Slashdot Mirror
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."
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?
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
...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.
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.
It's not me that's afraid. It's my wallet.
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.
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?