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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?)
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.
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)
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.
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...
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
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
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.
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