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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."
come to the other side of computing... join us... don't be afraid!
Esoteric reference.
The G5 is great, but it doesn't hold a candle to my Powerstack 5000.
Maybe because it's processor is based on this bad boy.
Tcd004
Stories like this appeal to the geeky "need for speed" undoubtedly ramoant at /., but offer little insight into real consumer thought/need.
That said, this is pretty cool; not cool enough for me to switch to Apple, but cool.
The safest way to approach lava is to have another person with you and he goes first.
"it certainly appears poised to meet or beat anything now out on the Windows side."
Doesn't anything somewhat stable meet or beat anything running windows?
-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-
Yea! Go Tux! He's just so dead Tuxy.
and i'm sure slashdot intends to.
So, to what productive end do we expect this particular slashdot thread, perhaps the third or fourth on the subject of the G5's supposed speed, to go?
After seeing benchmarks for the G5, I'm actually considering switching to Mac, which I once thought to be a mortal sin (or is it still?).
I certainly can't think of a better desktop machine that the majority of people are familiar with and yet kicks out that kind of performance. Then again, why should I care if anyone else can figure out how to use my machine?
New processor is faster than its predecessor.
And while you can debate benchmarks until eternity, it certainly appears poised to meet or beat anything now out on the Windows side.
/. clearly has an agenda to push. Why waste our time like this?
Well, uh... what?
I mean, maybe I'm just "debating benchmarks" here, but how do you pull the above statement out of the linked article?
On the G5, Photoshop launched in 8 seconds, and relaunched in 4. Yes, 4. On the Dual G4, it launched in 24 seconds, and relaunched in 12.5. And on the Powerbook, Photoshop was ready to go in 25 seconds the first time around, and in 17 seconds on relaunch.
Yes, but what of it? This has nothing to do with Windows, Windows Desktops, or even anything non-apple. It compares the G5 to other, older Apple products. Unsurprisingly, the *new* Apple product beats the *old* Apple product. 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".
And, just to give you an idea of the technical competence of the reviewer who wrote the article, check out this snippit:
One final note: I whined in my first review about the G5's weak Airport wireless signal. Several readers promptly (and pointedly) wrote to ask if I'd installed the Apple-supplied external Airport antenna. I had not.
I'm sorry. The article is lousy, and the clown who submitted this article to
Why hasn't someone benchmarked this? Or at least why would apple not publicize this one? I would think apple could use a benchmark with very large datasets that would show the G5 with 8GB Ram and a Dual Xeon with 8GB Ram(using PAE). The G5 would clearly kick the $#!t out of the Xeon in this case.
The fact that the G5 can handle more ram without resorting to the PAE b.s., is a clear advantage and I think Apple should market that a little better.
Try pricing out a comparable machine from Dell (w/ dual 3GHz Xeons). You'll see that the Dell is significantly more expensive than the G5.
I got the chance to play with the mid-model (single 1.8 GHz) G5 and it is VERY fast compared to the older models (roughly about the same if not faster than the previous top model). The owner of said machine (a video editor) uses it as a front end for some of his editing work mainly because he wanted a Mac to use for the interface. The back end is comprised of two large SGI's and dozens of linux boxes (all AMDs).
The best tool for the job. My hats off to Apple for a great machine.
[RIAA] says its concern is artists. That's true, in just the sense that a cattle rancher is concerned about its cattle.
Oh ferchrissakes, quit trotting out that lame old story about how macs are more expensive. They are actually CHEAPER than most of the PeeCees that they're benchmarked against. Macs now have a better price/performance ratio than PeeCees. Sure they sent out a high-end unit for review, just like all the other manufacturers. But the new G5 units are way cheaper than similarly performing Windoze CPUs from Dell, IBM, etc. Sure you can put together a piece o'crap whitebox for less, but what you won't be getting a seamlessly integrated hardware/software solution.
Of course it's the fastest ever, CPU speeds are increasing all the time. If I go out and buy a new AMD CPU it'll be the fastest ever....for about 2-3 months.
Plus there's the "it beats anything on the PC market", erm quad CPU Xenon? it's a PC ain't it? where do you want to draw the line?
Macs are cool but speed doesn't convice people to buy a computer, the price often does. Mac users were once ridiculed for knowing very little about computers, however I think this isn't true these days. Mac users know enough about computers to be able to choose between a computer running Windows and a Mac.
This is they type of thing that shouldn't make front page. Its good for the apple section but not front page. It is only a good article for apple users (which I am). But then you get all these ppl saying 'so what' which if you aren't a apple user, is true. This article doesn't give hard benchmarks, and specifically says that. So when ppl come in here and say my xxx boots quicker then that, all I have to say is, So what? This isn't meant to compare different platforms, just Macs.
It's just fast fast fast.
The first benchmarks released comparing the G5 to an Intel box had notes on this.
The PC folks wailed and moaned because Hyperthreading was turned off on the Intel boxes when the benchmarks were performed but they neglected the footnote that mentioned that the PC actually performed worse on the benchmarks when HT was on, so to be fair they took the best score.
it's one processor. it represents itself as two logical processors with no instruction cache to trick the operating system into letting the hardware take care of optimizing instruction scheduling. even though linux identifies two full speed processors, there's only one chip doing the work, so it would be silly to expect it to perform twice as well.
...but real-world app tests have shown that the dual 2GHz G5 beats Dell's cheapest dual 3.06GHz Xeon sytem, both in performance and (when configured identically as possible to Apple's base 2GHz dualie) in price.
In fact, Dell's current price ($4372) on the comparison machine has gone up by $600 since late June, the first time I configured one-- but even back then, Apple beat them by hundreds of dollars.
And don't bother playing the "I can build it cheaper" card-- you cannot fairly compare a manufactured system with one that you cobbled together with the cheapest parts you could find.
~Philly
What a disappointing article. His "speed" tests consisted of the ridiculously unscientific "boot time" test and application launch tests. Lopped on top of that were hand crafted Photoshop and Bryce "tests" which verify that the dual G5 kicks the crap out of the 17" G4 and 1.25GHz PowerMac. My 12" Powerbook is faster than the Lombard I bought in 1999. Yay.
What about running real stuff like FCP's Compressor or Maya's mental ray renderer plug-in? Maybe even a After Effects render speed. Using iMovie to test anything isn't very fair to the people who would buy a G5. They're not using iMovie to work on SD video. Photoshop users aren't using a bunch of filters picked at random.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
Why waste our time like this?
I think it has something to do with the banner ads at the top this page.
Let's all take a nice deep breath, and remember that this is simply yet another offering, in a huge selection of products; that these products are different in many ways, for many people; that purchasing one or more of these products is not indicative of your mental health, penis size, sexual orientation, or anything else... okey?
G5 fast, mmm, nice G5. Athlon also fast, mmm, nice Athlon. I want both, for different reasons. They are not mutually exclusive.
(As for all the 'so fuckin' what' posts; this is Slashdot. No one made you click More.)
If Jesus wants me it knows where to find me.
...is all the Mac haters who used to say "yeah, the Mac is cool, but I need something a little faster than 1GHz, like my IntelAMDAthlonXP 5500MHz box. You should see how FAST Explorer pops up on that puppy!!!1111"
Now that Apple has a arguably *fast* machine, they've switched back to complaining about the price.
I guess those folks just go between price, speed, and the number of mouse buttons, in circles.
I think the Macs are great machines and reasonably priced. My 500MHz iMac is perfectly usable and sits aside my 1.8GHz P4 Linux box with pride. The iMac cost me $1300 and the P4 cost around $1400 (I bought all quality components like Intel mobo, Antec case, 1GB Crucial RAM, etc), and it was purchased about 2 years after I got the iMac, and didn't even come with a monitor, so I think the iMac was a good deal. *shrug*
I don't know or care precisely how fast the G5s are. I just know they are fast, well-designed machines with a beautiful operating system and tools (have any of you ever written a program using the apple devel tools? I had a harder time taking a shit this morning!!) and they are worth the few hunder dollar premium.
Food for thought:
Back in the 386 and 486 days, I was in the 18-month upgrade cycle, simply cause my comp couldn't run the latest and greatest apps. Now, I am currently using a computer from 1999 - a p3-500. And, I have no immediate plans on upgrading. I consider myself among the power users -- graphic design, MSOffice, many programming suites, even an occasional game. And ya know what? It all works like a champ. Tell me, what's the reason for upgrading? So Photoshop loads in 4 seconds and not 20? Obviously, a new system would be NICE, but I don't really NEED it like we used to (new version of windows wouldn't run, office would crash, etc).
Before you answer with "To play games!" Please note that you can buy a brand spanky new Gamecube for $99 now. I will never play games on my PC again at that price!
Obviously this also doesn't apply to video editting as that needs every drop of power you can get it.
Startup and reboot
Er, yes, great. You do that what, once a day? And so are you telling me that by shaving 20 seconds you will now make the decision to sit and stare at the screen during the remaining 55 seconds of bootup rather than grabbing a beverage, finishing your sandwich, or going across the room to talk to someone?
Application launch times
Ok, yes. Again, wonderful. And so with your 512MB to 2GB of RAM you don't suppose you will just leave your email client and productivity app running?
Photoshop manipulation
"Rotating the picture took 2 seconds on the G5, 3.5 seconds on the Dual G4 and 5.5 seconds on the Powerbook. Applying the Gaussian blur (which, in essence, turned the photo into a blurry blob), took 4 seconds on the G5, 5 seconds on the Dual G4 and 8 seconds on the Powerbook. And applying the Pointillize filter took 3 seconds on the G5, 4.5 seconds on the Dual G4 and 9 seconds on the Powerbook."
Ah yes. Wonderful. I'm astounded at the practicality of testing operations which, "turned the photo into a blurry blob". And you shaved on average just over 1 second! Great googly-moogly!
Oh, and then we rinse and repeat for iMovie manipulation.
People, this is an absolutely unconvincing, entirely uninsightful article.
The G5 may be great, but all this article leads me to believe is that Apple users are about as detached from reality as a PC gam3r d00d pissing on about how Quake 3 runs at 178 instead of 172 FPS on their $2000 penis extension.
Say it isn't so.
.sig Realistic fines for copyright in
Reading some of the comments I've come to the conclusion that they just don't get it.
Despite the review, the point of a Mac is not the horsepower (and comparing completely different CPUs using gigahertz is just stupid).
The point is: Macs and OSX just work and they're beautiful! If you don't value quality then you won't value a Mac.
But please, don't bore the rest of us with your attempts to justify sticking with an inferior product.
"Yeah my Ford Ka is just as good as any Ferrari - it can do the same speed in town AND does more miles to the gallon! That means my Ka is better than a Ferrari!".
The difference is at least the Ka owner pays a lot less for his car. The pee cee users PAY THE SAME PRICE and get an inferior product ! Got to love Michael Dell and Bill Gates. And people say Apple is great marketing company.
Edward
Bad analogies are like waxing a monkey with a rainbow.
Half Life 2? Way to try to bolster your agrument by including a game that's not even out for Windows machines yet.
RTCW? Yup.
C&C Generals? Yup, coming soon.
Halo? Yup, soon.
Sim City 4? Yup.
Civ III? Yup.
In conclusion, you need to take a break from the gaming and check your facts before you post. Otherwise you come off looking like a dumb shit when someone like me comes along to easily prove you wrong.
~Philly
I looked at the AMD Opteron Alienware box for digital video editing and set all the settings as close as I could to a mid range G5 (the AMD doesn't come in dual cpu config, so I selected the 1.8Ghz AMD and compared it to the 1.8Ghz Apple):
Apple Box:
18.Ghz G5
1Gb DDR ram
160Gb S-ATA drive
Superdrive (DVD-RW. CD-RW, CDR etc)
GeForce FX 5200 64Mb
Gigbait ethernet
3x Firewire (1x 800, 2x 400)
USB 2.0
SP-DIF optical inputs and outputs
Alienware box:
AMD Opteron 64bit 1.8Ghz
1Gb DDR ram
160Gb S-ATA drive
DVD, CD-RW combo (note, no DVD burning capability)
Nvidia Quadro FX 128Mb
Sound Blaster Audigy 2
Prices:
Apple 1.8Ghz: $2,649
AMD Opteron 1.8Ghz: $3,101
This was as close as I could get the specs without digging around too much and I think it's pretty fair. I could add the ATI Radeon 9800 Pro to try and get closer to the Quadro in the AMD box to add an extra $350 to the price - still comes in slightly less than the AMD.
I know of more people in the last year to 18 months that abandoned Linux as their desktop for OSX. I am one of those because at the end of the day, I like Photoshop much better than GIMP, and the ablity to develop PHP/MySQL apps on my iBook and still have powerpoint is exactly what I need.
I do come from a video/graphics systems admin background. I worked during college part-time at a friend's father's architecture firm where they had a small 24 unit ALPHA rendering farm.
Now I do indy technology consulting, mainly to small businesses and video firms. I had a number of clients switch to PC's (Dell's mainly) in the last two years because the hardware costs were so much less, however they quickly found out that programs like Premeire suddenly crashed a lot more and the time in lost work was far greater than what it would have cost for a mac. ALthough this was mainly due to Adobe Premeire 6 generally being a piece of junk, not really windows itself.
I have one customer that is going to order the dual G5 after 10.3 is shipping. He is semi-retired, but does some commercial and wedding video work. He has a six year old G3 400 with 1GB of ram to run Final Cut Pro and he has upgraded X.2 and some of his rendering output times are 6 hours. No big deal to him, clicks render, goes out the back of his house onto his boat and goes fishing the rest of the day. Well, the local apple store was flying a specialist from apple over FCP and DVD studio pro and we were in the store and had my client's last video, which took about 4.5 hours to render. We imported the file from a DVD onto the new G5 with an enhanced version of FCP and then on a single 1.8Ghz G5 and the difference was about 15% for the same footage in favor of the dual compared to the single G5 and about 1/3d of the time that it took on his G3.
Granted configured with a new 23" HD and 17" flatpanel, the dual box is about $15,000 with all the software he needs as well. Add in about another $3000 for upgrades over the next 5 years in software and and the new box he will be buying is cheaper that his old G3.
Now granted, in video production, you can spend $20k on a mac and it will do just about anything you want, or you can jump and spend $250k on an Avid. Even dedicated editing boxes are $3500, so this industry will & must spend the money and for many graphic/video firms, that 15% difference means 15% more money because they can turn around and start the next job that much faster. Couple the increase in turn around with the prices some of these firms charge, that can pay for a couple dual G5's real quick.
Then finally, there is TCO. Most small wedding video/indy video companies I know of tend to hang on to their equipment for a long time. I know a lot of people that purchased G3's and still are using them because they knew a year ago that the G5's were going to be out, so they decided to wait. Some have already purchased the G5's and have been extremely pleased with their purchase and the dramatic increases in speed. Another video company in town switched from their Casablance/Kron editing tools to FCP on G5's and after about a month, their turn around times for videos has gone from about 14 days to 7 or 8. Many of their editors are full time college students and FCP is what is being taught in the classrooms, so the cost of time in retraining was extremely low. Now they purchased Single 1.8Ghz boxes with 2GB of Ram, but it seems to be more than enough for them.
So will the average "user" need dual processors...um, no, but there are those out there were it such high end specs can be usefull and profitable.
I have to admit that I was not a fan of Apple until a year ago and bought this iBook. The main reason why I switched was I wanted something that worked and thus far everything has worked perfectly and I have no complaints.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
RTCW? Yes, I play regularly.
Halo? Yes, about a month behind the PC version
Sim City 4? Yes
Civ 3? Yes
Granted anyone who just wants to play games for cheap has no need for a Macintosh. But you could also argue that they don't need a PC either (get a console).
I agree that there is a lot to be said for compatability: it gotten a lot better in the past few years.
Sanity is not statistical.
Having a fast machine is cool. Having a Hummer just makes you look like a moron. If you can afford a Hummer, you can afford a nice luxury sports car, which would (a) be faster and more fun to drive, (b) be more comfortable, (c) not be horrendously ugly, and (d) not have a fractional MPG rating.
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
But the new G5 units are way cheaper than similarly performing Windoze CPUs from Dell, IBM, etc. Sure you can put together a piece o'crap whitebox for less, but what you won't be getting a seamlessly integrated hardware/software solution.
;))!
Uh, so a computer build from scratch using the same parts (or better) than the Dell counterpart, is a "piece o'crap"? Why is this exactly?
Oh, and I got a newsflash for ya: Dell computers aren't born assembled. Believe it or not, Dell PCs are built by buying the hardware, jacking up the price, and, gasp, assembling them! Just the same as doing it yourself (but without the price jack
Dell's computers aren't more "seamlessly integrated" than any other PC built by someone who knows what they are doing.
- Houdini
Why is this "Insightful"? He didn't give a single price comparison nor did he point to a link that does.
I priced out a top-of-the-line Dell (which is slower than the mac) and a top-of-the-line Mac. Here are the results.
Mac: $3395
Dell: $2917
Of course this doesn't include the fact that you get better case design (aluminum/super quiet) with the mac. Nor does it reflect the Unix based OS that you get with the Mac.
...And when they came for me, there was no one left to speak out for me." - Martin Niemoeller (1892-1984)
It's not just you, it's everyone who hasn't done their homework.
For more or less equivalent dual processor systems I get:
Dell - $4,763.00
Apple - $3,623.00
Note that the Apple price does not include the $50 or less you would have to spend on a mouse to keep you happy.
That's what game consoles and Windows is for. Doing actual work involves a better machine. Can your PC run the various mac-only software out there? nope. What's your point? That's why I own both platforms.
In the current Linux Format magazine (an UK mag), there's about a half page about IBM prepping a blade version and a rack-mount version of PowerPC 970 (or whatever they're called exactly)-based machines. They run Linux or AIX. I know IBM has always had POWER-based workstations, but these are supposed to start at $4k for 4-way systems. The idea to to bury HP and Sun, but this would be the first (practical) alternative (to Apple) PowerPC you can buy. And with all the good karma IBM's been accumulating with its defense of the GPL...
Holy shit, your "laptop" weighs 12 pounds and is 2 inches thick!!!!
That's not a freaking laptop! It's a freaking desktop, LITERALLY! No wonder the weight/size specs are buried 3 pages deep way down in a chart here.
There is NO MENTION of battery life. What does it get? 15 minutes?
Meanwhile the powerbook 15" weighs less than 6 pounds, and is an inch thick.
Do you walk with your laptop?
Oh and don't press the eject button on your CD-ROM drive when your playing a PC game, you might get a blue screen or even worse, you have flip the switch off then on on your machine to get back to Windows. And be sure to 'recycle' your files, afterall, we don't want that landfill filling up. I just hope Windows 95 will stop saying there's no CD in the drive when I click retry. Point here, use a newer Mac OS before saying something trollish.
Since when does super quiet beat completely silent? Well, considering when I first got to work on a new Dell I accidentally turned it off because I thought it already WAS off, I guess super quiet is a short term benifit. Maybe Dell just needs a brighter power indicator.
common sense: noun
What those who are ignorant of the subject matter think; usually wrong.
For a group of users that prides itself on alternative operating systems, its simply hilarious that you cling to the old stigma that Macs are slow and overpriced.
OS X is far superior to any Linux GUI and definitely has a lot more going for it overall than Linux. Now when Apple produces machines that might (hard to tell from the somewhat shoddy article) be faster than what you have currently, you don't have to get so agitated about it. Yeah, the article is pretty flawed. But at least try to reconcile the fact that the Macs might be faster than a PC right now. Then you can follow up with endless rants about how ObjC sucks/one button mice suck/Apple sucks/other reasons that only make sense to you.
Let me guess... You just upgraded to a G5 running BSD-based OS X from an older mac running an older version of MacOS. Congradulations! You are now using a mordern operating system capable of basic multi-tasking!
Just don't ask how long Linux or even Microsoft users have been able to do the same thing. It will probably depress you.
Translation: "Macs don't have many games." Unfortunately for you, there are entire markets of software that (get ready for this) have no entertainment value whatsoever! What essential commercial software out there is completely unavailable for and has no open-source alternatives for the Mac? Macs have Office and plenty of software that can run under the X11 environment. In reality, there is very little Windows software out there that either isn't available for the Mac or does not have some sort of Mac equivalent.
It's nice to have so much processing power but unless there's plenty of software the mac will be limited to running a specific function such as movie editing or photoshop
;)
Which is basically what this would be best at.
I mean, really, do you need a dual G5 to launch Mozilla?
Well... I mean other than the 1.4 branch.
If your video editing, you most likely want only three things: power, power, and more coffee. This appears to provide at least two of those.
Now, if your going to complain about the "lack of software" for doing AV work on a mac, I'm honestly going to have to ask what drugs you've done today: that's pretty much been their main market since time began.
Well, first you have to take the $187 editing system off the Alienware system. Then you can replace that with the Pioneer DVD +-RW drive. Now you have a problem of the Alienware computer having a far better video card (even than the Radeon 9800), sound card, and DVD burner, which I think makes up for much of the $300 price difference. If you're switching platforms you ALSO have to pay to get a new version of Photoshop plus another video editing solution if you aren't using an Avid software package (say Vegas or Premiere). And while you would be right to have seen FCP as an upgrade over all those packages a year ago, the playing field has vastly leveled. Even Premiere Pro manages to compete at the same level.
common sense: noun
What those who are ignorant of the subject matter think; usually wrong.
You're so right, because there's just no way for you to download thousands of UNIX utilities and run configure, make, and make install, and have it run on OS X.
And aside from the command line, there just aren't any software products, just as you say. Basically, with Macintosh, you get a word process, e-mail client, browser, and that's it!
And there's really no hope of that ever changing, what with the crappy, hard-to-use development enviroment Apple has released for their platform, and the total indiffernce from the developer community regarding the platform.
It's a wonder more people don't share the "insight" you do.
Thanks for the enlightenment!
quiquid id est, timeo puellas et oscula dantes.
In our house we have 3 laptops, I have a tibook, my girlfriend a 12"G4 and sometime ago I retired the g3 laptop to inhouse server status. It is connected to the stereo and since it is pre-firewire is connected to a great big external drive via USB. we both have itunes running. my gf likes music i'd never allow on my laptop and i have music she will never want. she's in the back room writing an essay but using rendesvous has access to all the music on my mac, all the music on the stereo and her own music. she's no nerd, and the music sharing abilities of itunes are simply transparent. right now, just taking a look, she's playing music off my laptop but is out my my earshot. I am listening to music off the home stereo that is also coming off my laptop. there is nothing to configure, nothing to confuse a non-techy person, it all just works.
meanwhile every night at around 3am some shell scripts run thanks to cron that use ssh and rsync to backup mine and my gf's work to the g3, into our own account spaces on the stereo. when our local backups are done the stereo in turn backs up changes to a mate's server in holland. his server? an even older g3 laptop than mine. i have admin rights and the osx server admin tools are simply awesome. he's running a cvs server which i use with a bunch of our mates to share code. ican admin that from here with a lovely gui. yeah i know you can so all that nerdy stuff on *nix or windows, or at least I assume you can on windows, but the convenience of having it all look and feel consistant is just gold to me.
later this year i'll buy a new 15" powerbook and the tibook will hit the hi-fi rack. it's running mysql and tomcat and so forth so will become both a music server, dvd burning station and staging server for my clients.
and what's more it all synchs with my new cell phone and my ipod. lordy lordy i love my macs.
I used to have a better sig than this, but I got tired of it
It doesn't run OS X though, and that's why I bought a PowerMac and an iBook.
It can run a good game of BF1942, all settings up on highest, while playing a DVD on another monitor, and downloading various things off Kazaa.
Right, and that's really important to all of us who play 3d games while watching DVDs and searching for mp3s on Kazaa. From the looks of your daily activities, your schedule must be really hectic. If you had a G5 those 2 extra seconds it takes to load Photoshop would seriously hamper your Kazaa-BF1942-DVD viewing workflow.
Why is it the people most concerned with two second benchmark differences are the those that have the least important things to do?
For $2599 (even less with an educational discount) a 15" Powerbook comes with Airport extreme (built in mind you, not hanging off the side in a PCMCIA slot), a SuperDrive, and an 80gb HD. The $2500 PC Torque laptop gets me a 40gb HD, no Airport, and no SuperDrive. In addition the Powerbook is significantly lighter, produces less heat, gets longer battery life, probably has a nicer screen, and doesn't look like it's targeted to just-hit-puberty-FPS gamers.
Hell, if you offered to trade me my 800mhz G3 iBook (which I paid $999 for) for your Frankenstein, Redneck, monster-truck of a machine I'd refuse.
For some people quality is more than, "I get 150fps in Quake 3!"
The new G5 from Apple is more than merely "fast". It is a workstation in its own right. In "Byte of the Apple", "Businessweek" notes that the new Macintoshes are, in fact, UNIX workstations. The notebooks based on G5s are, in fact, portable UNIX workstations.
Steve Jobs, if he had any sense, would be marketing these machines as workstations instead of mere personal computers. With 64-bit processors, these machines are fully capable of handling engineering workloads like Verilog, HSPICE, fluid-dynamics simulation, etc.
Right now, a tidal wave of Linux-on-x86 machines is drowning Sun Microsystems in the workstation market. It sure would be nice to see a G5 take some market share bled from Sun Microsystems. In fact, it would be ideal to see a Linux-driven G5 take market share.
I'm always startled to see people getting excited about three-digit price differences between base machines for things meant for the video market.
I'm building a HD editing/compression system. When you add in storage, displays, audio, etcetera, even a cheap setup makes a $500 difference pretty tiny.
For my needs, I'm shaving THOUSANDS off by going Mac. Why? Xserve RAID. I can get 2.5 TB for about $12K, that's fast enough for 1920x1080i60 at 10-bit uncompressed capture. I haven't been able to find anything that's close to that price performance on Windows.
This is an edge case, granted. But for anyone who bills by the hour, a few hundred bucks in a system that's going to be making you money for a couple of years is nothing - like a quarter a day. Downtime for one tech support incident could eat up the entire differential.
My video compression blog
No, in reality the vast majority of PC software has no Mac equivalent.
This is true. I tried to get "Windows XP Tutor" from the Video Professor guy who's on TV all the time and they don't have it for Mac.
I bet all their other super high-quality software is PC-only too.
true story though..
I got a 1.3ghz, running windows xp
when I copy over the network from my pb12"
the winxp computer slows like a dog.
7200rpm maxtor in the xp
5200 rpm whatever in the 12".
I'm a big retard who forgot to log out of Slashdot on Mike's computer! LOOK AT ME.
I don't know about you but Windows XP consistently gets sluggish when copying large amounts of data (>5GB) on my Dell Inspiron 8100. I do agree though that OS has a bigger impact than the hardware for being responsive. In fact, my iMac 17" at home running OS X is much more responsive than Windows XP is on faster hardware. Just goes to show you how much Windows sucks, but we knew that already...
"The deluded are always filled with absolutes. The rest of us have to live with ambiguity." - Aristoi, Walter Jon Willia
Why would a G5-linux machine be ideal?
It's been a long time.
If you can afford a Hummer, you can afford a nice luxury sports car
Yeah.... but... The Hummer has room for three skanks.
Moneyed corporations, non-working 'poor' and criminal prisoners are turning productive citizens into tax-slaves.
New quieter fans for those? I swear I read that you could exchange the fans for an updated quieter one. I might be mistaken.
I was just saying the other day how much my G5 notebook was like a portable Unix workstation. It's not as cool as my G6 notebook, though. I think of that as my portable TIME MACHINE.
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
The problem is from what I understand Mac OS X hasn't been compiled or optimized for 64 bits, it is still running in 32 bit mode. This is why Jobs has the sense to not market these as 64-bit workstations. There's no doubt that these are fast machines and great computers but until the software running on them actually takes advantage of the 64 bit processor these are no different than running Windows or Linux on the new Athlon64 in 32 bit mode (granted you can run Linux in 64-bit mode now and MS has some betas out than run in 64-bit mode as well but you could also run the 32-bit versions of both if you wanted).
Or at least, that was an early claim. It ultimately turned out, however, that all the standardized optimizations that should have been turned on, were. And the ones that weren't, actually degraded performance. So it is hardly surprising that subsequent benchmarks are confirming what Apple claimed--the G5's are speed-competitive with the fastest Intels, and for some applications, notably faster.
Steve Jobs, if he had any sense, would be marketing these machines as workstations instead of mere personal computers.
There's loads of reasons why it won't happen, but I always thought that Apple should have bought SGI.
It'd be a huge engineering task, but having a consistant Unix with a good UI from laptop, to desktop, to machine room would be excellent, and SGI would give Apple the entree to research/corporate data centers they lack now, as well as some industrial-strength computing power they don't have now. This would give Apple a huge unified market in visualization.
The time for this would have been a couple of years ago when OS X was being developed so that it could have been developed for both platforms (and stuff from SGI merged into OS X). It's probably too late for it to be meaningful now.
The other option would be a merger/takeover by Sun. It's a poorer fit, though, as Sun is more datacenter/DB than visualization, but it would give Sun the ability to market a complete alternative solution to MS, including a really good end-user desktop.
Whenever I posit this, most people say "Apple's doesn't want to be a business/corporate platform". This may be true, but long-term its easier to see Apple's CPU development being less dependent on the good graces of a third party as well as having more compelling high-end computing driving their CPU development.
There's also nothing that says Apple should stop their consumer/botique marketing or market niche -- it would be important to a $UNIX+Apple company to keep the consumer/end user desktop viable, and staying in that market makes that happen.
It'd be good for "big Unix" as well, since Sun and SGI can't offer the lower end of the spectrum to the customers and end up bouncing off of MS-centric operations at a lot of places. With a total package that extended a viable, well-known platform to the desktop, their server offerings would get a better advantage, as well as giving them better lower end server offerings in Xserve variants.
Ok, let's dispell the smoke and mirrors:
Case 120
Pwr 120
CPUs 600
Ram 200
HD 150
DVD 200
Video 400
OS 200
Mobo 200
Kybd/mouse 100
This puts the total at: $2290.00
This assumes you buy XP Pro as an OS. You can go Linux and save, but then, you can't do as much with Linux.
It takes me an average of 3 hours to build the PCs I build, plus and hour for an OS install. This involves careful mounting of the mobo and referencing the manual for any jumper settings, etc. I've built quite a few PCs in the past, although I'm sure someone that builds them every day and do it faster.
Add $200 for build/install labor, bringing the total to $2490. That's $509.00 less than the Apple System, although you'd need to spring for another hundred to add 512megs more RAM.
I call that pretty comparable.
Not only that, it's one stop shopping. If you build a PC, you invariably shop the net for the best price, meaning any problems involve lengthy ship times and multiple vendors, some of whom are more cooperative than others. One stop shopping brings peace of mind in that aspect many people prefer.
Macs aren't just for people that don't know squat about computers. While I'm certain I know less than many here, I'd lay odds have more knowledge and experience with computers than over 50% of the people that read slashdot. And yet a seasoned computer veteran like me likes Macs. Go figure.
I run all operating systems. I'm not foolish enough to believe that one tool is the best for every job. And Macs certainly aren't the best for everything. But they are for many things and the new G5 is excpetionally powerful, not to mention, reasonably priced in a bang for the buck manner, despite the typcally uninformed posts saying they can build a less complete, lower performing system for less.
DUH! I can also buy an iBook for less.
I'm glad you've discovered that Alienware is expensive. With a very quick bit of shopping at newegg, you can match the G5 almost exactly (1.8ghz Opteron, DVD-RW, FX5200, 1Gb PC3200, 160gb SATA, etc) for $1455. Some of these choices I question (why on earth did they put an FX5200 in the G5.. sheesh) but thats pretty much as close as you can get to matching the specs. You could get even cheaper if you went with a plain Athlon 64 3200+, and more than likely still be beating the G5s performance, considering the 200mhz advantage. areas Don't get me wrong - I own several macs, and I love them - for a long time I *only* owned macs. But price is NOT one of the where they're even competitive.
This makes no sense: the dual G5 has PC3200 with two dedicated 1GHz buses, faster than anything you're likely to find from Dell. So how does a machine with better throughput have worse performance?
Methinks PEBCAK.
I am a believer of momentum and curves.
You missed the fundamental point of the parent's post -- this laptop (as beastly as it is) is running neck to neck with Apple's latest and greatest workstation. You cannot even get close to that with your six pound Powerbook -- I know because I use them too.
V
You're comparing an OEM solution (the G5) to your homebrew setup. Of course you can buy more in parts when you're designing, building, and supporting it yourself. As has been shown several times in the past, the dual G5 system compares very closely in price to a dual Xeon system from Dell.
Perl - $Just @when->$you ${thought} s/yn/tax/ &couldn\'t %get $worse;
I don't know what's with you Apple users. I've been sitting at this dual G5 trying to copy a 17 Meg file for... holy fuck was that fast!
Ok, I get it now.
I blew $3,000.
Why?
Because I really love the Apple operating system, and it's the best in the world, especially if you're a Unix geek who also likes doing arty stuff like video editing and compositing.
Because I'm working on some projects requiring heavy compositing and special effects, and I really wanted to have the most powerful Mac I could find.
Because the aesthetics of the Mac make me happy and make me enjoy work, and life, more. This is more important than one might think; considering all the time I spend in front of the screen, and the value of that time, it's well worth the bucks to get a computer I really like instead of one I don't.
Hope that helps.
D