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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.
"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?
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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?
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.
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.
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.
...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.
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.
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
First of all, you've got the people who do media editing... sound/video/still... 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. In the case of this market, the dual G5 will pay for itself quickly, on speed alone.
Then there's the sciences, which if you'd read the article is one of the very things being tested on this monster. I've got a friend who works in bioinformatics, and I can't wait to tell him that BLAST is being compiled for the dual G5. He will curse me as he picks up the phone to call Apple =]
Finally, there's this myth of incompatibility... for your average desktop luser, what applications are important to run? Well, hello, we have the Suite of the Beast, which runs natively, and rather well, on OS X... Exchange connectivity included, thank you very much. What else? Oh, you mean something that doesn't already exist on the unix side and has been ported by the Fink project? Hello? Are you still there?
I was helping a frind of mine to try to save his win98 box from an inevitable wipe-and-reinstall, and I asked him how he liked OS X on his dual-G4. This guy used to flip front-panel switches on PDP-8s for a living (but only when the tape reader was shredding paper), and hasn't left the industry since... I regularly pick his brain on "bigger-picture" type issues, and his ignorance of how to keep his teenaged children from b0rking win98 configs notwithstanding, he really knows his s**t. His reply about OS X:So true. I use and enjoy Linux on my peecee, and have no intention of leaving it behind as an OS - it's still much too useful for me for lots of things - but I have to say, Apple has done a fantastic job with OS X. It is fantastically easy to teach n00bs on, and I have found it to be superb for administering a very heterogenous network consisting of various windoze clients and servers, Apple machines from ][e to current models, and various *nix servers and a few clients... best of all, I can do all this with tools native to OS X - I've got the windoze Remote Desktop Connection, Apple Remote Desktop, and X11 or even Terminal.app for the real work =]
I don't want to sound like a cheerleader, although I admit I've probably done just that. It's just that when you find a really useful tool to get your job done, it's hard not to wax enthusiastic.
political_news.c: warning: comparison is always true due to limited range of data type
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.
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.
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?
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.
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
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.
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.
"1. It's the fastest most powerful desktop computer in the world."
According to whom? The only benchmarks I've seen are from PC Magazine (not that reliable) and Apple. PC Magazine gave it a mediocre evaluation, and, Apple, well, it's their product.
Apple's SPEC scores don't impress me. When they start showing me numbers in the 1400s, I'll agree. Unfortunately, all that they have released are the GCC numbers which makes comparison with other computers difficult. Am I to trust that Apple's numbers for the Dell system aren't biased at all? What about Athlon 64?
SPEC works because companies compete to optimize their platform (compilers, operating system, and software) to produce the best results. There are regulations that the company must follow; these are voted upon by SPEC members. Apple has not submitted results to SPEC, nor are they benchmarking their platform with the best compiler. And if GCC is the best compiler for the G5, then they have a bigger problem.
"2. It's certainly the most usable and stable."
Also debatable. "Usable" depends on what you're used to. I have not seen usability studies involving XP vs. OS X. Is your "most usable" base on actual data or is it just your personal opinion?
"Stable" depends on what kind of configuration you're running, as well as a number of other factors. Windows can be surprisingly stable; many Windows systems have been up for years. Of course, if you install every spyware ridden screen saver, Windows will likely be unstable, but that's not Microsoft's fault. Is your "Stable" claim based on actual data, or is it another opinion?
"3. It has the beautiful Aqua UI."
I could debate this (beauty is in the eye of the beholder), but I won't. I like Aqua too. However, after a few months, most people stop caring.
"4. It's a superb Unix workstation."
So is Linux. Or Windows with Cygwin.
"5. It comes in a gorgeous aluminium case."
There are plenty of great looking aluminum ATX cases. The G5 "cheese grater" case is a little gaudy for my tastes, but, again, this is preference.
So, let's see:
1: Is it the fastest? We don't know. Show me some impressive SPEC numbers and we'll talk.
2: Is it the most usable and stable? Show me some studies that say so. Your opinion means little to me.
3: Aqua does look cool. But that's a preference, not a fact.
4: PC's with Linux make great UNIX workstations too.
5: There are plenty of cool looking aluminum PC cases.
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.
You could say that while Linux is the "Unix workalike," OS X is the "Unix workaround."
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
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.
heh you wanna know stable? how about X11 + Gnome + Gimp for image authoring, + 6 different web browsers for cross-browser checking of DHTML functionality, + office apps such as word and excel to deal with requirements documents sent by management drones, Multi-IM chat client to stay connected with co-workers over AIM, and Jabber over SSL, iTunes mp3 player in the background to soothe the mind playing music from a firewire-connected iPod, BBEdit code editor and 10 terminal windows, one of which running Tomcat java servlet container, another one running ant build scripts, to work on various components of a J2EE-compliant web application, all this and a few other apps running and being actively used simultanously on a 400mhz Titanium powerbook bought in early 2001, recently upgraded to 1Gig of RAM for $180 including priority shipping courtesy of pricewatch.com.
How many times have i ever crashed the machine, and have had to reboot due to a crash? well, TWICE, when i got kernel panics when fiddling with some obscure features of CUPS printer sharing over SMB. But never while performing the typical daily load outlined above on this machine.
I only reboot my laptop once a week as a preventive measure to give the OS a chance to perform a periodic fsck whenever it feels it needs to do so. My daily routine is heavy in network, peripherals, *and* disk I/O. Plenty of room for bad sectors to creep up on me.
Go ahead, weep.
Again, this is a 400mhz machine from 2001. It's old. and it still kicks ass.
PC's with Linux do make great UNIX-ish workstations but not nearly anywhere near Mac OS X.
Windows with Cygwin fucking sucks ass compared to OS X. I should know, prior to 2001 i used windows NT then windows 2000 on a DELL laptop. I used cygwin. I even wrote entire application development environment set-up scripts in bash under cygwin. It becomes a real bitch when you need to access executables that live in the "windows" world and get them to interoperate in the "cygwin world". cygpath. forward slashes vs backward slashes. stupid stupid stupid waste of time. Don't get me wrong, prior to OS X, Cygwin was a God-Send. It made windoz bearable to deal with.
I have a debian linux server running at home on a cheap 2Ghz PC i inherited from my sister. I love Linux because thanks to Linux, no piece of computing hardware ever becomes truly obsolete. You can always turn any box into a cheap, decent desktop workstation, or a cheap, decent server.
Windows NT and 2000 have wasted me countless hours of valuable time.
In the end, to me, the best computing platform is Apple. The turning point was this pure beauty of an operating system that is Mac OS X.
The revolution is now starting with Apple's new next-generation computing hardware architecture. Read here why I place such emphasis on overall system architecture. Hint: until dramatic architecture changes happen, wintel PCs really are stuck in a speed dead-end right now. Clocking your CPU chip upwards can only take you so far without melting your enclosing case or restricting your customer base to Alaska.
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Extraordinary Vacations. Exceptional Prices