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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."
SUN Microsystems did the same thing.
After their $40k servers were proven to run slower than a $3k AMD boxen, they started pretending to be OS vendors and went on saying that Solaris is what's *really cool* about sparcs.
That's a statement on the road to dying...
1) Quake 3 - and video memory... Do you actually believe a nearly 4 year old game is dependand on video memory? Back in those days, more than 32mb was outrageous. No way that Q3 ever uses more than 64mb - I would even be surprised if it ever reaches that... I even think that recent games will use up the full 128mb. The videocards have exactly the same GPU - which should perform exactly the same in the same machine if the application doesn't need that exceptional amount of memory.
2) The Opteron/Athlon64 beats the crap out of anything when it comes to memory access. It has an on-die memory-controller - what do you expect? Larger files would have made the G5 only look worse. In fact - they also tested with an 150mb image - and the difference became relatively bigger.
3) & 5) Are you suggesting to bench and compare completely different pieces of software? What sense would that make for pure performance comparison? The best way to compare these things would be to write an own dedicated bench, not comparing apples with banana's.
Stripping the OS - what the hell are you thinking? As if Windows is the most optimal OS. As far as I know, MacOS-X has a much better task scheduling than any Windows around (which is - I'm afraid - not that hard)
You also seem to miss the point completely that in fact they ARE comparing kiwi's with banana's cause the Mac requires a dual 2Ghz rig to get even close to a single-Opteron/Athlon64. How fair is that? Ok - the AMD riggs have a slight Mhz advantage in most of the cases, but if you look at this from a neutral position, I don't see how you could not say that the AMD beats the hell out of the G5. Sorry.
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for example, the photshop tests used files of only 50Mb. That's pretty small of a pro-user.
Yeah, any more would have helped the Athlon64. It has the fastest memory controller by far of the bunch.
The AMD system smoked the G5 because windows has better software than apple. The 4x difference clearly indicates this. Just another reason why people are far better off using windows than a mac.