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

Compatibility Issues?

[Caradoc]

From the article:

"But upgrading to XP 64 could mean giving up functionality without getting much in return. In fact, XP 64 looks like a throwback to Windows past: Its interface mirrors that of Windows 2000 or even Win 98. Microsoft has not disclosed what else will be in the OS, so it is possible that you'll still get most of XP's other features.

XP 64 won't have the 32-bit XP's support for DOS apps at all, nor will it run 16-bit apps (but it should have no trouble with 32-bit software). More important, 64-bit drivers for common hardware, such as printers, will be scarce when the OS debuts."

In moving from a Dual 1GHz G4 (Quicksilver 2002) to a Dual 2GHz G5, I have yet to find any software incompatibilities - everything works just fine.

This may change once my copy of Panther shows up, but my printer and other hardware continue to work for now.

Re:Compatibility Issues?

[WatertonMan]

Panther isn't a full 64-bit OS. However it does have math and other libraries optimized for 64-bit instructions and has a library for addressing more than 4 GB of RAM. It's process manager can address more than 4 GB total, with 4 GB max going to each process. Although more can be addressed indirectly via the use of the afore mentioned libraries.

Having said that few people need a full 64-bit OS and Panther is aimed squarely at consumers. I expect 64 bit pointers to come eventually, but it is probably better to stick with 32 bit pointers and keep better compatibility.

And, let's be honest. Most people running the Athalon-64 will be using it just as a fast Athalon running WindowsXP.

Eh, I'm still buying a G5

[meta-monkey]

I think the jury's still out. We haven't seen OS's or applications optimized for either platform. However, both systems are still pretty damn fast. I think it's going to come down to what you like best. Personally, I like OSX better than Windows or Linux on the desktop. OSX gives me all the power and stability of Linux, and it's easier to use and prettier than Windows, and it runs Photoshop. I'm a photographer, so that's pretty important to me. I still run Linux on my servers, though...those Mac servers are ridiculously expensive.

Premiere is a worthless benchmark.

[sakusha]

I've argued with benchmarkers over and over about this, Premiere is a lousy benchmark, used only by people who want to stack the deck against Macs. Premiere is highly optimized for PCs, and highly unoptimized against Macs. Fortunately that benchmark will go away soon since there won't BE any further Mac Premiere versions.
If you want to do a proper test, you'd use a crossplatform product that runs equally well on both platforms and is highly optimized for dual processors, like Discreet Cleaner or Combustion.
There's only one benchmark I can think of that is more worthless than Premiere, the "MSWord scroll test." For some stupid reason, some benchmarkers think it's a useful test to see how fast the can scroll to the end of a long Word document with the arrow key. Unfortunately, Word has a delay loop built into the scroll function, it even changes the delay loop depending on the speed of the CPU. The results are totally useless.

Re:Trounced? With this kind of comment? joke...

[MidnightBrewer]

So I followed their links to the other PC sites and configured a few of them to match (as closely as possible) the basic dual G5 from Apple. Result: Apple, $2999. AlienWare: $3160. Voodoo PC: $3060. Falcon Northwest: $3179. Etc. I'd have done them all, but I have a life.

I tried to be as fair as possible. However, it was usually difficult or impossible to get matching optical drives (as in SuperDrive), and many models not only didn't offer Gigabit ethernet, they didn't offer Ethernet *at all.* They had modems, though. Optional (I didn't add them, so they'd cost you extra.) Good grief.

So lacking some of the features that the G5 comes with standard, the Athlon-based PCs came in more expensive. Same old game on the "PCs are cheaper" front. The Athlons may be faster, but they'll cost you.

Now how is that for fair? "Faster costs more money." That sounds like reason to me. You can have a really fast processor, but at the expense of giving up a few things you might want in order to be productive. Like the internet.