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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."
last time i checked the operon was to be the server class amd64 cpu, where as the athlon64 was to be the desktop version.
if you're going to compare workstation class chips, compare the freaking workstation class chips...
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.
Specialization is for insects. - R.A.H.
It might still get owned, but redoing the tests with the OS that the G5 was meant to run on will be a better comparison. What can it hurt, it's only 9 days away from release.
G5, Athlon64...any way you go it's an alternative to Intel. I think the importance isn't which is quicker but that they both offer serious alternative solutions to Intel which forces everyone to innovate. Both companies deserve credit for working toward better solutions for customers.
Of course we torture people, we need the information --Gen. Pinochet
...you'll wake the Mac zealots!
Get paid to code OSS
So they compare 32-bit apps running on a 64-bit AMD chip to 32-bit apps running on a 64-bit G5 and conclude that the AMD chip is much faster than the G5.
This does nothing to benchmark the capabilities of the chips -- just the capability of the chips to run non-native apps.
Go back to your lives, citizens, nothing to see here...
Life is short: void the warranty.
"Our test suite, PC WorldBench 4, cannot run on Macs. The new Macs aren't great values either, as the top-of-the-line G5 ($3549 as configured) costs about $200 more than the similarly configured Alienware Aurora.
The dual-G5 sparkled in one main area: our Photoshop test, which it completed in 18 seconds, or about 17 percent faster than the Aurora's 21 seconds. The 1.8-GHz single-chip G5 ($2999) trailed at 27 seconds.
Elsewhere, the Alienware earned top marks, performing particularly well in the Premiere QuickTime test."
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>>$200.00 is nothing and no direct testing comparision is funny.... This is pure marketing hype.
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.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
It sounds simple, but in reality moving to an x86 platform doesn't make sense from a technical nor business stance.
First, it's not as simple as recompiling a few things at the "higher layers." All of Apple's partners would have to port their applications as well. Porting apps is not as simple as you'd like to think--see the OpenOffice port to OSX.
Second, moving to commodity hardware of x86 would turn Apple into just another software company. Apple very much is a hardware company and its the marriage of that hardware with exceptional software that makes their advocates voracious in their support.
AMD has nice stuff but if Apple were to use their processors they would be proprietary and for use by Apple only. The processor would be designed and built from the ground up for Apple--sharing next to nothing with AMD's other offerings.
So for now, let's just be happy that AMD and Apple both have cool stuff.
Of course we torture people, we need the information --Gen. Pinochet
Did you look at the apps they compared the G5s and the Athlon64s with?
/. calls this a trouncing?
Word- It's Microsoft, no shit it's going to be faster on windows, who would have guessed that?
Premiere - The video app that sucks so hard on mac that Adobe stoped making it. Try the same functions on FCP and watch it come out a few times faster.
Quake 3 - A game, 'cause you know macs are what everyone uses for gaming, and developers spend just as much time optimising their mac versions.
Photoshop - The only relavant and fair app they bothered to test, and the G5 is noticablly faster than any of the Athlon 64 systems, beaten only by the Opteron.
And
"The worst tyrannies were the ones where a governance required its own logic on every embedded node." - Vernor Vinge
I cannot believe this is taken seriously on Slashdot.
Let's look into this more closely: the PCWorld team tested only four applications, one being Microsoft Word, FFS, and another being Premiere, which is no more supported on the Mac, runs in Classic and is leagues behind Final Cut Pro in terms of performance, as anyone with a clue in Mac video processing will tell you. This alone qualifies this comparison as biased in my book.
Where is the After Effects test ? And where is the Mathematica test ? Did you only know that any G5 will trounce an Athlon 64 in these apps ?
Also, looking at the results, I can hardly call it "trouncing the Mac". Only one in the four apps make use of the 2GHz' second CPU (Photoshop), and dutifully the G5 beats the PC in this test, and the scores in the other tests (not counting the Premiere's joke of an application) are not even that far apart.
Lies, damn lies, statistics, advertisements and benchmarks.
Aside from benchmarking Word for Mac against Word for Windows of all things, what does this actually prove? That Macs don't run software as well as Windows does when it comes to software that has been available for Windows longer? I'd be more interested in a price comparison between the systems.
No software-RAID setup on the Mac? Why RAID on the other machines?
Seems kind of one-sided.
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.
both 64-bit contenders
Both the G5 and the AMD64 are great chips, but they really only represent the intrustion of 64 bit computing in the popular consciousness, not the actual beginning of 64 bit computing.
Compare their performance with the last Alpha chip, development of which was cut off years ago, and tell me again how the best is being brought to us.
Even as Intel picks the carcass of Alpha to revive the still-born Itanium series, the killed off Alpha chip line has performance that embarrasses HP into covering it up.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
See: http://www.digitalvideoediting.com/2003/06_jun/fea tures/cw_macg5_interview.htm. Funny stuff.
[excerpt:]
DMN: Now, you're saying it's the first 64-bit desktop machine. But isn't there an Opteron dual-processor machine? It shipped on June 4th. BOXX Technologies shipped it. It has an Opteron 244 in it.
Rubinstein: Uh...
Akrout: It's not a desktop.
DMN: That's a desktop unit.
Akrout: It depends on what you call a desktop, now.
---
S
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
This sig has been deprecated.
I just sent this letter in to PC World. I think it pretty much covers all the mistakes they made in the cross-platform benchmarks.
>--
I have been a long time reader of PC World, and have much respect for your magazine. However, I am yet to see a more abject review than the "64-Bit Takes Off" what was presented in your November 2003 Edition.
Let's start with the choice of Microsoft Word. Undoubtedly a widely used piece of software, and Microsoft incredibly allowed Office v.X for the Mac to receive a number of features that the Windows version is yet to receive. There is, however, one thing that Microsoft will not allow Office for the Mac to achieve; and that is performance parity. To add to this, much of the codebase of Office v.X is left over from the good ol' days of MacOS 9 - reflected in the fact that Office is still a Carbon app. So, although Office on the Mac is extremely widely used, it's of dubious use as a means of comparing performance between processors. Unless, of course, all you do is Office and it's not presently running fast enough for you.
Next. Premiere. This is what stunned me. There is a reason that Premiere doesn't work very well on the Mac. This is because absolutely nobody who does video editing on a Mac uses it. Period. Final Cut Pro wipes to floor with it; not only in functionality, but performance also. Of all the ways you chose to benchmark the G5s, this surprised me the most.
In the Quake test, the Mac was hamstrung by the fact that it only had a 128MB video card in it. I also may be wrong in making the assertion, but doesn't the 256MB ATI 9800 Pro run at a faster clock rate than its 128MB cousin? This would account for quite a performance differential. Despite the fact that Macs aren't really known for games, no other computer with a 128MB graphics card beat it.
The next test was Photoshop. This is the one app you benchmarked in which some 64-bit optimisations have taken place for the Mac, and is also an app that many people use on the Apple platform. In this test, the G5 beat everything on offer from the x86 world by quite a handy margin.
What makes this even more impressive is that the G5 system you benchmarked is running on a stop-gap operating system release from Apple. OS X 10.3, codename Panther, has been specifically designed to take advantage of the G5's 64-bit CPU structure; it's out in barely a week.
I would certainly be interested to see a re-run of the tests, if you think that this feedback is valid. Cross-platform benchmarks are notorious for being difficult to standardise; I do, however, believe that if done properly they can be both useful and interesting.
-- james
Apple never said first 64-bit workstation. Only first 64-bit personal computer. Get it straight.
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
Fun. Free. Online. RPG. BattleMaster.
When reading my analysis, bear in mind that an average person with a stopwatch has +/- 1 second margin of error per test, so anything within two seconds is considered the same time.
Also consider that most machines spin down their hard drives when not in use, leading to up to a five second stall. Because there was no aggregation of multiple tests, tossing out any outliers in the process, these test results are basically useless, but you can consider them to have a +/- 12 second margin of error.
Finally, bear in mind that my analysis is extremely biased. Please look at the facts yourself and make your own decisions. Do not blindly accept my opinion as truth, as doing so doesn't do anyone any good.
Analysis of results:
- Render test: all times identical.
- Quicktime test:invalid (see below).
- Photoshop 50 MB test: tie between Polywell 2 and dual G5 for first place
- Photoshop 150 MB test: tie between Polywell 2 and dual G5.
- Quake tests: invalid.
- MS Word tests: invalid.
Reasons for invalidation of Quicktime test:- If two machines with similar performance suddenly show more than a factor of two difference, this almost always means that only one processor is being used on the slower system due to differences in the software used.
- The test is poorly described so that it cannot be reproduced. There is no "Quicktime format". Quicktime is a wrapper movie for any of dozens of formats. QuickTime has different default codecs in different versions. I doubt Premiere installs the same version of QuickTime that most Mac OS X 10.2 users would have installed (thanks to Software Update), thus there is a good chance they were using different codecs in this test.
- According to the QuickTime API docs, your application has to be modified to take full advantage of multiple processors when compressing images. Since Premiere for the Mac was last updated not long after that support was added in QuicktTime (as best I can tell), odds are very good that it does not use the new APIs, while recent Windows versions almost certainly do.
Reasons for invalidation of MS Word test: factor of four difference clearly indicates that software is not comparable across the two platforms. The results are beyond any sane person's ability to accept from nearly equivalent machines running even remotely similar code.Reason for Quake test invalidation: this should be dependent on graphics card performance, not CPU performance. The G5 beat all but one configuration with an equivalent video card. This one configuration inexplicably was about 50% faster than all the other configurations. Since at least one machine in each 128M speed class uses 8x AGP, it is safe to assume that there are substantially different versions of ATI's drivers being used in these tests, rendering any results meaningless in terms of the performance of the machine itself. The most likely (but hard to prove) interpretation of these results is that the G5 performs slightly better than any Athlon64 when given an equivalent video card, and that the one machine is either mislabeled or has a newer version of the ATI drivers than the G5 and the other 128MB PCs.
But that's just my opinion. I could be wrong.
120 character sigs suck. Make it 250.