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Better Business Bureau Targets Apple's G5 Ads
deathazre writes "The Council of Better Business Bureaus has suggested Apple Computer withdraw its claims of the world's fastest, and first 64-bit, PC after a complaint by Dell. However, even having one of their ads banned in the U.K. didn't stop them here in the States."
Apple has already stated the ad has run its course and it will be 'mindful' of the request in the future. Meaning we've already made out on that one, better luck next time :)
You are aware that those numbers are usually LinPack numbers, not just theoretical specs, right? the Xbox probably does run at 80 GFlops in some theoretical sense, when you consider the graphics chip. But, that won't translate into LinPack numbers. The Apple supercomputer, on the other hand, actually has a LinPack score worth mentioning.
I have a G5.
For my code, it's faster clock-for clock than a Xeon, and (usually) slower clock-for-clock than an opteron. Benchmarks can be made to say just about anything, but I bet the G5 is the fastest thing around for some people running their software.
To date, Apple has not released a 64-bit OS for the G5, and not only has not announced any intention to do so, but simply avoids admitting this to be the case. Think what you like, but even if you think "64-bit" doesn't mean "a single application can access more than 4 GB of RAM", you certainly have to be perplexed by the sense in which Apple claims to have "broken the 4 GB barrier", given that their latest OS provides your app access to the RAM just the way an Intel-based 32-bit system can.
Since there is not 64-bit OS for this machine (although Linux is very close), I cannot prove that my G5 has 64-bit hardware, tho I guess I believe it.
I will now accept my troll-mod, since I have posted this atrocity in an apple.stlashdot.org story.
The BBB is nothing but a protection racket for businesses that traditionally garner lots of complaints (e.g. door-to-door sales, home improvement, predatory lending) to avoid escalation of a large number of complaints to people who would actually take some enforcement action.
The BBB is esentially useless after the fact if you've been screwed, but I personally check any local tradesman, etc. If I see a "blemish," knowing how easy they are to avoid, I do no business with that company. It's the same kind of due diligence as checking Google for references to a mail order company before you place an order.
One CPU cycle wasted on digital restrictions management is ONE TOO MANY.
>Apple uses the same components as every single other PC vendor.
True for:
- RAM
- HD
Sort-of true for:
- video cards (different BIOS, but same otherwise AFAIK)
- optical drives (different firmware in some cases, special supplier agreements in some cases)
False for:
- CPU
- Mobo
- I/O chips (many of them are Apple ASICs)
- Power supply
- LCD screens (if applicable)
- Mouse & Keyboard
- Case
Apparently you've never ever looked inside a Mac before, or you'd know this. A G5 desktop is not an Opteron machine with a Gigabyte mobo and Antec power supply in a generic white-box case with an off-the-shelf Logitech KB and mouse, or something like that. A Powerbook is not a Dell Latitude with a different badge on it.
>Apple uses the same "cheap, generic components" and charges you more for them.
I guess cheap is a matter of opinion, but hardly generic. Take a Mac apart sometime. The stuff has brand names on it. Sony, IBM, ATI, Matsushita, Apple, etc. etc.
sigh... Photoshop has been 64 bit enabled since the G5 was introduced, Finalcut followed suit shortly after the introduction, and AfterEffects will no doubt be discontinued in the very near future, since Apple will clearly be pushing Shake (64 bit).
Just as irrigation is the lifeblood of the Southwest, lifeblood is the soup of cannibals. -- Jack Handy
"performed the multi-processor "Rate" benchmarks with hyperthreading DISABLED" because the PC ran faster with them disabled. You're just trolling.
-- oldthinkers unbellyfeel ingsoc
The impressive fact is not the overall performance of the VT G5 cluster, but that the price-performance ratio was better if they bought G5s at the standard Apple educational price (not some insane 1-time giveaway deal cooked up just for VT) than if they bought systems from HP, IBM, Intel, or AMD.
From How Virginia Tech built a supercomputer:
"Intel, HP, IBM, and AMD were all trying to come up with ways to work with us," says Lockhart."But the prices were out of reach and IBM's 970 chip would not be available in time to allow the new Virginia Tech cluster to be ranked."
From Confessions of the World's Largest Switcher:
He looked at various architecture options and was in the process of buying Dells when the deal fell through. He also worked with IBM and AMD and couldn't get the price to match. The budgets were coming in at $9 to $12 million dollars.
When Dell built a similar cluster for more than half the price ($3M vs. $5.2M for VT's), they got a cluster with less than 1/4 of the performance.
Of course, this "performance" is measured by a benchmark, and all benchmarks lie, and single-computer desktop usage doesn't look like large-scale cluster usage, but the fact is, this was not a matter of somebody deciding to buy Apple and blindly throwing a bunch of cash at it. The Apple offering had better price/performance for their needs.
They are now working to get 2 terabytes of IS.
>Most computers, even servers, don't get put into supercomputing clusters, so they're not built for that.
And yet, VT found that the G5 desktop had better price/performance at standard educational prices than any of the offerings from the PC vendors they were talking to at the same time (HP, Intel, and AMD).
I don't believe the Opterons were available at that time either, making the G5 even better. Apple really was the fastest at that time. I don't know why people keep arguing with us (you and I and others) on this point.
And again...
Just to exercise my fingers a little more I'll repeat myself. No individual customers complained to the BBB about Apple. Dell did. This is comparable to Ford making a tip to the BBB about Chevy's claim that their mid-sized SUV gets the best overall mileage of all other currently available mid-sized SUVs.
Slashdot | Apple Hardware VP Defends Benchmarks
spl is an idiot and known Mac community troll. Proof for the idiot part can be found here.
Oh, and here is what Luxology had to say benchmarkwise ...
Micron or Falcon Northwest shipped an Opteron gaming machine targeted at home users. This was the first 64-bit personal computer and most benchmarks showed the opterons faster than the G5, so the G5 wasn't the fastest, wasnt the first 64, it really wasn't anything but the best Mac you could buy.
Actually, the 533 MHz Xeon bus means a dual Xeon system is likely memory bound for a lot of video tasks, which are bandwidth-critical, or a mix of bandwidth and CPU bound. Single-processor P4 is a lot faster than Xeon for video decoding, for example, since the bus is 2/3rds faseter. Dual G5 and Dual Opteron provide way more bandwidth per processor than Xeon in dual configurations, and so win for a lot of media processing tasks.
My video compression blog
Some readers might interpret this as meaning that 64-bit pointers are the only benefits of a 64-bit CPU. I'd like to point out the advantages of single-instruction (u_)int64_t operations.
There are a bunch of algorithms that will run twice as fast on 64-bit CPUs and 32-bit CPUs. String comparisons where the string length is known a priori (as in Java or Pascal strings) can be handled 8 bytes at a time rather than 4 at a time. There are also some tricks that can be done with null-terminated strings, but these Multi-precission arithmatic and memory comying routines also benifit greatly from 8 byte words.
On 64-bit systems, you could also do things like re-writing the O'caml virtual machine so that it internally uses 63-bit integers and doesn't box 32-bit integers.
Copyright Violation:"theft, piracy"::Anti-Trust Violation:"thermonuclear price terrorism"<-Overly dramatic language.
Well, moron, it was the G4 that was a "SuperComputer". At least it fell under the export restrictions for supercomputers of the time. Not those of 1980 but of 1999.
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck