority and heft as the old one. But let's not lose sight of the fact that he had to burn the old company to the ground in order to salvage something viable out of it.
What went wrong?
The story of Apple from the late 1980s to the late 1990s is, in my opinion, a story of individual brilliance and group stupidity. From the moment I joined the company in 1987, I was amazed by the energy and intelligence of the people around me. Never in my career have I worked with brighter, more interesting, more capable people. Probably I never will again. And yet, despite all our braininess, as a team we were the Keystone Kops of computing.
For every innovation we brought to market, a dozen great ideas were strangled in the labs. Hundreds of millions of dollars were spent on massive projects that yielded exactly nothing. Remember Taligent?(1) Kaleida?(2) Jaguar?(3) OpenDoc?(4) The list is almost endless. Even today, the PC world has yet to fully deploy innovations that we worked on and failed to bring to market in the 1990s, things like component software and the advanced user interface ideas in the Sybil(5) project.
It's easy to blame all these failures on the company's senior execs, but frankly, they weren't powerful enough to inflict damage this comprehensive. Far too often, the problem was that we didn't work together toward common goals. This was partly due to the usual politics you get in any large company, but in addition we all believed we were so smart that we were unwilling to compromise and follow the visions of others. We'd sit in meetings and smile and nod at the pla
What's that you say? Apple's hype is a little optimistic?
What a shocker.
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according to PCMAG, the G5 cost $4349 as tested. Using the apple store, i can get that with the 2x1gb RAM modules, superdrive, no bluetooth/wifi, Radeon 9800, and a modem. now, let's configure a similar Dell Precision 650. the review doesn't mention that the Dell has a Radeon VE 32mb, no 56k modem, a 120gb ATA HD (compared with the G5 and its 160gb SATA), and uses DDR266 (compared to the G5 using DDR400, but that can't be blamed on Dell, but the mobo config). According to PCMAG, they were "comparing the results with a similarly configured (and priced) Dell Precision 650 Workstation". Funny how they give the exact price of the G5 and not of the "similarly priced" Dell.
... they don't explain what it is, but they make it obvious that said delay is not experienced on the Mac). According to the story, "on the Windows system, loading the controls often took a minute or more. If these times are added back to the actual test times, both Macintosh computers would have clearly outperformed the Windows-based computer." They don't make a note of it on the actual benchmarks, just the preface.
as you can see, the Dell is $835 more. now, let's try and be objective, something PCMAG disavowed in their introduction saying they took Apple's claims about the speed of the G5 "with a grain of salt". in other words, the test was designed to debunk Apple, thus throwing objectivity out the window.
IF we were to buy the RAM by a third party, drop the 56k modem on the G5, and leave the default video card (which is still better than the Dell), the system would cost $3188 (RAM is DDR400, 512mb+1gb on pricewatch). The Dell would cost $4057 (again, with RAM from pricewatch). That would make it $869 more.
On top of that, PCMAG admits to not taking into account a certain loading time (for controls
so if anything should be taken with a grain of salt, it's PCMAG.
The same criticisms of the Apple propaganda organs that always say that the Macs are faster also applies to the PC propaganda organs saying that PCs are faster.
Objectivity, wherefor art thou?
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
Many pc morons fail to realize that their single processor P4 they built themselves for under 1k is nowhere near the dual processor G5 in performance. They bring up things like Dell's 350 dollar computer and how much cheaper pc's are, ya they are cheaper but you get what you pay for. for 350 you get every possible corner cut everywhere in that pc and it will most likely require another 500 at least to get it to respectable speeds. When comparing prices/computer, you need to compare apples to apples and oranges to oranges. Shoot the xeon processor, the most comparable to the G5 in terms of performance, is like 800 a chip or some ridiculous price, so start configuring guys, hit up pricewatch and try to make your system 200 bucks cheaper than the g5.........then also try to sell your system for 60% of what you paid for it 2 years later..........and finally try to add in 1 year of no questions asked award winning support..............and tell me what you get.......nothing....because you can't get that on pc's. I just sold my 2 year old 867 Mhz quicksilver for 1,000 on ebay, no monitor included. I paid 1600 for the thing........so i basically rented a mac for 300 a year for 2 years. Get with the program folks, and get a mac.
I know you hate all the hype and think they are overhyped, etc. Well believe the hype, and then some
-yet another satisfied mac user
Despite what many people here on /. like to imply, the Apple benchmarks were about as close to objective as you're gonna get.
Keep in mind, as well, that 10.3 is not up to release version yet. The G5 is running on incomplete software, and, at almost $900 less, still outperforms the Xeon, even with the questionable objectivity of the study. I think it says a lot that a magazine aiming to trash Apple and claim the superiority of PCs is unable to get more than a tie with their unfair methods.
run windows on that Dell too.
My karma is getting better everyday.
and the Dell is generally available now, not just viewable on the web at VA Tech.
"the Apple benchmarks were about as close to objective as you're gonna get."
Of course they are. I agree with you 100%. When I buy a car, I only read the literature from the car company. They are more objective than Consumer Reports. I also consider the spokesmen for the Bush administration to be the most objective people to find out information about the Bush administration from.
At additional cost, the Dell could have been configured with 1 MB L2 cache per processor, to yield an even faster system. What can Apple do for its customers, except to tell them to wait?
What I want to know is how long it takes to copy a 17 MB file from folder to another.
With the fact that they were giving the text to debunk apples claims and to come up with a comparable system. Is actually a good review. Could they have done things to improve Mac performance or make the tests more fair, probably. But there were things that they could probably do to the PC side to improve performance. But the fact that PC World was a hostile reviewer and they said it is a tie. Is a really good review for apple. But benchmarking PCs vs Apples is always tough because they were engineered for different jobs as shown in the results. So if you wanted a glowing PC review you subtract the benchmarks that Apple won. If you wanted a glowing Apple Review then you take out what the PCs shined in.
I don't tend to follow benchmarks I use what seems like it is good for me, A difference in milliseconds doesn't effect me that much because normally I cannot type that fast.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
For most of the stuff that most people do most of the time, today's machines are hugely overpowered, and whether the top-end G5 or the top-end Wintel machine wins the benchmark race hardly matters at all.
Sending e-mail, writing reports, editing web pages, and 98% of what we do as software developers can be done with equal speed on a dual-processor G5, a G4-based iMac, or a G3-based iBook. Same goes for the Wintel world. Speed matters a little more if you're crunching a truly huge spreadsheet or running a filter on a large digital image. And speed really starts to count when you're editting video or running a large simulation. But most people don't run large simulations or edit video most of the time.
Those that do a lot of video editting, etc., generally do it for a living, and the speed improvements are so important that the price differential usually isn't a problem. Time is money and all that.
The parent post is by no mean a troll! It may not be the best post ever but it is on topic and it is not trying to trash anyone.
Shouldn't the slashdot topic icon say G5 on it by now?
"We started [Photoshop testing] with a 59.5 MB test image, but many operations completed too quickly to time...."
Stupid job ads, weird spam, occasional insight at
Another insight was that one of the oft-criticized older Mac G4s beat the Xeon in one test (two if you factor in the controls issue), nearly tied it in another, and wasn't so far behind in two more. Heh.
Remember to keep it simple. With every bit of information you want to add to the piece, ask if it's relevant. Is it acting as filler that you need? Is it making a point or setting up a mark for a kneejerk reaction? Or are you just impressing yourself by seeing your wordcount grow every time you check it? Impact, impact, impact. This is something the British trolls never got and why you could spot them a mile away.
Better luck next time, make sure to keep trying!
And by outperforming top-specked Windows machines on some tests ...
Top-specked? What the hell is that? The same kind of paint specks on both machines?
www.lucernesys.comHorizon: Calendar-based personal finance
Some of the folks in the forums over at Ars Technica has been using PS7Bench (a 21 filter test) on a 50 MB test file. Their results are summarized here.
It is interesting to note that the G5 performs significantly better on the first 12 tests than on the last 9. The tests it performs the worst on are NTSC Colors, Accented Edges, and Water Color.
Integrate Keynote and LaTeX
It's not just Cousin Ned who can built a better machine for half the cost, it's ANYONE who wishes to put a little effort into it. Think about it, a $4,000 computer, or a week's evenings worth of researching parts online to get the same functionality in a PC you've built yourself for under $2500. I know what I and other smart people are going to be doing instead of buying a G5. You can only ignore the basics of economics for so long.
Apple may have shattered the MHz Myth by providing a dual 2GHz machine that does as much as a Dual 3GHz Pentium based system, but they still have to work on "the Money Myth" which is the myth that people don't want to spend more than they have to.
Hey. that's not really a myth now is it lall!
Where are the 64-bit benches, against Opeteron and the Itaninum? All the benches I've seen are 32-bit. We can't get a specially compiled 64-bit version of Photoshop?
How is a ranting piece of Mac zealotry Insightful?
I'm not saying the Mac is slower or trash - it looks like its the winner so far, but geez, why does Mac vs. PC have to be such personal debate?
Original as always!
please mod parent way up. very interesting stuff. I am noting that a single-processor 1800Mhz G5 is neck-and-neck in performance with, but slightly lower than, dual-processor 2200Mhz Xeon.
in all benchmarks i've seen, it is becoming clear that while the G5 processor itself is a dramatic improvement, the overall motherboard rearchitecture entirely designed around high bandwidth for data flow is most definitely paying off. IMHO this overall architecture, beyond the mere CPU, is what will keep paying-off in the long-run.
The intel-based chips have been stuck around 3Ghz for a while now and my guess is a key reason has to do with heat dissipation and power consumption issues which could render dramatically faster clock speeds unsafe for your averagely-cooled machine. And this brings me to one main draw-back of the PC world: since so many components are independently architected, built and assembled by such a wide variety of vendors, no single component, and especially the CPU, fits as part of one consistent, overall hardware engineering vision. The intel chips weren't designed with efficient power consumption in mind in the first place. They were designed to sustain high clock speeds. period. MMX was an after-thought answer to Altivec. Most PC manufacturers have always grossly architected motherboards and enclosing cases without ever putting as much thought as Apple did with the new G5 architecture.
Apple defines the requirements of every single component that goes into their boxes. They will find vendors that meet those requirements. From the processor-maker, to the heat-sink, to every single fan, to the hard drives.
My guess is there is plenty of room for that G5 processor clock speed to grow. And when it does, the superior architecture of the enclosing case and all motherboards subsystems will both enable this clock speed growth and dramatically increase its performance boosts pay-offs.
Extraordinary Vacations. Exceptional Prices
"But in a good way. I've never heard a mac user complaining, have you?""
Nope, Mac users never complain. As soon as something goes wrong, they quickly switch to a PC and are not a Mac user anymore.
Apple can't die. As soon as it runs itself into the rocks again, Microsoft will be there AGAIN to bail it out.
The G5 in these tests was running 10.2.7. Mac OS X 10.3 (Panther) will, by all accounts, increase performance even more. For example, from this Bare Feats test:
....CPU score increased 40%
....Thread score increased 44%
....Memory score increased 38%
"PANTHER PUNCH"
Meanwhile, here's some data on the speed increase that OS X "Panther" (10.3) will provide G5 owners once it's released. We ran Xbench 1.1 on a G5 1.8GHz with 10.3 beta build 7B49. Compared to 10.2.7 "Jaguar"....
A faster processor than the one tested is available for the Dell 650: 3.06 GHz with 1 MB L2 cache, which is double the standard 512 KB L2 cache.
For new orders, Apple can not deliver a dual-processor G5 for 3-5 weeks.
Dell offers 10,000 and 15,000 RPM Ultra320 SCSI drives as an option, with up to 4 drives. Apple only offers up to 2 SATA drives.
The Dell 650 can be configured with Linux.
I, for one, would rather use a sane, reasonable operating system without such draconian crap as Windoze DRM, no matter what the speed of the machine.
Is there anyone here who actually enjoys the Windows user experience so much that he would spend $3,000 on a P4 with WinDOS XP rather than sink the money into a loaded G5 with OS X, an OS that actually makes sense, looks good, and works?
Jesus Christ.
Can you give a price tag for all that?
I'm not into semantic nitpicking but since you're now describing the Ideal Workstation Configuration (tm), it's only fair to say how much this is going to cost, mmm?
We're talking about a Serious Computer (another tm) that does iTunes as well, not the Perfect umptydumpty Dollar Workstation, although it means something that you're making the comparison, quite a compliment, me thinks.
PS: pricetag?
I think, therefore I am...I think.
Firstly - don't get me wrong, i'm a mac and pc user (a mac user right now - powerbook 12" :), and i love macs.
But this is the kind of thinking that mac users, no, mac 'zealots' never understand. just as we think PC users 'suck' and have all these misconceptions about our wonderful macs (which is often the case), in just as many cases we have all these misconceptions about PC users too. and often to a higher degree. we're always making rediculous claims about PC's just because they don't have an operating system that suits us, and (although i might be flamed for this) because in the back of our mind we definately need to justify to ourselves spending more on the average mac than a pc.
now that we have caught up well and truely in the high-end computing stakes - this is cause for rejoice such that we can hold our own against 3ghz+ pentiums. but there is still a long way to go..
the P4 is a poorly designed high-mhz piece of shite.
lower-clocked Coppermine, Tualatin and M all kick its ass. is it any wonder that G5 can do the same?!
I need to vent guys and here I hope I find sympathy! I HATE MAC'S
Today I spent the good part of five hours helping a friend with a titanum powerbook put an 802.11 card in, she bought an apple Airport one. The first amazing thing comes when it doesn't fit in the slot, but a quick call to the apple seller and they tell me it has to go INSIDE THE MACHINE. My friend had opted not to get them to install it as it was an extra $20 fee, so he took it home and I got the job as I'm the "Computer Guy" and can generally help friends and family with there computer problems. I have never seen such a tragedy of design as the TiBook!
First I had to take the entire thing apart. This if youve been inside a laptop is not an easy trivial task. It needs the batteryu and case to come off, the drive and optical drive to come out, and apples STUPID design inside them mean I had to file away some parts as they were put in without obviously meaning to be taken apart again. Now I know computers are throwaway things nowadays but that's rediculous? We also had to use snips to cut some tiny pieces of shielding off to get to the right screws. I can see why they were charging so much to put the card in, she should have gone with that option! In the end finally I was able to lever up a part of the inside to push the airport card inside and click it in place. But that wasn't enough, an aerial cable then needed to be connected, and getting it out of its holder was another half hour of work where I had to pull the airport card out again!. Finally with it all back together it works. The inside I think is back where it should go. the back doesn't go back on how it should either and I think is a little bent.
I don't, I really don't, see how Apple can claim to be tops in design. Even my A600 was a dream to work on compared to this and it was pretty compact too!. Why they couldn't put it in an easily accessed slot like normal PC notebooks I dont know. Anyway Ive talked my friend into getting rid of her mac addiction, she will definately be buying a Dell next
I was getting SO tired of the "I don't want to start a holy war here..." post.
Tell ya what, bucko, if you had to take tin snips to a Powerbook to install an AirPort card, you're not a "Computer Guy," you're just a fucking moron.
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 G5 dual 2.0GHz 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 G5 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 Windows 3.1 is faster than this G5 dual 2.0GHz 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.
So, let's see.
First, they said the Mac was hopelessly slow. Now we've got the G5's that are more than a match for much higher clocked x86 boxes.
Then they said the Mac was still too expensive. Now the top of the line G5 costs $3000, and the cheapest Dell with dual 3.06GHz Xeons, when you configure it to match the dual 2.0GHz G5's base configuration as closely as possible*, costs $4372. And that price has actually INCREASED BY $600 since June 28, when I first spec'd out an identical system in a previous discussion.
Now, they're down to "but you can have the Dell today, you have to wait two weeks for the G5."
Just give it up already, x86 apologists.
~Philly
*I configured a Dell PWS 450 by selecting two 3.06GHz Xeons, downgrading to 512MB of RAM, upgrading to a 120GB hard drive (still smaller than the G5's 160MB), upgrading to the cheapest drive that could write DVDs, adding a modem, adding a FireWire card, and subtracting a monitor. Components not specifically listed here were left at their default settings.
Dude, what planet are you from? I've seen many instances of Dell's spontaneously shutting down because of heat issues, including my own. This is a recent thing with recent hardware. Not good. And Dell laptops are great for camping because you can work and then use it to fry something.
There is a real problem with heat in the PC world and someone better figure it out soon.
Arguably, the G4 didn't maintain its supposed superiority over Pentium for very long. With IBM at the fore now and Motorola playing little/no role on the G5, the future might be brighter longer, but Apple still lives with a sole source problem. At least in the X86 world we still have AMD and others to fall back on and to help keep prices down, not to mention all of the X86 programming expertise that exists in the world. Apple could theoretically jump ship to X86, as well, but this seems practically impossible, due to Apple's reliance on Velocity Engine (AltiVec) and the tremendous loss of face that would accompany such a move.
Let's face it: most people will not buy a new computer for > $4000.
It would be far more interesting to see what you can get for different amounts of money. E.g. What is the price / performance for a system for $900, $1000, $2000 and so on. This is where I believe Apple will have a hard time keeping up with Intel based products.
is by Celebrity Deathmatch. Nothing like a good fist fight. What they're computers? I guess we'll have to settle for a game of chess then.
"I just can't sit while people are saying nonsense in a meeting without saying it's nonsense" J Watson, Sci Am 288:(4)51
Talk about a tragedy! Dude, my P4 takes like four seconds to install spyware, where my Mac, won't even let me install it at all!
And does anyone realize that Macs don't even run Windows natively? What's the deal with that? What am I supposed to do with that software that I bought at the checkout line in Walgreens?
I mean benchmarks are cool and all, but let's focus on the important thing here: will it be able to run crippled software made by monopolistic theives who want to take over the world?
You crazy Slashdot people sure know how to blow things out of proportion.
There are two kinds of people in the world: those with loaded guns, and those who dig.
"Talk about a tragedy! Dude, my P4 takes like four seconds to install spyware, where my Mac, won't even let me install it at all!"
There's hardly any software you can install on the Mac. Everyone has left it behind (including the worm authors, but also the overwhelming majority of useful software and fun game software as well)
"will it be able to run crippled software made by monopolistic theives who want to take over the world?"
It runs Mac OSX. That sure counts. They've got blunding deals that M$ could only dream of.
The review begrudgingly acknowledges that the G5 is "generally as fast" as the Dell, but the performance table suggests the G5 is much faster than that. The G5 bests the Dell in 4 out of the 6 tests. While the G5 is more than twice as fast on one test, the Dell wins by an unnoticable 2.5% for one of its wins.
Its not surprising that PCMag is a sore loser because they are afraid of losing subscribers to Mac magazines.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
Yup!
Do you build your own cars? House? Microwave?
Do you make your own shoes? Toothpaste? Condoms?
It PROBABLY is cheaper to roll your own. So?
*BING* Guess what?
People find it WORTH the cost to buy a product!!!
You're a few hundred years late of your BARTERING.
(Now go jack off to anime, hick.)
Stay away from my computers. If it took you anything over 30 minutes to complete that task you are a moron. When you get your airport card there are these little things called instructions. If you simply follow them it is as easy as 1,2,3... But he way how long have you had your MCSE?
While they did acknowledge that "Current users can download 64-bit plug-ins or upgraded versions of [Photoshop]," they also suggest that they didn't use the Adobe G5 plugin for the test: "the PowerPC G5... will continue to run 32-bit applications (like those in our test suite)."
I guess they were trying to make the test "fair" by not using code optimized for the G5?
Apologies for this off-topic post, but 'wherefore' translates better as 'why' than 'where' (as many people think).
:)
Juliet was basically saying "Why art thou Romeo" (as in why is he from a rival family) rather than asking where he is that that moment.
Therefore, you are asking Objectivity why it is what it is
Congratulations on the PowerBook. I bought a 12 inch just after they came out - great machine. It occurred to me the other day that unlike my Linux and WinNT/2K boxes, I don't know how the filesystem is layed out - not because I don't want to know, but because I never needed to find out!
Anyway, enjoy the PowerBook.
"There's hardly any software you can install on the Mac. Everyone has left it behind (including the worm authors, but also the overwhelming majority of useful software and fun game software as well)"
/ macosx/index.shtmls /macosx/
You're so full of shit. I can't stand moronic statements like yours. Aside from the biggest names (Dreamweaver, Office, Photoshop, Illustrator, Toast, etc., etc., etc.) that I use daily on a Mac, there are thousands of software titles for everything I could ever want.
And of course, there's fink and X11 (http://fink.sourceforge.net/doc/x11/index.php) for thousands more OS X apps.
Try wrapping that tiny mind of yours around this concept. Stupid fucktard. Quit making up words like "blunding." If you're stuck at an eighth grade reading level, seek help.
More helpful links for the google-challenged:
http://www.versiontracker.com
http://www.apple.com/download
http://www.macosxapps.com/
10.2.7 is essentially a short term hack to get G5's out the door. Beta versions of 10.3, on all tests run - including just raw benchmarking applications like Xbench - show these 40%-type improvements under 10.3. No worries; it will be confirmed within a couple months anyway when 10.3 is released.
"98% of what we do as software developers can be done with equal speed on a dual-processor G5, a G4-based iMac, or a G3-based iBook."
Speak for yourself. I have done software development on my Dual G4, my 800mhz iBook, and my friends shiny new G5 for an afternoon. IDEs are ever-increasing in complexity and responsibility. Apple's new XCode and VC++ have for a long time done many, many things that require quite a lot of lookups, analysis, and parse tree building.
Sorry, these things create stutters, slowdowns, and obnoxious hangups when I develop. I've used VC++, Eclipse, ProjectBuilder and XCode. All benefit hugely from faster machines. I wince at coding using a real IDE like Eclipse or Xcode on my iBook, which has a max ram loadout. It's not a huge deal on my G4, and I'll wager a G5 eats it alive and asks for seconds.
On the G5, everything was happening instantly. It was kinda eerie. I built the newest Ruby on it for my friend, using xlc (the better cache management actually speeds ruby up appreciably, like 10% in some operations!).
It took about 25-40 seconds ( I wasn't timing, so I'll keep the range broad). That's compared to about 3:25 on my dual G4. Admittedly, I'm not using xlc here, but it gives you something to think about.
Fast compilers are very important to people who rely on their compilers to find errors, the build-fix-build-fix cycle is standard procedure anywhere you go, and faster compiling computers make you wait less time for that.
Slashdot. It's Not For Common Sense
"Are you also noting that a 3Ghz P4 is quite a bit faster than both of them (and a *lot* cheaper) ? :)"
Umm.. you know why these benchmarks that everyone does are stupid? Because the test the machine doing one task at once. Sure, the task has multiple parts, and may include more than just the processor, but all too often we see these little head-in-the-sand benchmarks that make the 3Ghz P4 look so good.
It's not. Want a real test? Run two of these benchmark tests simultaneously. Run 3. The p4 has a vastly higher clock speed. Unsurprisingly, when you focus it on one small task, it completes it quite fast, even though it's doing so less efficiently.
The Opteron and PPC970 do more things efficiently. As you might guess, this is the "real world" scenario, where our machines do many, many things at once. Your machine is performing dozens of distinct tasks, right now. Many Opteron reviews are claiming the chip doesn't benchmark well under the current idea of what benchmarking should be, but in real world tests they easily outperform the P4s. No one questions them. The G5 and the Xeons are the same way. When you try and take account of the innumerable factors that make a computer fast and condense them down to a small set of "average values" you're going to get a distorted picture, favoring people who play the benchmark game.
Ironically enough, the Xeons and the G5 still royally stomped on everyone else. I find this very satisfying. I like seeing those silly P4 chips lose at their own marketing game.
These benchmarks are stupid, small, outdated, and almost seemed designed from the ground up to favor machines with high clockspeed.
Slashdot. It's Not For Common Sense
I have to say, this is probably one of the funniest things I've read this month. It's like a troll in the opposite direction! :)
Slashdot. It's Not For Common Sense
Code can be optimised for the PPC970 execution pipeline / caching without hulking 64bit integer values and pointers around.
;)
So I'd say that they didn't hint that they weren't using the 7.0.1 G5 patch
I've seen people make this argument for at least ten years now. (And I suspect that it's been made far longer than that, and I'm just displaying my relative inexperience.)
It always turns out to be pretty shortsighted. Yes, an average new computer is overkill for most users the day it's purchased. Software is targetted at the average computer in use, new computers tend to be faster than the average, so new computers are always overkill. This is so definitional as to border on tautology.
But software continues to evolve to take advantage of new hardware resources.
It's easy to just dismiss this as laziness an inpcompetence on the part of software developers; to say that they're not really adding anything new, they can just afford to be sloppy now.
Obviously that's an oversimplification: some software becomes more demanding because it simply does things which were not practical with more limited resources. But even in the worst case, where new software is less efficient, I'd still call this a feature rather than a bug. If developers can spend less time on optimization, they can spend more time on more important things. Those efforts can go into clarity, security, consistency, or portability.
(Clearly some developers, notably those working for a certain little startup in Redmond, will not use these freed-up resources wisely, and will instead just take the opportunity to write a larger volume of bad code. But those are the same developers who probably would've buggered up the optimization process anyway, so this is really no worse.)
If we'd just stopped when we had enough hardware to speedily run common user applications, it would be too minimal to handle taxing things like tcp/ip, which you might have found to be handy.
Can The Mac use a 3 button mouse?
Purity is good but I sure like hitting the middle button to get in and out of tabs in Mozilla.
TKR spiritposts2@yahoo.com
Dude, what planet are you from?
Dude, Obviously a Dell user......
-mix
So I'd say that they didn't hint that they weren't using the 7.0.1 G5 patch ;)
And I wouldn't not say that they didn't not hint that they didn't not choose to not use the patch.
If you look at the total scores, the distribution is as follows:
With Final Cut Pro, the G5 and G4 comparison is:
G5: 5306.47s
G4: 7481.06s (41% more than the G5)
Without Final Cut Pro, the full comparison is:
G5: 1206.47s
G4: 1281.06s (6% more than the G5)
Dell: 1462.4s (21% more than the G5, 14% more than the G4)
This shows quite a different picture. Of course one could argue that the tests should be weighted differently, etc...
All you have to do to figure out which machine you should get is to weigh the scores the way you'd use the machine.
Now I would have loved compile times but you can't get everything...
Yeah, um, it's plenty responsive on my iBook 800. I do not know where you're drawing this from. Are you complaining that OSX doesn't have a smooth scroll feature like Windows does? They do in Panther, but honestly I don't like them. It's a lot harder to tell how far you're scrolling when there is an animation delay imposed.
I'm sorry, you can't get away with that here. The P4 has a much, much higher clock rate. It means that yes, for doing one thing, especially one more-or-less simple thing, you probably will win in a footrace. Duh.
It doesn't mean that your machine will do better at multiple parallel tasks. The P4 is just slower at it. Also, its architecture won't do contest switches as quickly between threads. Part of the reason Intel is adding the on-die memory controller and more cache is to try and hide this fact. Intel's hit the limit with the P4, more or less. Maybe they can get a bit more clockspeed, but they're topping out with what's reasonable in an aircooled machine.
The G5s are keeping up with an unoptimized OS, a lack of optimizing compiler, at a clockspeed much lower than the architecture's maximum.
Why not ask GamePC to define it. They're the one I'm angry about. You have a funny idea of "real world" must be. Everyday web browsing and use? Everyone I know tends to check their email and browse the web while their email loads. Now, those are both processor and memory intensive tasks. Your mail program index, spam filters, and places your mail in a data hierarchy. Meanwhile your web browser is rendering relatively complex operations. Usually it's doing them in parallel. Scrolling is also relatively expensive.
This is an everyday case that the P4 copes with poorly. The ameliorating effect of the larger cache and memory controller only carries you so far.
A typical game is a nightmare for a single P4 machinel Multiple threads all doing different memory and I/O intensive things, with your video card you can't always use DMA! Sometimes the P4 has to send stuff manually. The P4 can only keep up with modern games by virtue of its high clock speed. As the Opteron and G5 catch up, the performance barrier will only become more and more apparent.
As it stands now, I still feel that a 1.8ghz G5 or Opteron will "blow the doors off" a P4. I've gotten the chance to use said G5 and my friend's P4 is roughly of the spec we're talking about. By the way, did you notice that the G5s aren't set up to use their altivec, while the P4s are going to use SSE? Yet another handicap. The altivec doesn't just help with floating point you know. It does integer ops just as fast, on a variety of sizes. Auto-vectorization in a compiler would turn ordinary code into screamingly fast code. With no OS optimized for it and no optimizing compiler.
The G5 is blindfolded, has one hand tied behind its back and the other opponent has a spear. And it still wins.
Everyone who's tried it agrees, it's impossible to get the G5 to slow down. Three apps open up as fast as one does (unless they have to do network stuff to boot, then the network latency comes in of course). My friend's P4 with lots of the best DDR ram he can slot still stutters on the Start menu, let alone starting several apps at once.
And no, he doesn't suck at building machines. He's actually quite good at it, I assure you.
Slashdot. It's Not For Common Sense
... but I have to comment on this. I didn't realise it myself until recently -- "wherefore" means "why," not "where." And duh, Romeo's like right in front of her, why would she say "where are you?"
c-hack.com |
...Global Thermonuclear War?? PLEASE????
If you average the results across all of the tests, you'll see that the Dual G5 Mac beat the Dual Xenon PC by an average of 22% overall. Of course, there were some tests where the PC beat the Mac by a bit, and some tests where the Mac beat the PC by quite a bit, so as always it's dangerous to generalize from any benchmark to performance on the applications you use. But it looked like overall the Mac beat the PC by a fairly significant margin. I'm not sure that a 22% performance boost alone is enough justification for a platform switch, but it certainly doesn't hurt.
The dual G5 also beat the dual G4 by around 45%, so for Mac users, it's a clear win.
(though it also beat the Dual G4 by around 45%). Of course, the test results bounced around pretty significantly, so it's not completely unfair to describe it as a tie
Enable 3D printed prosthetics!
Ah, this must be one of those special edition machines Apple gives to Mac Fans.
I do not know where you're drawing this from.
A great deal of experience. I've be using OS X off and on since the public beta, on a large selection of machines all the way up to (recently and briefly) a 1.6Ghz G5. OS X's GUI remained unresponsive and chunky on all of them.
I bought a Rev A 667 because I wanted to run OS X. Then I bought Jaguar because I was digusted at how frustratingly slow 10.1.x was to use. Then I sold it because 10.2 didn't make any appreciable difference.
Recently I took a 1Ghz model for a week-long test drive to see if the situation had improved. It hadn't.
I used to think it was a hardware issue - after all, OS X is doing a lot and shuffling a lot of data around and until recently, Macs have been hamstrung by (relatively) slow machines and poor bus speeds. On the other hand, the raw power of the machines was not lacking.
Are you complaining that OSX doesn't have a smooth scroll feature like Windows does?
No, I'm complaining that under any sort of trivial usage, the GUI is unresponsive. Slow to manipulate windows. Slow to access menus. Slow to switch between applications. Etc.
I'm sorry, you can't get away with that here. The P4 has a much, much higher clock rate. It means that yes, for doing one thing, especially one more-or-less simple thing, you probably will win in a footrace.
In other words, it'll win because it's faster. I'm glad you agree with me.
It doesn't mean that your machine will do better at multiple parallel tasks. The P4 is just slower at it.
Available evidence would suggest otherwise.
Also, its architecture won't do contest switches as quickly between threads.
In terms of what ? Relative to the clock rate ? Relative to real time ? Show me the numbers.
Part of the reason Intel is adding the on-die memory controller and more cache is to try and hide this fact.
Improving CPU performance is "hiding the fact" ?
Intel's hit the limit with the P4, more or less.
Intel probably disagrees. They've demo'd P4s at over 4Ghz. Heck, crazy overclockers have managed to get currently shipping machines over 4Ghz.
Maybe they can get a bit more clockspeed, but they're topping out with what's reasonable in an aircooled machine.
I remember this being said about the 50Mhz 486. And the 66Mhz Pentium. And the 300Mhz Pentium 2. And the early Pentium ~600Mhz 3s. Then the 1Ghz Pentium 3s. Etc.
So, pardon me if I place a touch more faith in intel than a slashdot pundit.
The G5s are keeping up with an unoptimized OS, a lack of optimizing compiler, at a clockspeed much lower than the architecture's maximum.
Indeed, "keeping up" being the appropriate description.
Everyday web browsing and use? Everyone I know tends to check their email and browse the web while their email loads. Now, those are both processor and memory intensive tasks.
*boggle*.
Now, I can't profess to know the software you're using, the size of your inbox or the web pages you browse, but they must be pretty damn impressive if you consider web browsing and email checking to be "processor and memory intensive tasks".
Right now I have about 50 tabs open spread over 4 Firebird windows, 5 IE windows, Outlook checking 6 email accounts every 2 minutes, a VMWare machine idling away in the background, MP3s playing, 6 Word documents open, 4 IM windows, 15 terminal windows and about 30G of data being copied over a 100M network link.
Now, in my experience that sort of workload puts the load on my machine well and truly above the "average user" running an email program, a few web browser windows and maybe listening to MP3s. Just for kicks I fired up task manager on the other screen to watch the CPU usage while I worked. It's averaged a
You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink.
You, sir, are an idiot, and a fool.
One day, perhaps, you will learn reading comprehension.
Until then, may you rest often and well, and have your gonads chopped off by a burglar. Because it would be a affront to humanity for your genes to be passed on. There are already too many conformist sheep wandering around.
Okay, at first I thought you were just trolling, because my experiences with the G5 have been liquid smooth. Maybe we're using different meaningw or responsive sand smooth? On my dual 800 and even on my iBook there an be some frame loss when dragging very large windows or doing that minimize effect, but it's only when the machine seems especially occupied, and doesn't affect the rate at which things move.
Maybe you're referring to the mouse-interaction delay bug that very few mice display on some machines? Some mice and some machines apple makes have an odd interaction where your click occurs a few ms after you press the mouse. It can be quite disturbing until you realize it and switch mice.
Maybe you're talking about window resizing? I wouldn't blame the machine. I'd blame the app writers, but even above and beyond that, OSX is pretty much the only game in town doing live resizing, so it's hardly a fair comparison. Of course, you don't seem like one for fair comparisons.
With liquid cooling, in every example I've seen. Sorry, that just isn't going to work for the masses. It also tends to dramatically increase the cost of pre-built machines. Most people, like intel's sales department, don't consider this a "success".
Umm.. no. Looking at the results and then quoting the article:
In other words, they snipped off some time! The G5 had to load the controls to finish the operation and return to normal status. The P4 didn't. Probably, they snipped off some time because it's PC mag, I am not very surprised or very upset. At least they mentioned it in the article.
Let's ignore that for a second or two. I'll say again: there is NO OPTIMIZED OS OR OPTIMIZING COMPILER FOR OSX . So the fact that in general the G5 comes up mighty close to being even after the time-snipping, means it's much faster.
Hmm. I use IMAP. I get a pretty low amount of personal mail and I'm subscribed to Ruby-Talk, which I keep a 1 month archive on. This means I have about 7k-10k messages at any given point.
Indexing those for content is not a trivial task.
Bullshit. But go on.
Slashdot. It's Not For Common Sense
Bullshit. But go on.
See, this is the point at which I lose interest in anything you have - or had - to say. Pretentious, snotty and condescending tones I can excuse as immaturity. But a personal attack - and a direct insult to boot - is where your credibility evaporates.
You lost yours the moment you began arguing both sides of the same argument. One for Opteron (set up for SMP, which incedently means set up for context switching and context sharing) and another for G5 (implication that P4's context switching is not slow compared to G5, which is also very optimized for SMP).
Among other things. Like, "I don't own a P4, but I'm bragging about the one I'm using right now."
Sorry, I just don't have the time to play games with people like you. I'll condecend when it sounds like you deserve it. And you, my poor comrade, seem to yearn for it.
I won't claim to understand why so many people on slashdot are so eager to make arguments so patently false. For a moment I thought you were actually saying something and began to respond.
Slashdot. It's Not For Common Sense
No, I didn't. I merely asked you to explain the conclusion you were drawing and the data you were drawing from.
Among other things. Like, "I don't own a P4, but I'm bragging about the one I'm using right now."
Firstly, I wasn't bragging - merely giving statements of fact. If I was bragging, I would have spouted some hyperbole that was only barely feasible.
Secondly, you couldn't think of a single way that I might be regularly using a machine I don't own and _that_ was your first conclusion ?
Sorry, I just don't have the time to play games with people like you.
The irony !
I don't particularly care for people like you who call me a liar for no other reason than they don't like the sound of what I'm saying.
I'll condecend when it sounds like you deserve it.
And, naturally, being civil and raising valid points is a sure indicator, right ?
Your posts were dripping with condescension from the get-go.
I won't claim to understand why so many people on slashdot are so eager to make arguments so patently false. For a moment I thought you were actually saying something and began to respond.
My thoughts exactly. Then I considered your assertions that web browsing and checking email were processor intensive tasks, that application startup times were meaningful indicators of CPU performance and that just because a CPU did things faster, didn't actually mean it was faster. *Then* I read the insults and realised your mind was made up, you wouldn't believe anything I said - regardless - and any further attempts at discussing the topics were a waste of time.