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G5 vs Opteron, Finally
metfoo writes "It's been months since the G5 and Opterons have been available for purchase. When the G5 systems were first released, many Mac bashers and AMD nuts discredited the G5's performance. They always ended their comments with 'Wait until its compared to an Opteron, then we'll talk.' Well, it's finally time to talk. Barefeats has posted an article comparing the two systems. The G5 line was compared to a Dual 2GHz Opteron and the results are impressive. In gaming, the Opteron system proved to be superior, which is partly due to the superior 9800XT over the base Radeon 9800. The G5 spanks the Opteron in many of the non-gaming tests, except for the Photoshop tests."
That since they are running the Opteron in 32-bit mode, it's not taking advantage of it's full potential. Guess we'll wait until "round 2" like he says, but it still looks bad that he kind of dodges this. If it were me I'd be running the benchmarks on 64-bit linux versus 64-bit linux.(gentoo?)
The Opteron isn't meant as a desktop chip. It's meant to be in mid to high end servers and possibly workstations with CAD development, not running Photoshop or After Effects.
Not to mention the fact that the Opteron was running in 32 bit mode. When XP-64 comes out, I'd like to see this comparison redone.
Am I just an exception?
"You know why you do not see me styling wit my homies? Because I have no homies!!" -Mojo Jojo
Those two processors are not compared. The video graphics cards, the motherboard speed, and other things are compared. It should be labeled how Apple G5 Platform compares to Athlon Based Platform.
a) Not many people have heard of.
and
b) Even fewer people use.
The thing that's true now is that the Mac systems are competitive. They're close to the fastest Intel/Athlon systems -- close enough that there's not an OBVIOUS performance reason to choose one or another.
They're close in price, too (if you go PC white box then the PC is still less than half the price, but for a Xeon system or something from Dell it's fairly close).
I don't think this benchmark is going to make up ANYBODY's mind one way or another, though -- it's an emotional debate rather than a logical one.
The good thing is the Mac's numbers are no longer embarrasingly crappy, as they were in the latter G4 days.
Better now?
Well, personally, I wouldn't be too interested in that sort of comparison. I doubt that I'd be the only one who felt that way, either. Barring truly representative synthetic benchmarks, I suspect that most people would be interested in real world benchmarks, such as those provided by testing with After Effects, Bryce, etc. in Windows or Mac OS.
D.
Yes, thousands of people are clamoring for much needed performance tests in the areas high-end games and professional-level media software. Since Linux has long been recognized as the leader in both of those categories, I can't believe the reviewers' oversight in testing on Windows and MacOS.
Also, these tests are meaningless to today's consumer, since they weren't done on fully 64-bit operating systems from the future.
I for one say forshame to these uncouth heathens for spoiling with practical applications what could have been a perfectly entertaining penis-measuring contest.
In Capitalist America, bank robs you!
Who are you kidding?
If people actually took the time to look up accurate information about what they bash they probably wouldn't have much to talk about in the first place. Just like how the Windows-bashers are quick to cite Win98 as a sucky OS, the Mac-bashers point to "huge" price differences when in reality they aren't that much more.
People are only as open-minded as they want to be, and most people prefer the stronger arguments that used to hold true.
...of those who confuse supercomputing and distributed computing.
hopefully this will put to bed all those folks who cry about Apple computers being so damned expensive.
In the midrange and the high end, it seems Apple's performance per dollar is competitive to Wintel PC vendors'. But in fact, the "Macs are expensive" conventional wisdom results from the fact that Apple has refrained, wisely or not, from targeting the $500-$700 "entry level" price range.
Everyone can compare numbers until pigs fly but what about user perception? Yes it's great X component makes X application run faster. But as a whole who's out there using these applications on a daily basis? What about from power on to usability (of which many users just leave the pc running) or how long it takes from click until your email application fires up and starts accessing email?
It's really these things that users care about not the 1% that may be using specialized applications that were complied to take advantage of these processors.
The G5 will obviously have a advantage due to the OS being tweaked for it and the Opteron will have a advantage if the applications are compiled 64bit. Of which were any of these applications full 64bit or recompiles.
There is also a world of difference in the applications depending on which compiler you run. Intel compilers are vastly superior to many run of the mill compilers and will generally run better on Intel systems. AMD and Apple probably have their own compilers and more than likely encourage the use of them. Now since application developers will use what's cheapest and is most stable across platforms you'll probably see the differences you're seeing. Any native Apple application will obviously be done with a apple compiler. Photoshop may have been done with a generic thus better performance on x86/64 vs it compiled for a G5 processor which Apple may or may not release all specs for proper compilation with a generic.
Either way comparing them in this manner is nothing but a mess of varibles unless you're using everything the same across the board.
Better to compare bandwidth and other functions of the processors and not varible application performance where you're not sure of the breeding of code.
The 'huge' price difference isn't really the main issue. The issue is being boxed into a single-vendor solution. I can buy x86 machines from hundreds of sources. I can mix-and-match components rather freely.
Or I can hope Jobs hasn't discontinued the model of Mac that I had started to like. Apple proved they're not ready to be anything but a niche vendor when they got cold feet and killed their second source vendors (the Mac clone business)
What I think is really funny about people wanting absurd frame rates like this is that the monitor is only being refreshed 72 times a second. Anything more than 72 frames a second goes to waste, if you did try to display more frames than the monitor, then you get tearing of the image as you flip video buffers.
I want a gaming engine that gives me the same number of frames per second as my monitor is giving me.
Although a monitor and game that could give me 120 frames a second would be very sweet. Then I could play it for many hours without getting eye strain and headaches.
the people who are going to buy these are buying dell for primarily one reason. it's a dell. now, you and i go, BFD. but, if you're a business, or even a serious professional, it is a tool. it is worth far more than $500 or whatever, to know that if your box takes a shit, they'll back it up. i just bought a canon A70 (pix of the kids) from ritz camera. yes, i could've gotten it elsewhere, with a better package. but you know what, i got their extended warranty, which basically says if i drop it off a building, and bring in the battery door, they'll replace it. now, what's that worth? that kind of peace of mind comes at a price. businesses expect that when they call, someone is there. if something goes to hell, they're gonna get something fixed. dell is still pretty good at service. even though they're PQ has taken a shit last couple of years.
My problem? I was perfectly gruntled, until some numbnuts came by and dissed me.
Ok this is crazy. Since when does this count as a benchmark? Correct me if I'm wrong but the point is to minimize the differences. Not only are they running different OSes, they're running different video cards. This is the biggest example of grab ass benchmarking.
Whats so hard about running these machines with a 64bit distro of linux with both running the same vid card and the same amount of ram. Its like each time these people do benchmarks they purposely sabotage themselves.
[Just Shut Up and Do What I say]
>Am I just an exception?
No. Your the rule but to a very small degree.
Most people don't care about how a car preforms.. Do you care how quickly your car will go from 0 to 60? If you get up to speed quickly it so matters not if it takes 2 micro seconds or 1 full second to reach the 25 MPH spead limit enforced becouse of the naborhood kids playing in the street.
But some people live on those nasty busy streets where if you don't reach 60 MPH near instantly you'll never get out of the driveway.
That's it for the car anolog.
Your running a web browser, e-mail, simple stuff. Once your computer is fast enough those things work instantly and you never notice a slowdown.
But the computer dosen't always produce results inside a number of seconds. Some tasks take minuts, hours, days.
Try recompiling your Linux kernel. It takes time (after you've downloaded the latest source) you have to wait and wait and wait and for those of us still doing things that make us wait and wait and wait speed becomes an issue.
Speed of disk, speed or network, speed of ram, speed of processor. What ever it is that is making us wait and wait and wait is what we will look at.
Ever notice that website that seams to run slow?
Must be populare. Why is it slow?
Maybe they don't have enough bandwith...
Or maybe the computer is slow only able to handle 4,000 people at once quickly and your not lucky 4,001... Ohh no... your user 8,000
Untill computers can outthink us humans they'll be to slow. Even then the computers themselfs will want to be faster if just to out think the Jones bots.
I don't actually exist.
to Mac people??? The same people who thought that the "G3 was faster than the fastest Pentium II" for years!
Let me try to make this simple: neither Windows XP nor OS X are 64-bit OSs, and neither was running 64-bit programs. This is a much better situation for the G5 than the Opteron. 64-bit mode on the G5 really only allows for 64-bit instruction execution, and 64-bit pointers. On the Opteron, 64-bit mode enables a host of non-64-bit-related improvements, notably a doubling of the visible register set.
The bottom line is this:
The G5 will run 32-bit code just as fast (or faster, because of better cache utilization) than 64-bit code. The Opteron will run 32-bit bit code about 20% slower than 64-bit code, because of the architectural improvements in X86-64 long mode.
Note that none of the apps here would really benifet from 64-bit processing. Floating point is already 64-bit (actually, 80-bit) in both processors, and the only program that could concievably use 64-bit integer math would be Photoshop. Neither machine had more than 4GB of RAM, so 64-bit memory addressing was a non-factor.
That said, the G5 beat the Opteron by more than 20% in most of the benchmarks. I fully expect that with both CPUs running optimized 64-bit code, the G5 would still be faster, though the performance delta will be less.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
I don't know about the Los Alamos cluster referenced, but the Big Mac cluster went all out on Inifiniband interconnect, inferring a potentially extremely better network interconnecting the cluster.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
O.K., hopefully this will put to bed all those folks who cry about Apple computers being so damned expensive. Feature for feature, the G5 is about $600 cheaper than the Opteron. I certainly found this out when I was pricing workstations from Dell and other Wintel manufacturers and the G5's from Apple. I went with a fully loaded G5 and the price delta was $1200 cheaper going with the G5. Plus, OS X is soooooo nice.
:(
I am very curious as to how you got an Opteron price from Dell, which doesn't Make an Opteron system.
I've read this sort of argument before, and what it comes down to is the difference in price between a comsumer system (G5) and a pro workstation (dual Opterons are not for the avergae consumer). The manufacturers making dual Opteron systems provide very heavy support - because their market (Engineering, 3d modeling, rendering) demands it. You pay for said support. The G5, however, comes with typical Apple support - which, while very nice, is not at the same level.
Also of note, the manufacturers making Opteron workstations tend to put on very high end graphics cards - not the game-use 9600 pro that comes standard on a G5.
Unfortunatly, no one makes a dual opteron that isn't targeted at a professional user currently - instead you have to cobble one together yourself. The price point drops considerably when you do this, becoming on par with that of the G5, but you wind up with 5+ warrenties to keep track of, and no central org to get service from.
man is machine
People who were complaining about Apple's pricing where complaining about having to pay for dog slow 1GHz G4s with hideously slow memory busses that couldn't even take full advantage of a stick of DDR 1600 RAM!
The G5 is the first good deal from Apple's desktop lineup in years. Dual 64-bit 2GHz for $3000? That's pretty good! Apple's will have to be aggressive with the pricing, though, because eventually, AMD64 chips will have to drop the premium 64-bit pricing and start competing with mid-range Xeons at $300 each. And IBM will have to keep ramping up the clock speed, because the nicest architecture in the world means jack shit in the face of a 3x clockspeed delta. If they can do that, the G5 will be successful. If they can't, it's back to G4-era "Macs are slow and expensive!"
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
One important consideration in the G5 versus Opteron comparison is who is standing behind the product. The only tier 1 vendor who has announced Opteron systems is Sun, and those are currently vaporware.
Tier 1 designation (which is done by market analysts, and includes companies like Dell, IBM, HP, Sun, Apple) is especially important for governmental purchases, as national law dictates that unless you stipulate the purchase comes from a tier 1 vendor, in order to prevent fraud the purchase order must be put out for bid, in which case the purchase order will go to the lowest bidder, which is often undesirable as the lowest bidder will typically be disreputable and a terrible pain to deal with.
In the past at my job we have always purchased systems from tier 1 vendors, first IBM and then Sun. Recently we experimented in cost savings by purchaseing a HPC cluster from a vendor found through the bids system, and it has been nothing but a nightmare. We've decided in the future to purchase only from tier 1 vendors because of this experience, and will probably end up building our next cluster from G5s (we are an educational institution and thus receive a very generous educational discount from Apple), especially with the recent release of IBM's XL Fortran compiler for OS X.
Do you know anyone who wouldn't build their own dual Opteron?
Yes. And when you're finally capable of stepping outside your current understanding of the industry, you will too.
I'm against picketing, but I don't know how to show it.
As far as the pricing on the Apple machines, it may seem a bit steep at first but when you look at the total package (sexy aluminum case, sweet fan setup, SATA hard drives, Firewire 800, 64bit PCI (even as far back as the old B&W G3 I recently picked up) and especially the resale value you really aren't doing to poorly. I love the comparisons where people say "I can build an x86 box for half the price". Well, the problem is that the x86 box is worth crap 3 months after you build it while the Apple boxen seem to hold their values long after your half priced x86 box becomes a machine you cannot even give away except maybe to a buddy who wants an old machine to use as an IPCop firewall box.
The G5 definitely isn't a slow machine, you will be able to resell your G5 without taking a bath on your investment, and OSX is damned slick....I mean...REALLY slick.
All in all I would have to say that the G5 machines are holding their own. Slower on some things, faster on other things, but nevertheless holding their own. The price/performance thing really depends on what you want the machine to do for you. I personally play games on a Playstation 2, listen to music on a real live stereo system and use a computer for browsing the web and checking email. So for me, OSX is a really nice environment to work in and the price of admission for OSX dictates Apple hardware. For others that play games I guess x86 and Windows is the way to go, and for those that like a total lack of intergration of their various UI components and appreciate a plethora of different "widgets" and toolkits all crammed together in a hodgepodge of a UI with no unified look or feel from application to application (wanrning, run-on sentence) and an almost unrelenting requirement to be tweaked and fiddled with then I guess a Linux x86 desktop is the way to go.
I guess where my rant is going is that the hardware playing field seems to be fairly level these days and therefore your choices in systems would have almost entirely to do with how you plan on using your machine and/or which particular environment you prefer to work or play in.
"The strong will do what they want, the weak will do what they must."
-Thucydides
http://www.specbench.org/cpu2000/CINT2000/
http://www.specbench.org/cpu2000/CFP2000/
A collegue has a five year old "Wallstreet" Powerbook. When Panther came out he installed it.
Guess what: It got faster.
Show me one PC Manufacturer (not alone Microsoft) who can manage something like that?
I have a five year old Dell Notebook.... XP I guess might run on it, or not. But the reality is I wouldn't even want to run XP on that thing.
I didn't own an Apple until I bought an iBook a year and a half ago (together with an iPod). But I can tell you right now that my next one will be an Apple again, because "It just works" and I don't feel completly abandoned by Apple once I walk out of the door.
This might be the case because Apple is still relativly small in comparision to other Computer companies, but at this point in time I don't really care, I get what I paid for, if not more so.
If you want to e-mail me, use my PGP Key.
You saw the price comparison? The opteron was +$600.
Yeahyeah, you can buy cheaper PC's. Well, what do you know? You can also buy cheaper Macs. The cheapest mac btw won out on a price/feature comparison with other all-in-one machines (brand names, including ungggg Dell).
The mac premium, is that the amount of free software you get with the good hardware?
The only game I miss on the Mac is Dungeon Keeper II, for the rest, my PS2 does the trick.
I think, therefore I am...I think.
and i AM being 100% objective !!
Uhm, no you're not. You just threw out the blanket opinion that "MacOSX + mac hardware" is "far superior" to "windows on a PC". Laughably, you go on to intimate that OS X may be a bit slow.
Then, you state an opinion concerning Microsoft. Then, you make another blanket statement that Mac hardware is much more reliable. I could name a dozen PC configurations off the top of my head that are quite a bit more reliable and of higher quality than Mac hardware. And yes, I'm qualified to make that statement as I own both a PMG4 and a TiBook.
The hardware doesnt get faster with each new release of MacOS, the OS does.
Seems you don't have the slightest idea what objective means, as there were perhaps only one or two sentences that were objective in your post. That's the problem with slashdotters.
One thing people seem to forget about when you compare pricing is how often you have to replace your windows box versus an apple box.
The only reason that Apple seems to have any advantage they didn't come out with faster CPUs for almost 2 whole years. Most people would find little reason to spend $3000 upgrading from 500Mhz to 1250Mhz.
Now that Apple's got a real CPU supplier, things will change. A 1.2Ghz PowerBook won't look so hot compared to the 4 Ghz PowerBooks out in 2005.
Finally, your premise about PCs is wrong. A 5 year old 500Mhz PIII system is still perfectly usable for everything except games. Furthermore, all low-end Apple systems have zero expansion slots, which basically means you are screwed if there's a new wireless standard or something. At least with a PC laptop, you could buy a firewire PC card.