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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."
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.
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
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.
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.
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.