Slashdot Mirror
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?)
If they would have used a linux platform instead of Windows...
Jason Faulkner
Old Os Administrator
jason@oldos.org
oldos.
One main issue with the UT 2003 tests. It doesn't say if they are running UT 2k3 2225.1 or 2225. 2225.1 brings MASSIVE performance increases. From the notes:
It's much, much faster. Several optimizations have been made, lots of Altivec code has been added, and the entire sound subsystem has been rewritten. Performance improvements of 25% or more over the original retail version are typical, with single CPU systems achieving a more noticible gain.
Am I just an exception?
"You know why you do not see me styling wit my homies? Because I have no homies!!" -Mojo Jojo
I'll get you started:
(a) Mac only has one mouse button
(b) PC is like a Dodge Neon, Mac is like a BMW
(c) Mac has no games
(d) Windows XP: DRM
(e) Linux has no games
(f) X windows sucks
(g) etc.
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.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
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.
Unreal Tournament 2003 runs in Direct X mode on the Opteron and OpenGL mode on the G5. Some say this isn't a fair test but if you are choosing between the two systems, you need to know how it runs your favorite game.
If a G5 running in OGL gets such low scores something is wrong. D3D renders slower and requires more processing power than OGL.
-illumina+us "I put on my robe and wizard hat..."
The desktop iteration of the Opteron is the Athlon FX-51. Maximum PC has run multiple benchmarks on the two systems to compare them, and the athloh whoops up on the G5. As a matter of fact, the G5 lost in all but one or two tests to the two frontrunners, the Athlon FX and the P4 Extreme Edition. This was obviously in 32-bit mode. I don't hate macs, but in this race (the desktop race), it certainly comes out under the other two major chip manufacturers.
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.
Price comparisation:
- comparisation of artificially low memory systems as Apples prices are where Apple makes the most on. On the one hand claiming 'we don't want to build ourselves as Apples can't be build, and then going to another store to add memory, just isn't fair when comparing prices.
- Boot-testing the Mac for performance difference with other the HD is a good thing, but the test in the other direction (booting the PC with the other HD might reveal that the bottleneck is in the other direction).
- MacOS X is certainly better in 64bit environments than not wanting to run beta software on a system bought for performance.
- The problem with the Mac is also that the graphics subsystem is already dated. The release cycle of Macs is just too long. When they're first released they -arguably- beat most of the fastest PC's. But the next version is only released at quickest 6 months later, if you compare at that time with latest hardware. Macs just can cope up.
- I also assume that near the end of the cycle, Apple's profit margins are incredible high. It's a very good marketing tactic to keep hardware and software tied to each other, keeping it all under control.
- As I'm typing this on my top-equipped 12" PowerBook, I must admit that MacOS X is a good OS and the hardware is very good (this laptop was cheaper than any comparable hardware at the time I ordered it - not any more at the time when it got delivered)
- And as a rule of thumb, I always say it's better to buy a less expensive system and upgrade it quicker than to go for the fastest and be stuck with it for an extra year.
- Macs also have a better second hand value, and that shouldn't be forgotten when taking the price into account.
- But most performance comparisations clearly SUCK because they tend to be optimised for a certain system (because of lack of knowledge of the party), or highly dependent on release schedules of involved hardware or software.
had feature called "The Race Is On" by Jonathan Seef. The comparison was between G5 and PC's with opteron. The PCs seemed to fare better in most of the tests (photoshop, word, quake, premiere, mp3-encoding, mpeg-2 encoding). Mac seemed to be better only with the DVD creation. By the way, I use Powerbook G4. Anyone's got a link for the article ?
Science as a way of life.
First, lets examine the statement The G5 spanks the Opteron in many of the non-gaming tests, except for the Photoshop tests. I see five tests in this review, and there are two wins for G5, two wins for Opteron, and one tie. So I really don't see either chip spanking the other. On the second page Opteron wins two, G5 wins one.
Second, the configuration notes section was pathetic. It doesn't really give a very good description of the real configuration of the systems. Anyone that views benchmarks regularly knows that the devil is in the details. Still, this is equally a problem for Opteron and G5.
Third, I wonder what kind of comparison is really valid. Anyone familiar with the AMD/Intel world knows that you can't just grab two 2Ghz chips and run them head to head. The architectures are not the same, it wouldn't be a valid comparison. So with two entirely different ISAs, what chips should be run head to head? The only obvious comparison would be each manufacturer's fastest...in this case I believe the 2GHz G5 is Apple's current fastest, but AMD does have a 2.2Ghz part that is available (see pricewatch) and that wasn't tested.
Lastly, let me address the importance of compilation. I can't speak for G5, but you would get a substantial boost in performance on most applications just with a recompile for AMD64 chips. This is because Opterons have 32 GPRs instead of 16, which can make a big difference (especially in multimedia apps like photoshop). Obviously these products aren't commercially available, but people should be aware that a substantial performance boost for AMD64 could come just from optimized releases of software once it reaches a wide enough audience to make it worthwhile for software vendors.
I guess this has turned more into a "notes about AMD64 architecture" post than anything else. It looks to me like this review is interesting but doesn't really settle much. Both Opteron and G5 performed well.
I know this isn't quite on topic, but I wonder how the latest Alpha design would fair. The alpha was the first mass produced 64 bit chip that had any commercial success. It was introduced in the early nineties. IN fact Linus had one. Basically the curret EV78 is a 6 or 7 year old design, but in most serious tests of processor power it has done quite good. It's amazing that such an "old" design still works so well. The last SPEC numbers I can find are here. Considering the platorm has been ignored and basically orphaned, it's suprising that this chip still powers many of the worlds top rated super computers.
How does all this relate to the G5 and Opteron? Well AMD gets it's bus design from the Alpha lineage. The G5 is built by IBM, who I believe is building the alpha cores as well (I could be wrong, I can't keep up). The irony? Every current intel pentium chip is quality control checked by machines with alpha processors. Funny world huh?
AngryPeopleRule
"Science is about ego as much as it is about discovery and truth " - I said it, so sue me.
Here are some benchmarks that show comparitive performance under Maya and Mental Ray. The G5 does not due so well in this, atleast compared to Intels and AMDs offerings.
t al.htm
_ maya.htm
An item of interest in both benchmarks are
the stats from an SGI Tezro workstation with 4 procs.
Mental Ray for Maya
http://www.zoorender.com/html/benchmark_men
Standard Maya Renderer
http://www.zoorender.com/html/benchmark
Also there are alot better reviews already published that cover these cpus respective performance in more detail.
Cheers
according to them:
Athlon 64 vs. Apple G5 Systems: Not Even Close
Now i can't say whether these tests are any less or more objective, but they do draw a completely different conclusion.
-Jon
this is my sig.
...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.
It's running Windows XP, so we have a bunch of slow down right there. I had a 200ish mhz laptop with FreeBSD and a 400mhz WinNT machine running the same program, and the FreeBSD machine ran it about twice as fast. Moral of the Story: Operating systems can add a lot of overhead.
Of course, I don't know what the overhead of OSX is against XP, but I think it's something I had to point out.
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.
This article strictly compares the 970 to the G5 using GAMING benchmarks.
The Opteron and the G5 (IBM PowerPC 970) are two disparately different chips meant to serve two different purposes. The Opteron is AMD's server chip designed to handle for the most part, 64 bit high performance database applications and applications which require large memory models in which the 64 bit memory addressing is needed-- NOT 64 bit desktop applications or games. That's reserved for the Athlon 64 which is clocked significantly higher and has a much smaller L2 cache than the Opteron. On Gaming and desktop content creation benchmarks the Athlon64 is a much better match for the 970.
If you want to compare apples to apples I would compare the IBM Power4 to the Itanium2 to the Opteron, hook them all up to an EMC storage array using fiberoptic SAN connections, and run a few million row length Oracle and DB2 databases and some SQL database benchmarks -- and for load up a few gigantic thermodynamic simulations up into main memory and see how quickly they can run through them. THAT would be an appropriate test for these server chips.
On the latest Top500 list Virginia Tech's Mac cluster is number 3 with 2200 2GHz G5 processors, and Los Alamos National Laboratorys machine, with 2816 2 GHz Opteron processors is number 5.. I didn't look at the topology, or connection medium, but I am certain that the Mac cluster was cheaper, and is faster running the SAME benchmarks...
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...
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.
Answer this question: will final cut pro run on an x86 based machine?
To me, and most Mac users, gaming is irrelvant. Most people that use Macs are in a profession such as desktop publishing, video production, or graphic arts. Sure they may play a game or two, but their machine is used for work.
I do a little bit of everything with my G3 700Mhz 14.1" iBook, but mostly its MS Office, Mail, Safari, and Quark that I use. Along with Final Cut Pro and Photoshop when need be.
Our office is 95% Mac and 5% FreeBSD, which we run on Althon white boxes, and we have beat out competition because of productivty. We are not spending loads of time with viruses and patching security issues on a weekly basis. Our machines rarely lock up, none have crashed (knock on wood), and that helps with the bottom line.
Does it help in video rendering to have the extra speed and power of the 64-bit G5? Yeah, the faster a project is rendered, the quicker we move on to the next. But for everyday business use, our older G4 500's, 867's, and Dual 1.25gz will serve us for years to come and even though Apples cost more up front, we know we have saved time and money by using macs for our desktops.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
I don't know if the author of the article was just trying to make the mac look cheaper, or if they just weren't looking very hard (I suspect the latter), but they could have EASILY shaved $82 off the cost of the Opteron system and got 1394b support for free too boot!
For some reason they configured the Opteron with an add-in Serial ATA RAID controller, supposedly in order to better match the configuration of the Mac (which doesn't support RAID, but I digress). This added $117 to the price. However they completely ignored the motherboard upgrade option that added SATA support (no RAID) and 1394b support together for only $35.
They could also have shaved another $37 off the price by using a software modem instead of a hardware modem (though the HW modem might be a good idea for Linux users that need dial-up) or $72 off the price by not including a modem at all for those of us with broadband connections.
In the end though, the Mac is still a bit cheaper. Macs are not expensive for what you get, the problem is that you don't have much choice but to get top-end. To price out a dual-processor Opteron with similar specs to a dual-processor Mac, you'll be easily over $3000 and possibly up closer to the $3938 of the Xi computer system. However, if you don't need all those features you can easily configure yourself an Athlon64 system for SIGNIFICANTLY less.
I have absolutely no need for a modem (got an old external kicking around in case of emergancies) and have never owned any 1394b devices. Therefore, if I were configuring a PC for myself I would never bother adding either of those two options. I might also configure a cheaper video card and I probably wouldn't bother with a DVD-RW drive, though I would prefer to have two optical drives (one CD-RW and one DVD). These are all easy options on most PC configurations, but often they aren't on Mac configurations. Simply put, you have more choices on PC configurations than on Macs. If you desired setup matches that of a Mac closely, then they often offer good value for your money. If not, then they can be quite expensive for what you want.
Huh?
For the 3 games you can play on a G5?
Why not compare more relevant things? Okay, you say, let's do some applications tests. Okay, photoshop filters. A couple rendering jobs. Yawn. Who the hell does this on their machines all the time? Okay, now the five of you, leave the room.
Why not give me some more information about the guts of the machine, like how fast memory access is or how each bus design handles contention issues, explain why they're relevant in various facets of operating system or application execution, and provide some anecdotal evidence by way of application benchmarks. Hell, run them in a debugger so we can see if our assumptions about system behavior are correct in real-world situations.
These people get a dual G5 and a dual Opteron and all they do is run Photoshop and Quake 3 on it and call it a night. What the hell? Where's the investigation, the effort? How much more boring could that article have been? (Okay, maybe they could've lost the graphs and numbers and just told us, "Trust us, this one's faster", but that would've seemed like they were phoning it in.)
In summary, I was a little disappointed.
- A.P.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
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
We've had benchmarks for months, actually meaningful benchmarks. They show that the G5 is a nice, competitive chip, but it's merely keeping up with AMD performance-wise. And G5 systems are behind Opteron systems in terms of bang-for-the-buck and features.
If you check the published SPEC benchmarks for the Opteron 148 against Apple's claimed SPEC results for the G5, you'll see that a dual G5 is not faster than the Opteron. It is pretty telling, incidentally, that Apple still has not actually submitted official SPEC results for the G5's--they really don't seem comfortable with the comparison on a real benchmark.
Of course, a dual Opteron will have other advantages for many users: you can get it in 1U rack mounts, it runs a lot more application software, and it's cheaper.
Running five application programs does not constitute a meaningful benchmark of the CPU. We don't know how those applications are written, what CPUs they are compiled for, what compilers they used, etc. Most likely, none of those applications have been tuned for Opteron, wherease they have received extensive tuning for PPC and AltiVec over the years. The differences may be something as trivial as cache conflicts. All those "benchmarks" tell you is that if you must run the current version of Bryce and AfterEffects, you may get more bang (but not necessarily more bang-for-the-buck) out of a G5 for the time being.
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.