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Apple's Dual 2GHz By The Numbers
mallumax writes "ComputerWorld has an exciting review of Apple's Dual 2GHz machine." An excerpt: "It's clear from two weeks of testing that Apple's new Power Mac G5 dual 2-GHz machine is the fastest thing the company has ever produced. And while you can debate benchmarks until eternity, it certainly appears poised to meet or beat anything now out on the Windows side."
It's a dichotomy, all this power, and yet so little of what could benefit from it, is actually availible for mac (I'm speaking high level plugins such as Mental Ray [for 3dsmax], which are x86/Windows binaries, only.)
... *hmm*
There is only so much power you can throw at photoshop, and to a lesser extent video editing applications. My AthXP-1800 machine is perfect for photoshop, and nothing takes longer than 15 seconds - with video it's still a concern (and one that is lessening, or being moved to dedicated hardware), but the question is - without an industry like gaming, which demands an up-to-date-system (*cough doom3 cough*), why do apple insist on trying to have the fastest, and not instead focus on widening their compatibility, which is their real enemy.
-Gwala
#!/bin/csh cat $0
But... even if the benchmarks aren't biased, according to Moores law Intel will have a faster CPU in 6 months and Apple will not release a new CPU for several years.
If you must have two processors to compete with a single processor something is wrong, plus they never include the cost of the EQ and the shitty components apple uses, I am sad to say this is why I never buy name brands in the first place (sure if you are a huge company and you want 1 hour service times you will go with dell/etc) but comon who wants crap inside there pc's... Have they tried matching it with a Dual Zeon Board? ... This is basically what I'd put it up against since the price is the same.
I don't want to sound like a cheerleader,
You don't. You sound like the usual astroturfer.
Has Apple recently start paying a lot more than Microsoft for that kind of thing?
A Good Intro to NetBS
On the G5, Photoshop launched in 8 seconds, and relaunched in 4. Yes, 4. ....
... And clicking a stopwatch, and measuring how long launching a program takes, or how long a reboot lasts isn't that much of a "benchmark".
--snip--
Fantastic!
Oh, wait. My homebuilt computer with an AMD 1800+ and 512MB of DDR, which is probably worth about, what, $500 today?, and running windows XP, starts photoshop in 8 seconds. And it's over a year old. And it didn't cost $5000 when it was new.
God. I thought photoshop was the raison d'etre to move to Mac. I thought it was "well you can't play games or use most software, but at least we have photoshop, and it's faster" was the whole 9 yards for a Mac. Now that I hear that, I'm glad my pocketbook is $4500 richer.
Now that I think about it, I think my Used honda accord cost less than a dual G-5.
Fast computer, but, 1.) too expensive, and 2.) these benchmarks mean jack shit.
~Will
sig?
"They are going to continue to shell out the big bucks for the best Apple hardware because it will continue to put them in a competitive advantage over their collegues who need to spend more time every day waiting for numbers to crunch."
If that gave them a competitive advantage, then they should be out of business by now. Apple had been trailing the in processor power for years. All those other companies using PCs instead of Apple must have been doing fantastic.
Democrats or Republicans. They are both taking us to the same place and they are not afraid of us anymore.
Boy, Apple must have really hurt your feelings when they released the G5. Funny how, when the Pentium 4 was faster than the G4, all we heard was how much faster PCs were than Macs. Now that the Mac is faster, speed somehow no longer matters.
You don't like Macs. We get it already. But enough of these rediculous arguments that make no sense and are flat-out wrong.
Go away.
There they were, sitting in the van with all those dials, and the cat was dead. -V. Marchetti, CIA
Uhh, that could be because the Mac isn't faster, at least not if you live outside of the Steve Jobs Reality Distortion Field.
Don't get me wrong, it's a good chip, and it's plenty fast, but it's the blazing speed-demon that Apple makes it out to be. At best it's about on-par with the top-end P4 systems. A dual Mac G5 runs more or less neck and neck with a dual Xeon 3.06GHz for the most part. Some things are quicker on one system (sometimes by significant margins), some are quicker on others, but overall they're about the same.
Of course, it's slightly tough to document this since Apple hardly ever publishes any industry standard benchmarks. They put out some SPEC scores earlier, but they were pretty sad, easily beaten by low-end PC processors.
Note though: "about the same" is a VERY good thing for Apple! This is a HUGE improvement over the G4, which couldn't even keep up with the low-end Celeron processors in bargin-basement PCs.
I have a nice, new dual G4 powermac sitting in my office with a nice cinerama display, and it never gets used. It's just too loud.