PC World: Apple G5 Gets Trounced By Athlon 64

StewedSquirrel writes "PC World magazine has published an article comparing the AMD Athlon 64 and Opteron versus Apple's G5 processor, both 64-bit contenders for the title of 'fastest desktop processor.' Apple has made many claims to be the first, fastest and only 64-bit processor for the desktop and workstation market, but (not mentioning the fact that Opteron beat the G5 to market by over 4 months) the benchmarks should speak for themselves. Of note is the 3.2GHz Pentium 4, coming in competitive with the G5, but significantly behind the Opteron and Athlon 64 systems."

Comments

Unscientific

[Nexum]

Hmm...

So this is how we benchmark two different platforms these days?

For everyone's information, I should not have to point the following out, but here we go... the benchmarks were taken from the following apps -

Quake III, developed on, and for, x86 over 5 year period of programming research and enhancement. Later ported to OSX in a week by OmniGroup.

Word, developed on, and for, x86, by the developer who also wrote the operating system running on the PC's. Ported by MBU to OSX.

Photoshop, Adobe develops Photoshop in a very balanced way for the two platforms, and these are the results for this test -

Fastest 50MB image = 17 seconds, G5 = 18 seconds
Fastest 150 MB image = 47 seconds, G5 = 51 seconds

The final test was a Premiere rendering, where almost all the systems tested did the job in 3 or 4 seconds. The fastest was 3 seconds, the G5 did it in 4. This is Premiere which no longer exists as a current ongoing product for OSX.

Does anyone see just how biased and unscientific this all is?

Oh, and I didn't mention that most of th PC's had double the graphics memory, and had RAID as their primary storage.

This article is FUD.

-Nex

You're MISSING a point

[danaris]

The POINT is that Apple never marketed the G5 as the fastest workstation. All Apple marketed the G5 as was the a) first 64-bit desktop (and if your definition of desktop differs from "a pre-built box from a well-known company that an ordinary human might buy", that's your problem, not Apple's), and b) the fastest desktop around at the time.

Saying, "Ooh! Ooh! New computers have come out! There are benchmarks against computers Apple wasn't talking about! The G5's not the fastest! Apple LIED!" is just plain dumb. Of course faster computers will come out! Apple isn't dumb enough to think or claim that their first-generation G5s will always be the fastest, and anyone who thinks they were claiming that is dumb.

And does anyone else see the possible conflict of interest with PC World running these benchmarks? Now, note that I'm an Apple fan. However, I won't completely believe any benchmarks that are done by anyone with an interest in seeing either side win. And it would probably be best if both computers were running something neutral, like a Linux or a BSD. Does anyone really believe these benchmarks are any more fair and unbiased than Apple's own???

Dan Aris