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G5 vs. x86 and Mac OS X vs. Linux

Posted by Zonk on from the head-to-head dept.

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."

5 of 486 comments (clear)

  1. Re:No PowerPC Linux in the Review?! by dduck · · Score: 4, Interesting
    Your Linux on G5 performance figures are here . It does appear that the performance (or rather, lack of wrt. forking and threads) is due to tue architecture of Darwin/OS-X.

    I will point out that this is hardly relevant for a desktop OS, and that I am more than happy with my dual G5/1.8GHz. Getting things done faster and neater due to elegant interaction design is much more important to me than being able to spawn threads quickly ;)

  2. Re:No PowerPC Linux in the Review?! by RickHunter · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Except that they used Apache 1.3 and MySQL, two of the worst possible choices. If they'd gone for Apache 2.x (which actually uses threading, instead of processes) and PostgreSQL, things would've looked much nicer.

  3. MacGCC? by Doc+Ruby · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Most of the benchmark data is bottlenecked by gcc, as the review mentions. That's fair, because that's what so many of us use to compile on these kinds of platforms. But I do think that Apple would do well to throw some of their programmers at the GCC project, at least adding their expertise to some of the Altivec modules. It would show off their platform, and return some value to the gcc project surely used extensively by Apple.

    --

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    make install -not war

  4. Re:No PowerPC Linux in the Review?! by molnarcs · · Score: 3, Interesting
    I think Sybase and Oracle found the linuxthreads package :) FreeBSD 4.x and early 5.x had problems with multithreaded applications like mysql, which has been solved in the newer versions. That's what the article says as well:

    "This means that applications use slower user-level threads like in FreeBSD and not fast kernel threads like in Linux. It seems that FreeBSD 5.x has somewhat solved the performance problems that were typical for user-level threads, but we are not sure if Mac OS X has been able to take advantage of this.

    In order to maintain binary compatibility, Apple might not have been able to implement some of the performance improvements found in the newer BSD kernels."

    Yes, server performance with the xserve seems terrible right now, but I think that will be solved in the future, as apple will incorporate the enhanchements from fbsd 5, and more importantly 6. They are cooperating (freebsd and apple) it seems on many issues.

  5. Re:Ummmm...... by AusG4 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    1. MySQL -does- have a thread pool.

    2. The threading engine on OS X really does suck. This is not new information. Apple says as much if you ask them.

    This will all get fixed in due course anyways - Linux is more than a decade older than MacOS X is, and Apple is already doing very well.

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    bash-3.00$ uname -a
    SunOS panda 5.10 Generic sun4u sparc SUNW,Ultra-2