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G5 vs. x86 and Mac OS X vs. Linux
demonbug writes "Anandtech has an article up comparing performance of dual G5s to AMD Opteron and Intel Xeon workstations. The article also takes a look at performance under Mac OS X versus Linux. It provides an interesting look at some of the strengths and weaknesses of the different CPUs." From the article: "This article is written solely from the frustration that I could not get a clear picture on what the G5 and Mac OS X are capable of. So, be warned; this is not an all-round review. It is definitely the worst buyer's guide that you can imagine. This article cares about speed, performance, and nothing else! No comments on how well designed the internals are, no elaborate discussions about user friendliness, out-of-the-box experience and other subjective subjects. But we think that you should have a decent insight to where the G5/Mac OS X combination positions itself when compared to the Intel & AMD world at the end of this article."
Linux 2.6.5 - That's rather outdated... Maybe more recent kernel snapshots offer better performance in some regards?
:%s/Open Source/Free Software/g
YTARY!
Don't forget this:
The server performance of the Apple platform is, however, catastrophic. When we asked Apple for a reaction, they told us that some database vendors, Sybase and Oracle, have found a way around the threading problems. We'll try Sybase later, but frankly, we are very sceptical. The whole "multi-threaded Mach microkernel trapped inside a monolithic FreeBSD cocoon with several threading wrappers and coarse-grained threading access to the kernel", with a "backwards compatibility" millstone around its neck sounds like a bad fusion recipe for performance.
The G5 woops when it comes to floating point, and stays just behind in everything else. AMD of course takes top honors in almost everything. The find out that OS X kernel doesn't do so well on the server when it comes to multiple threads created while using MySQL and other possible open source software, so they conclude OS X a good desktop, but Linux is better on the Server. They will look into Linux on PPC to see which is better next time, PPC or x86 when it comes to a Linux server.
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are opterons are super super fast and AMD kindly, and without NDAs, provides technical documentation on them. that's why i buy them
vodka, straight up, thank you!
Umm, no.
Good news! Apple has been doing precisely this with its contributions to auto-vectorization in GCC 4.0.
Umm. No. I'd pick linux running on opteron system.
Have you ever been to a turkish prison?
/. is where we often go to discuss the article. Since the parent of my post was mentioning some performance problems, I thought it'd be a good opportunity to highlight one of the most informative aspects of the article that the parent left out. /.: Very few posters read the summary, and fewer the articles. For these people, a post like this is quite informative.
To question it's informative mod would be to question the nature of
But, even if they use gcc for both, they are still doing a compiler comparison. They are comparing the gcc version that Apple carefully optimized for the G5 with the gcc version that performs very badly on the Pentium SSE2 instructions. The article itself said so, they mention that they didn't use the Intel compiler because no one uses it in the real world. However, if you really need floating point performance, then you should consider doing a hand-optimization on the critical parts of your software.
That's the comparison that I would really like to see for floating point performance: assembly code G5 vs assembly code Intel vs assembly code AMD.