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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."
Wow, double flamewar. :)
Slashdot editors are impressive
I have discovered a truly marvelous proof of killer sig, which this margin is too narrow to contain.
Linux 2.6.5 - That's rather outdated...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!
Anyway..here's the article summary:So, forget OS X in the server room, but have fun if you want a desktop OS.
This comparison is flawed. A more direct comparison that would have resulted in better information would have been Mac/OS X vs. x86/BSD.
What performance is he measuring? The hardware or the OS? Comparing both with no baseline control for each is about as informative as pulling numbers out of my ass.
Do not taunt Happy-Fun Ball
Darwin vs. Linux on PPC!! This is a more useful comparison, IMHO, than Linux on a P4 and/or AMD vs. Darwin. Then you can better gauge the kernel latencies, etc. Are there any differences in Mac OS X Server's kernel? The article concludes Mac OS X is ok for Desktop use, but not for server use. I found this article disappointing.
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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I guess that the first 50 posts above 1 will be useful, the next 50 will start with the "ford pinto to mercedes" comparison (all modded up Insightful or Interesting), and from there it will just go downhill. I also predict 17 references to the "i've been sitting at my 6300 which should be a much better machine, waiting for this file transfer..." and at least 3 "BSD is Dying" posts.
Tell me how well i do.
Hikeeba!
do() || do_not();
How about OpenDarwin x86 vs. Mac OS X on Apple Hardware?
How about Linux on x86 vs. LinuxPPC on Apple Hardware?
jeesh
Anandtech has an article up comparing performance of dual G5s to AMD Opteron and Intel Xeon workstations.
Ok, Rule #1 - its a performance comparison...
It is definitely the worst buyer's guide that you can imagine. This article cares about speed, performance, and nothing else!
Calm down, did we forget Rule #1 already?
No comments on how well designed the internals are, no elaborate discussions about user friendliness, out-of-the-box experience and other subjective subjects.
OK... Rule #2, no more posting news for you.
I wonder if he uses a mac or pc....
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!
I'm not a Mac Zealot, lets start with that.
But they are running a test and are identifying the thread creation as being really slow on the Mac and that that is the cause for the Mac's slow performance on the MySQL test.
Come now, if you are running software that is slow because you are creating threads all the time then you need to change software.
Use some kind of threadpool and *kaping*, problem is gone.
This is more revealing for MySQL than it is about Mac OS X.
The Internet is full. Go Away!!!
Until I saw the blatanly placed & scantily clad woman with the words "Root Me" written with MS Paint on the desktop.
Read the rest of the paragraph... They say they're just parroting Apple's marketing. The rest of the article tells a much more unbiased story.
Don't forget the
"The people who buy Macs are creative professionals" partyline that we've been hearing since Joel was still on the S.O.L.
do() || do_not();
"he PowerPc 970FX is a very wide, deeply pipelined superscalar monster chip, with excellent Branch prediction and fantastic features for streaming applications. And let us not forget the two parallel FPUs and the SIMD Altivec unit, which can process up to 4 calculations per clock cycle."
The PPC970FX/G5 looks really hot, even up against Intel and AMD's top CPUs. I'd love to see such a direct comparison as this report with an extra couple of columns for nVidia and ATI's top-end GPUs. Sure, they don't run Darwin or Linux (yet), but as GPGPU gains momentum, I'd like to see what kinds of horsepower gains are available for GPGPU designs, vs. RISC designs. Then I can pick the HW best suited for the task, perhaps even in the same machine.
--
make install -not war
What the f**k is the "power of BSD with REFINEMENT"? It's a blood bloated microkernel. NOw don't get me wrong, I think Mac's UI is heads and shoulders above anything Linux has to offer, but let's keep this in the realm of reality. The Mach kernel isn't some wonderous uber-code, and it certainly isn't all that well refined.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Did you read any further? He clearly states he is parroting Apple's marketing.
They end up coming to the conclusion a G5 is not a good server CPU, but fail to do a balanced test to see if the issue is OS X or the CPU. They should clearly have tested:
Linux x86 vs. Linux PPC
OpenDarwin x86 vs. Mac OS X
I shouldn't have to 'alias' this and 'rm' that and :wq here and 'sudo' there just to get a damn X server running...
The odds are pretty good that you'll need to do some CLI sorcery to get an X-Server to run under OSX.
OSX's overhead comes with a price. Performance. Compare a machine running OS 8 or OS 9 to a Macine running OSX, the machine will be discernably slower when running OSX.
I installed Mandrake PPC on my Macs because it was faster than OSX on the machines in question.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
The entire paragraph reads
"It is a professional 64 bit Dream machine with supersonic speed! It is beautiful. It is about the ultimate user friendliness. It is about a lifestyle. It is a class apart. You guessed it - I am parroting Apple's marketing."
And... you can guess where it is headed after that... The article goes on to slam Apple.
The Internet is full. Go Away!!!
You Must Suck(tm) if you have to do those on Linux. Though why anyone would want to point and click for shit that is faster using a text editor on the commandline I'll never understand.
But then you are just an ignorant troll, so why am I even bothering?
I read through the whole comparison/review. The article points out that the main factor that MySQL is slow on OS X is how threads are handled in darwin. It's a speculation based on good observations. However, I think that the author should have done a more controlled test to prove his point, such as running yellowdog linux and OS X on identical hardware to compare MySQL performance. Instead, the mahcines that ran linux were opteron and xeon machines, which made it hard to tell whether the hardware or the kernel contributed more to the performance difference.
MySQL runs just fine on the BSDs, Linux, and even Windows. Every project on the face of the planet that uses threads has to be re-written for the sake of Darwin/OS X?
Don't forget five complaints about folks not reeading TFA, at least one list of steps to "Profit!", and three comments about old people in Korea.
Oh. And somewhere, someone is thinking this is all Microsoft's fault.
I'm not tense. I'm just terribly, terribly, alert.
Try this similie on for size, OS's are like socks. They're all fine at first, but after a while they all start to stink.
OS X still has some extremely rough edges.
I think some of the performance issues are related to the extreme number of interfaces the OS supports. Carbon Coca and Classic is a good idea from a marketing standpoint but it creates an extremely complex environment where it's hard to write efferent code. Apple's can't leave things alone for vary long. They keep forcing developers to recode old methods to fit into their new ideas so people stop optimizing, as it's a waste of time. I love using Apple hardware / software but I hate coding for their OS. PS: I am typing this from a year old g5 running OS X 10.2.8 so
As some people have pointed out (but not completely), you should be comparing:
Linux forks 5 times faster than BSD, but that's been known for years. You didn't need a new benchmark/ad for that. Finally, the article doesn't have a benchmark that uses Altivec to its full potential, so it might be a hack piece as well.
"Thirdly, hardcore gamers are not the ones buying Apples, but rather, creative professionals.
So, we focus on workstation and server applications..."
How could anyone who has ever met a "creative professional" think they care about "workstation and server applications" like MySQL and Apache??
Sorry, guys, but being a sysadmin does not make you a "creative professional..."
-- Mark
I happened to be passing London today and popped into Apple's flagship store. All very nice, but I idly hit F12 in order to bring up dashboard on one of the Powerbooks - 15" or 17" I think - and it was sloooooow.
Now, this could be down to a dozen factors, and it only slightly deflated my ambition to own a nice shiny mac - perhaps a macmini - but it wasn't a good thing, that's for sure.
~~~~~ BigLig2? You mean there's another one of me?
... Will we see PCIe @ WWDC? Will ATI even release an AGP card that accelerates H.264?
Steve, AGP is a dead end.
"I am no operating system expert, but with the data that we have today, I think that a PowerPC optimised Linux such as Yellow Dog is a better idea for the Xserve than Mac OS X server. "
I'd like to see these benchmarks rerun with the G5 running the same OS as the other CPUs: Yellow Dog + kernel v2.6.5. The Darwin vs Linux competition makes deriving real info about just the hardware impossible, though an interesting aspect of the review.
--
make install -not war
At the presentation, they mentioned the G5's potential, but noted that it was closer to the Intel architecture in the sense that each CPU shared a memory controller (but it's not hampered by the bus). The Opteron's HyperTransport model is simply more scalable. Apple got the point, but whether they will address this deficiency in their Xserves (particularly the Cluster Nodes, where it makes sense for massively parallel systems) remains to be seen. All I know is that *I* love the performance of our G5 systems, Xserve and desktop alike.
There exists no way of exchanging information without making judgments. --Bene Gesserit Axiom
I'm not sure I trust the benchmarks. They proudly show their benchmarking code which has a blatant mistake in it. They spotted it, but wrongfilly blamed VB.NET and threads for it and then proudly announced they had to write a super-duper workaround for it to make it work.
Worthy of a WTF.
If you'd like to see it for yourself: look here
Wouldn't it have been better to use compilers that are tuned for each platform? Say, Intel's compilers for the x86 systems, and IBM's compilers for the PPC systems. These compilers could perform better prefetching, for example, and you might get a more accurate idea of what the systems could do with binaries that are tuned for that system.
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.
--
make install -not war
when I saw they were going to benchmark Apache. Maybe they used Gigabyte ethernet, but otherwise, there's nothing interesting in the comparision with a 486.
...so you don't have to read it: Apple = slow, Linux = the shit.
;)
Now, had they gone x86 BSD on the G5 versus OSX on the same G5 then that would be a bit different. But nobody ever does that. I'm glad I'm not the only one who saw that "comparison" was flawed a bit. But it is still nice to see the myth of Apple being all-powerful being demolished by cruel charts.
Unfortunately, it's a Lamborghini stuck in the mud of netinfo.
Another one bites the dust
Really comparing Linux vs Mac OS X is very much pointless... Now, Darwin (XNU) vs Linux would be more interesting... especially Darwin running Xorg and KDE (or GNOME) vs Linux running Xorg running KDE (or GNOME)... that would be more fair, I believe.
Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
Nor really sure who that is in the picture. When driving through the mountains of Oaxaca, I'll take the Charger. I guess I'm one of those weirdos who prefer reliability(and availability of parts) over refinement. In this case I understand that OS X is refined AND reliable. So for the average guy, the Mac would be the better option. But Linux is the better option for those of us who like to tweak and learn what makes the machine go...and of course the price is a bit better.
What?
Umm, no.
but chances are "energy waste" didn't come up...
If my AMD64 can get me 30fps in ut2k4, compile the kernel in under a minute or two and render porn at acceptable jerk rates...
WTF DO I CARE!
Its doing all this while taking a quarter the power of the G5. All I know is my AMD64 doesn't have a windtunnel in the case to keep from melting through the board.
Efficiency people, not raw numbers.
If you can do X amount of work with Y less power in a comprable amount of time... that's a good thing as Y increases.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
I would really like to see a comparison using better compilers though, Intel on x86 and IBM on Power.
The odds are pretty good that you'll need to do some CLI sorcery to get an X-Server to run under OSX.
Actually, you don't. Just click install xfree86 when you run your os install and there it is. You're right about OS X in some ways it is slower than OS 8 or OS ((although with 10.4, it is also faster in quite a few ways too). Even running on an old dual 533 g4, I don't have any responsiveness problems with OS X, and the machine has been plugging away as a multipurpose server and pvr for many a year.
Personally, I don't know any people using MySQL who aren't both creative and professional. But maybe I just don't get out enough....
Linux? If I have never have to use vi to set up a simple routing configuration again, it will be WAY too soon.
vi? Where do you *have* to use vi? Is it meant to stand for [any plaintext editor]?
Granted, editing text configs *can* be less friendly in certain situations (it can also be a lot more flexible and straightforward); but I guess invoking the name of vi (which has a reputation for being arcane) makes textual config sound more complex than it actually is.
I use and like vi in preference to Emacs (vi IMHO is less friendly on the surface, but more straightforward than Emacs once you know the basic keys). BUT.... we're discussing its reputation here, and it seems this is being exploited to make your case.
Don't like vi? Use a different editor, but don't try to rub vi's alleged arcaneness off onto text editing in general.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
Sorry, but this completely invalidates any metric including the word "performance".
IBM's C compiler should be used on the Mac side (OSX now uses GCC 4.x BTW), Intels C compiler on the AMD64 side.
Do that, and try again.
Repeat after me - "GCC is crossplatform - performance sucks on all eequally".
- Adam L. Beberg - The Cosm Project - http://www.mithral.com/
I want to hear about the techniques used by "the major database vendors" to deal with the thread blocking issue. Maybe programs like MySQL can take advantage of these enhancements, too.
This doesn't appear flattering for Apple, but it's apparent that they have been scrambling to get the user experience right in OSX, at the expense of sub-optimal kernel development. Hopefully they will be able to refocus on the kernel and the compiler and get the performance up to what Linux people expect. Thread blocking will become much more of an issue as multi-core CPUs become mainstream.
Linux is a good example of what can happen here. They got crummy benchmarks, the kernel guys identified the bottlenecks, experiments were written to overcome the bottlenecks, and eventually the fixes made it into the kernel and everyone benefits. Notice how Microsoft doesn't brag about performance any more?
Sunshine is the best disinfectant. - Tip O'Neill
I would like to see a comparison of hardware only. Linux on PowerPC vs Opteron
Go Dirty Hippies!!!
Your courageous and selfless spelling corrections have made me a better person.
And in some cases, you really do want to do that. 80% of the time, you'll be pounding threepenny nails into pine blocks. So this particular benchmark is going to tell you which is the best hammer for you.
It's worth noting that all of these benchmark reports must be taken with a grain of salt, but more importantly, anyone planning to make decisions based on them should get a really strong idea of what they plan to do, then use them to figure out which hardware/OS/software combo will give them the best performance for their primary task.
If you're going to do all sorts of stuff, then a "general purpose" benchmark may be for you. But if you're mostly doing 3D modeling and rendering with Maya, then what is really useful is to know which processor/OS combo ekes out the highest scores on Maya tasks, not which processor is considered the best "workstation" based on benchmarks for software you don't use.
Every set of benchmarks makes it easier to eventually hunt down information that's relevant to the task you need benched, so I don't want to discourage journalists from posting these kinds of articles. In fact, I'd like to see more. But I'd like to see more application-based tests and less results based around arbitrary measurements like floating point operations.
- Greg
Start a happiness pandemic
OS X comes with an X server preinstalled.
Well, it's on the CD, but not installed by default.
Any modern linux distro will have X installed by default.
My Mandrake boxen (1 laptop and one desktop) did not require any extra work to get X running.
You make the mistake of thinking you can educate the fundamental stupidity out of people. You can't.
There's no OpenLinux, FreeLinux or NetLinux. I think that proves that *BSD forks at least 3 times faster than Linux.
Windows socks are full of holes!
"Proudly Posting Without Reading The Article"
Wow! What distro are you running? Slackware 0.9? LFS? I haven't had to do any of this stuff since 1995 unless I wanted to.
My investigation has uncovered a series of hippy drum circles arranged in a flower shaped pattern on this map (that you cannot see).
My research clearly shows that we are very close to the start of a hippy music festival. It could begin at almost any moment. In fact it may already be too late.
Appended to the end of comments you post. 120 chars.
everyone keeps complaining that these tests were not fair because it wasn't linux to linux or bsd to bsd etc etc. but isnt the point of a test like this to compare the typical working packages that one would have in an environment? people are going to buy an apple machine to have OSX. people are going to run linux on x86. by all reasonable accounts, apple does not want us to seperate their software from hardware. it is a mac. end of line. isnt this is a fair comparison? the computers as you would find them in real life, not finagled to get differnt specs on operating systems that most likely are not going to be used, like ppc linux? (i know i am sure someone out there uses is.. but really). the computer here is a whole product, and for servers macs apparently fall short.
Hmmm... where did you read that? Even in the fefe test, freebsd and linux have very similar performance characteristics, and that's a two year old benchmark.Quote:
"FreeBSD looks like it would scale O(1) if I could create more processes with it, but as long as I can't confirm it, I can only give it the second place.
"
Check the graphs ... and the corrections (author did not read man tuning, sysctl, the handbook... well, the documentation in general at first, so did not know how to set kern.maxproc).
You're welcome (to this information) :)
Even the FPU performance is questionable-
They state that the simple flops.c is designed specifically to isolate and test the FPU-
Ok- then they go on and do this:
The really funny thing is that the new Xeon Irwindale performed better when we disabled support for the SSE-2, and used the "- mfpmath=387" option. It seems that the GCC compiler makes a real mess when it tries to optimise for the SSE-2 instructions. One can, of course, use the Intel compiler, which produces code that is up to twice as fast. But the use of the special Intel compiler isn't widespread in the real world.
Well- so WTF is really being tested here?
"twice as fast"?
This then becomes more a test of gcc's optimization for a particular proc does it not?
Does Apple have their auto-vectorizing modded gcc out yet?
What's AMD's compiler technology looking like?
Comparing 3 different CPUs in such a rudimentary manner with only a single compiler, without taking in to account the compiler's own strengths and weaknesses is kinda pointless IMO...
I guess the next step would be to hand-optimize a short FPU routine for each differnt CPU...
I still love my Mac, but c'mon...
I browse at +5 Flamebait- moderation for all or moderation for none.
The odds are pretty good that you'll need to do some CLI sorcery to get an X-Server to run under OSX.
Double-click on your hard disk.
Double-click on Applications.
Double-click on Utilities.
Double-click on X11.
Compare a machine running OS 8 or OS 9 to a Macine running OSX, the machine will be discernably slower when running OSX.
The interesting question is, why?
Here's what I've found:
Compare a machine running NeXTSTeP with a comparable machine running OS 8 (say, the Performa 475 vs the NeXTStation Mono). The NeXT, running the same basic kernel as OS X, is about as responsive for pure GUI interactions and WAY more responsive running multiple applications or when disk I/O is involved.
Compare a machine running BeOS and Sheepshaver with the same machine running OS 8 natively. Under BeOS, the machine is again more responsive, and again disk I/O is much better.
Compare a machine running OS 9 applications under Classic and the same machine running OS 9. Not a lot of difference. Slightly slower screen, better disk I/O, and much more responsive than OS X applications.
OS 8 vs OS 9? Not that big a deal. OS 9 does multitasking a bit better, it seems, but at the same time it's a bigger system.
OS X should be faster than OS 9, then, even with the "Microkernel overhead", because of the improved multitasking and disk I/O. But you can see that it isn't just using it on the same machine.
The big difference is that OS X allocates a separate raster map for each window, and composites them without involving the app. Scrolling panes in windows can end up using a raster map the size of the scrolling region. This means at least tens of megabytes of extra storage just on scrolling, and at least one and sometimes two additional copies (dpending on translucency) before any pixel makes it to the screen.
This is why QE and QE2d are such big wins on the Mac. They move one of the copies out of the way.
Meanwhile on OS 9, you usually have zero copies... the app calls Quickdraw and Quickdraw renders just what's visible, and may completely bypass the CPU to do it. Just like just about every other windowing system I know of, including NeXTstep.
Holy crap! Where did you get the idea of comparing OS's to cars?!? Genius.
If metaphors were cars this would be the big honking overcrowded city bus that everyone's ridden and smells vaguely of urine.
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
Lamborghinis are ugly and impractical. The Charger is beautiful and impractical. Easy decision. You can take some of the money left over and reupholster it if you are offended by passengers suffering incontinence from 440/6-pack acceleration trauma.
Why I remember when your computer came with circuit diagrams, machine language opcodes and technical details about what every region of ROM memory did! And pretty much every manual came with an ANSI chart, whether the product actually required you to have that information or not! Why I oughta... get off my lawn you damn kids!
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
My roommate and I work together developing websites. He runs a powerbook and I've got Gentoo Linux running on a Dell 600m. The main advantage that he has is a reliable PC emulator on which he can test apps for IE. The real tie-breaker though is what KDE provides me in a text editor.
Far from vi, Kate (the editor embedded in most KDE apps) has an unbelievable ability to make work go faster. It has a native understanding of html/css tags way better than Dreamweaver or the like, supports Perl, Javascript, and PHP with inline variable-name completion and auto-syntax. I can't name all the things it does well, but a system running the latest KDE 3.4.1 can take on an OSX system any day in refined web development.
World Changing - News for Humans, Stuff about our planet
I'll criticize the entire article after reading it, but rigt after the first page I can tell this is a crap test badly done, here's why:
They say Macs are bought by creative profesisonnal so they will test open source solution such as MySQL and Apache!!!???
Since when those are the tools of creative pros?
They compare Xeons and Opterons to the G5, it should be Athlon64 and P4 against the G5, lets compare what target the same type of user base, else why not simply make a test that pit the G5 against a cray machine or Blue Gene?... I mean I know the Xeon isn't that powerfull and I don't have the test result but the base config is flawed in terms of comparison. Even if it wouldn't I mean Apache... common, at least pit the Gimp against the Gimp if you wanna look like you don't give the test gift-wrapped to Linux and x86, even then it would be flawed comparison since Gimp doesnt get the same amount of devellopement on G5 than on x86... and people say Photoshop benchmarking is flawed... geez at least the app truly IS optimized for both patforms...
Anyway on to the reading of the second page...
I usually like their reviews, but this is terrible - it's a bunch of tests that skip anything that would make a useful comparison even though it keeps wandering around and doing more stuff.
1) They should've compared several compilers. I suspect that gcc on OSX is much less optimized on i386. They showed that gcc doesn't speak vector almost at all. I also suspect IBM or someone has a better optimized G5 compiler. While I suspect there's no way to make a really fair comparison, giving us some idea of the range of compiler difference would've helped us know how singificant it might be - and it's a lot.
2) If, like they say, they're trying to compare the CPUs, they should've compared Linux on G5. They basically say as much at the end of the review - that they were really comparing OSX to Linux 2.6 across different platforms. I would've liked to see 2.4, 2.6 & OSX all on G5.
3) If OSX's has big threading disadvantages because of it's similarity to BSD4, they should run a benchmark compared to BSD4 - and another one to BSD5, which will presumeably give something of a "view into the future" of what OSX's performance will soon be.
Looking for freelance Actionscript (Flash/Flex) or ColdFusion work and/or freelance developers. Email me, put Slashdot
Here's a similar comparision/benchmark. And Tech Report posts a summary/commentary of the tests:
PC World has posted some benchmark results suggesting that Apple's Power Mac G5 isn't the world's fastest desktop PC after all. The PC World tests compare dual G5 systems to a Pentium 4 3.2GHz, Athlon 64 3200+, Athlon 64 FX-51, and Opteron 246, and the results make Apple's claim to the desktop performance crown look rather foolish. The dual 2GHz Power Mac G5 can't even manage a win in Photoshop, where the dual Opteron system turns in the fastest performance.
I suggest you check out the benchmark results.
If you think about the analogy, most people in the REAL WORLD would probably pick the Charger for several reasons:
- Price - Nobody in the upper middle class or below can even afford to buy a Lambo -- that makes the "certain breed of people" over 80% of the population
- Insurance Cost
- Practicality - The Lambo is so low that it's impractical to drive into any of the strip malls you find in North America without scraping the bottom.
- Fuel Economy (I doubt an old Charger has good fuel economy, but it's gotta be better than an Lambo)
- Noise - if you like listening to the radio in the car, don't get a Lambo
- Carjack magnet - Highly doubtful that anyone's going to try to pull a gun on you when you're getting into your old Charger
- Drivability - not everyone, especially Joe Average, knows how to drive a car with the performance characteristics of a Lambo. If you shred the clutch on a Charger, who cares? It's a piece of crap anyways.
- Maintainability - I doubt the mechanic at the end of your street is going to be able to service your Lambo.
- Two-seater - where you going to put your kids?
- Trunk space - Not sure the Lambo is very useful there either
- Year round driving in places with snow
I'm sure I could go on and on about how the "refined" Lambourghini isn't really that great a car for most people.Could also read:
And of course, like the guy in the Lambourghini, the Mac people will extoll the limited virtues of their decision while gleefully ignoring the fact that having an expensive car is still no guarantee of getting laid.
Of course, if the two cars were free, I'd take the Lambo so I could sell it and get a practical car like a Toyota Camry or a Honda Odyssey.
You forgot to mention that you tried to copy a 17 Meg file from one folder on the hard drive to another folder ...
Wait... Which is which?
Capitalism does not lead to corruption, lack of character does.
You also have the option to drop to the command line if you wish.
Even if OS X does happen to be slightly simpler to configure, I hardly think that justifies locking yourself into a single software and hardware distributor, especially when the equivalent in x86 is considerably cheaper.
have you READ the article? It was not apologist at all.
Just because Thurott didn't come in and say that the Mac was a worthless POS that only a pink Miata driver would use...
Ok that was funny
If I had mod points, this post would be one higher.
"But this one goes to eleven! That's one more!"
Lamborghini? Did you read the article? They found that Linux was ten times faster for high-end server apps that make lots of system calls. That's more like comparing that old Charger to a shiny new bicycle. I love OSX's GUI too, but is it worth an order of magnitude speed penalty? On a server system? Hell no.
(I similarly dislike Linux and like OSX, so this article disappointed me. I do think they made some mistakes in their testing. However, the unerlying problems causing the performance issues are certainly real.)
Well, I'm very very drunk now, but at the time I had only had a pint of carlsberg and probably the crapest cheese and ham toastie in the world - (c) the mitre pub in hatton garden - so I definitely hist F12, not Fn+F12
~~~~~ BigLig2? You mean there's another one of me?
give him a break, he's belgian
sup
OS X should be faster than OS 9, then, even with the "Microkernel overhead", because of the improved multitasking and disk I/O
Uhh, no. The "improved multitasking" refers only to security and APIs. Mach's multitasking _performance_ still blows. Mach isn't just a microkernel, it's a particularly bloated and slow one (compared to, say, QNX or l4).
I mean, you can look at comparisons of server apps this that don't use the screen to see that it's not just the graphics that are slowing things down.
rage, rage against the dying of the light
As a matter of fact, energy waste did come up.
But I guess who cares? This is slashdot, isn't it?
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Compare a machine running OS 8 or OS 9 to a Macine running OSX
A 6100/66 running OS 9.1 will be significantly slower than a Dual G5 2.7 running OS X 10.4. Maybe if you were to say which hardware and which revision of either OS you were comparing, you might be able to scrape together a valid point...but I doubt it. Now, running OS 9.1 on a dual-mirror drive G4 and running OS X 10.4 on said hardware would show a significant difference in operating speed.
http://www.bynarystudio.com
You really need to read this article. Because of the mess known as Mach/BSD (Microkernel shoved in a monolithic kernel) you have to have thread wrappers to handle and create threads. This means multithreaded applications like MySQL get absolutely destroyed by Linux when it comes to performance.
I understand what you're saying, that Mac OS X has an elegant UI, but the article wasn't about OS X as a desktop, it was OS X as a server. And OS X Server got rocked.
isn't it sad that racist, homophobic and sexist comment systematicaly get rated funny on Slashdot?..
I own both a dual G5 and an AMD64 system, with both Windows 2003 and Linux running on it. Have fun arguing about which platform is best.
And since you're curious, I use my G5 most of the time.
You, sir, have never had the pleasure of owning a Honda
Cudos to this guy going through all the trouble so potential PPC Users don't have to. :-) .
The G5s exeptionally bad real life performance with Apache and MySQL is an eye opener for me, as I am considering XServe as a plattform for the stuff I deliver.
However, the G5s highest LW Raytracing performance is comforting, as I just bought an LW 8 license for Mac OS X the other week
Very informative article indeed.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Not really, it makes a difference, but the main problem is there. And as others have noted it is not the thread creation but the overhead and locking by calling into the kernel and having to go through layers. You can bypass the creation problems by using a threas pool, but having your threads constantly locked is another issue.
A comment can't be homophobic, only a person can.
I am not homophobic, and I see the humor in the joke you are replying to. It's called absurd humor... half the joke is in the stereotyping. Macs are stereotypically the favorite computer of gays, and Linux geeks have a strong correlation with the "dirty hippie" and "pinko commie" crowd.
So don't get your panties all in a bunch.
(I'm assuming you're either a P.C. blowhard, or a homo. See, wasn't that funny?)
Ironically, the word ironically is often used incorrectly.
Jeez. I've got an idea. Why don't I take this opportunity to tell you that you should be using the One True Bracing style when coding so we can really flame on into useless obscurity.
'91 Accord. Biggest pile of crap ever. (to be fair, it became pretty obvious the previous owner did not take care of the car). But even then, the car was hard to service, and the interior was cheap and flimsy.
Hmmmmmm.....well - here is my $0.02 worth:
//e, //gs, Lisa Mac, 128k Mac, 512k Mac, Mac IIfx, and now owns both a G4 Powerbook and a PowerPC -> I know a bit about Apples and Macs. (But not all - just some - no one really knows ALL there is to know about anything.) So when I say I used to wonder why Apple didn't do Unix and now wonder why Apple doesn't just embrace Linux and be done with it; it isn't out of ignorance. It is out of "why go to all of the hassle?" I know - it's a control freak thing. If they don't control the OS then they can't control where it is going to go next. Right? Wrong. No one in the Linux community would care one way or the other if Apple used Linux as the base but made their own window manager. Just like Enlightenment, FVWM(2), ICE, KDE, Gnome, and all of the others have theirs; Apple could make its own window manager. There is already an old Mac emulator for Linux (ie: Pre OS X) and Apple could have hired the person or persons who are working on these things to beef the emulators up so it would cover all of the various previous systems (and not just OS 9.x). The savings in time and money would have allowed them to also back a revival of the old Apple line so the emulators for the //e through the Lisa Mac could have lived on. (They do now but Apple probably wishes they would disappear.)
First, someone did OS X under Linux and Apple told them to stop. So Linux could have had the same capabilities that looked just like what Apple was doing - but Linux doesn't. Not because it couldn't - but because the development was stopped.
Let me relate what other cooler heads have been saying for years and that is "Each OS and each computer and each programming language and each editor and each <insert whatever you like> has its good and bad things about it." Everyone's milesage varies according to what they know and how they use it. Thus, flamewars over any of these different areas doesn't make sense.
For instance - here is my experience with Mac OS X -> PAINFUL! Sorry, had to say that. Mac OS X is ok but I am used to using Linux so I bought Yellow Dog Linux, removed Mac OS X and installed Linux. I have found that YDLinux seems to run (for me) about twice as fast as Mac OS X used to on my system. Go figure! (At least I haven't figured it out yet but maybe it has to do with the monolithic OS that Linux uses versus the Mach OS's diversified OS as per the article.) Further, with the latest version of Linux I have not had any of the VI'ing that you have stated (ok - some VI'ing of the HTTPD.CONF file to put in the <Directory> stuff for Apache but everything else came up fine without me even having to click my way through mouse menus.)
So now I have Mac OS 9.2 (Classic) for those programs I still like to use (like Canvas 3.5.6 and some older games which still work under OS 9.2 [which really amazes me that they do run]) and I use the Linux side for development work on my own things.
Now, we could go back and forth over the good and bad things for days on end but I believe there is one thing you must admit Linux has over OS X and that is the price of it. $90.00 for people who know nothing about Linux, $30.00 for those who do (such as myself) versus $94.00 (single license) and $149.00 (family pack). Further, YDLinux can have as many accounts as you want at the $90.00 and $30.00 fee, contains hundreds of programs (which Apple also includes now whereas they didn't to begin with) and you can make your desktop look a lot like the Mac OS X desktop.
As someone who bought an Apple ][+,
Turning to the article (for some final thoughts) - my main thought is this:
Why didn't they install Linux onto the G5 and try comparing Linux to Linux? Since Linux for the Macintosh doesn't suffer from the problems Mach seems to suffer from wouldn't that make the comparison more logical? I think so and will suggest it to those who did the testing.
Later.
Someone put a black hole in my pocket and now I'm broke.
Run "Top" so that it refreshes every second. (I believe that's default.)
.
On the Mac Mini, it uses 7% CPU
I have a friend who just got a dual 2.0 G5. Had him run Top and I was stunned at how much CPU time it took. I didn't write down the exact number so I'm not going to mention it here.
On any x86 system I've used, Top barely uses any CPU
Democrats or Republicans. They are both taking us to the same place and they are not afraid of us anymore.
And if your benchmark is measuring how long it takes to do a fork or a fork/exec pair, rather than how long it takes to do a pthread_create(), your benchmark isn't particularly appropriate as a measurement of thread creation time if "thread" means "pthread" as appears to be the case on the previous page of the Anandtech article.
And if the application being tested is using processes rather than pthreads, your Anandtech article shouldn't go on about pthreads (much less doing so in a way that says OS X uses "slower user-level threads" rather than "fast kernel threads" when the Apple tech note from which they took their diagram says "POSIX threads (pthreads) are layered on top of Mach threads", i.e. for each POSIX thread there is a Mach kernel thread).
("You" here of course meaning "the people writing the article", not "the person I'm replying to".)
Like everyone's already said: Linux/PPC would have been a good thing to add in. Like someone else mentioned, Apache 2.x and a PostgreSQL database would have been good tests along with the MySQL+Apache 1.3 ones. I haven't seen anyone mention the gcc compiler version.(they used 3.3) 3.4 is more wholesomely made. 4.0 is the latest, woulda been interesting to see if that made any significant changes(and doesn't panther use that defaultly?) The test lacks the ability to show whether the issues in server based MacOSX are CPU based or OS based. Linux/PPC would have been helpful.
It really is a shame that Apple didn't build their new OS around Linux rather than BSD/Mach. It would have been great for both OS X and for Linux.
I know it's more complicated than that (eg. it might have been bad for Apple long-term if they helped Linux), but it's a nice thought anyway.
You forgot one:
PPC Darwin vs. x86 Darwin
Considering that a bicycle reaches about 60 km/h, it's more like comparing a World War II Lockheed "Lightning" P-38 airplane to a shiny new bicycle. And I'd say the geek factor relation is also about the same...
You're not the first person to ask this, and Johan responded to the same thing over at Ace's Hardware (where he was before heading over to Anand). Basically you can only do so much while having a reasonable article:
Johan's response
Sorry, I'm unfamiliar with this app???
OMFG. The horror, the horror, the horror. If I want an X server on my Mac I have to put a check mark in a dialog box during the OS install. Oh my God! How could they ask me to do this? Oh the humanity.
Any modern linux distro will have X installed by default
No shit! That's because X is the only fucking windowing system you can get with any modern linux distro, and compared to Aqua it truly sucks the ass.
My Mandrake boxen (1 laptop and one desktop) did not require any extra work to get X running.
Yeah, except when you're done you're still running an X based windows manager and when compared to Aqua every X based windows manager out there, KDE, Gnome, WindowMaker, etc, etc, etc, looks and runs like a warm runny shit in a cold steel toilet bowl.
cheap labor conservatives - they want to keep you hungry enough to be thankful for minimum wage.
Upgrade maybe? If you upgrade to Tiger and install Xcode 2 with all of the fun tools that it comes with (Core Image FunHouse!) you will definitely re-think your opinion.
I don't want to sound like a Apple Apologist but...
Really all this caring about differences in performance is becoming a rather old argument, and is becoming less and less valid every day. Sure back in the early 90s the speed difference of say 5% was important it would be the difference from a slow system to a smooth system. But now most tasks can be run well on a lot of systems. I am using a 667mhz Powerbook and still most of my tasks and buy all specs even with PCs the same age of the system it will loose on all benchmarks. But it still does what I want it to do for most of the tasks I want to do and it does it just as well as systems 5 times its speed. Because for most of the work I do which is mostly typing/programming, networking and some light graphics work. I rarely notice any bottleneck except for me.
So unless you are using some tools where you can notices times where a 5% speed increase can save you 20 minutes on your task. Most of the time you are just as better off buying a system that can take a lot of ram a big harddrive and is the color you want.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
I love OS X, but there are some definite rough edges in Tiger, and unfortunately those are Spotlight and Dashboard, the two most anticipated features, or at least in my mind. Dashboard takes sometimes up to 15 seconds to come up and fill in the info on my 12" 867 with 640mb memory. Subsequent cycles through F12 work a lot faster though, unless I do a bunch of other work and let it sit for a while, so I think this is a memory issue. Spotlight also has some memory issues. I moved about 23,000 files from my laptop to another computer and it was *amazing* how much faster it ran. I can only attribute the speed increase to spotlight not having to hold info about those extra 23,000 files. All in all though, I still think OS X is much better than XP. (Digression: I'm interested to see what Longhorn has to offer, but I'm not holding my breath, especially since even if it smoked OS X in eyecandy it still wouldn't be *nix.)
well, i have a pc and a mac. what does that make me? a gay hippie? i can handle being called a homo, but no one calls me a dirty hippie and gets away with it!
Sceptical is a valid alternate spelling of the word skeptical.
Must... resist... Your Mom... jokes...
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
Your subject, comparing apples and oranges, is invalid:
m e1/v1i3/air-1-3-apples.html
http://www.improbable.com/airchives/paperair/volu
http://www.darwinmag.com/read/0502/apples.html
Space and Computers.
This is what I'm getting on my DP 2.5. I typed in "top -RF" as noted in the other post.
I once had a print job get stuck in a process, or something like that, anyways it was eating up almost 100% of just one of my procs. Once I figured it out, I killed it and haven't had that issues since then. Maybe your friends DP 2.0 had something running in the background like that?
Why limit your options? There is software that runs on one and not the other, or runs so much better on one than the other, but if you own both you can't complain.
And if we're keeping score, I too use my Mac most of the time.
Carjack magnet - Highly doubtful that anyone's going to try to pull a gun on you when you're getting into your old Charger
Actually, the most commonly stolen cars are the most popular Toyotas and Hondas. The reason? They strip them and sell the parts. There are literally thousands of shady car repair shops around Southern California, many of whom will buy stolen parts and sell them to their customers who don't care or don't ask where the parts come from. How many shops are there that service Lambourghinis? How many Lambourghini owners are there who would even buy the stolen parts? Basically, if you could easily steal either an Acura Integra or a Lambourghini Diablo, you would steal the Integra because you could sell the engine, transmission, and just about every part within 24 hours.
Anyway, if you're looking for a car comparison, a better analogy is comparing popular sedans like the Toyota Camry and Honda Accord to the low-end luxury cars such as the BMW 3-series, MB C-class, Lexus IS300, and Acura TL. The low-end luxury sedans are incredibly popular, despite the higher price for "basically the same thing". Still, most people would rather just save money, so they buy the Accords and Camrys.
My other first post is car post.
annoucement at the WWDC in SF....The dual core mobile Intel chips rock and this will ensure a future it seems IBM can't deliver!! WOW if it is true http://news.com.com/Apple+to+ditch+IBM%2C+switch+t o+Intel+chips/2100-1006_3-5731398.html?tag=nefd.le de
OS X on Dell here is comes!
"However, the G5s highest LW Raytracing performance is comforting, as I just bought an LW 8 license for Mac OS X the other week :-)"
The G5 wins in floating point performance, so that's easy to believe.
The server performance is dependant on the kernel, and Linux gets an easy win there.
I rarely criticize things I don't care about.
Ive had one rust out, one with a STOLEN cat! and a VTEC thing which was 'orrible slow but cheap to run
If you want a seriously shit car buy French Renooo or shitron
Homo means Apple for some reason. Hippy means Linux for some other reason.
Transcend Humanity. Please.
Mach's multitasking _performance_ still blows.
Compared to OS 9? Have you used classic Mac OS? The classic Mac OS multitasking charade (I won't call it a kernel) was appalling. It had no real scheduler, applicatons ran for a while, gave up the CPU voluntarily, and went on. There was no way to get smooth interapplication concurrency because the API was built around operations that weren't even thread-safe, let alone safe for separate independent applications to use concurrently.
That's what I'm comparing Mac OS X with, not other real multitasking operating systems, but a hideous shambling wreck that was so bad it made a 240 MHz Power PC running Mac OS 9 feel less responsive than a 30 MHz 68040 running Mach.
Later on, I ran both OS 9 and OS X on the same hardware. OS X was smoother and more responsive in the face of even heavy competition for the CPU and disk than OS 9 just sharing files. I had an upgraded 7600 which I was going to use as a file server and occasional console, until I started trying to use it that way. Any time it started sharing files it got slow, unresponsive, and jerky. I wanted to use it for music, but iTunes would chop and skip on just about any file access. Upgrading it to a 240 MHz CPU and giving it a second SCSI card just for file sharing didn't help.
Bad as Mach is, it's so much better than what Apple was using before that if they had just stuck to using Quickdraw and Display Postscript OS X would have knocked the doors off OS 9 on the same hardware. I had a copy of Rhapsody DR1 for Intel at one point, and it was easily the equal of BeOS (another OS I've found has an inflated reputation) on the same test box.
It's not the Mach kernel that makes OS X slower than OS 9, it's the Quartz graphics.
I've yet to see any indication that Apple is funding or helping FreeBSD in any way. While that is their perogative under the BSD license, it is a bit disingenious.
Uhm, they have some of the main coders for FreeBSD on the payroll. I'd imagine that since OSX userland is so heavily based on BSD, the work would coincide more often than not.
Can I get an eye poke?
Dog House Forum
I had a 1984 Honda Accord. Bought it used, with 70,000 miles on it. Drove the absolute SHIT out of it, for 6 years. Delivered pizzas in it for 5 years. That's about 120 starts a night, on a busy night. Sold it with 146,000 miles on it.
Total unplanned maintenance: A fuel pump failed on me at 125,000 miles. I had asked about replacing it at the 120K maintenance, my mechanic said probably not necessary.
I found it to be a wonderful car. Sure, it's not my Audi S4, but it was fun enough to drive, it was a stick, and it was dead solid fucking reliable.
That said, comparing OS X to a "soupled up honda" seems a bit misguided to me. And OS X is pretty fast for nearly everything. Sure, it may not be the fastest for MySQL. Task switching 60 threads at a constant 100% CPU load is definitely a db server, but it's not all that common of a use case. Servers do more than just run databases, and I know folks that have run Oracle 10g tests and found it about 30% faster on OS X (10.3.6) than on Windows. So it can't totally suck.
Maybe it's a functional thing. Today's Macs only have HARD drives, no floppies.
I'm lost. I thought Aqua was the UI. X isnt a UI, is it? Or did KDE/Gnome/(insert UI here) get bundled in that comparison somewhere.
Which leaves me wondering, is Aqua considered the whole GUI interface combined for comparison sake or is there a layer like X underneath Aqua.
Forgive me if I am asking stupid questions - I really dont know.
TIA
User level threads aren't necessarily slow, it depends on how well they are implemented, how much support the underlying system gives and what you are trying to do... User level threading packages can switch threads *very* cheaply, without going into the kernel at all. They are sometimes limited to only run on one CPU but this is an implementation issue. Purely kernel-based threads (like Linux 2.6's model) have their own problems (eg. scalability with those more expensive thread context switches).
(I'm assuming you're either a P.C. blowhard, or a homo. See, wasn't that funny?)
No. Breaking out stereotypes is banal and easy. For something to be funny it needs to at least be moderately clever.
Perhaps because their claim is not based on fact, but based on, apparently, a complete misunderstanding of what "POSIX threads (pthreads) are layered on top of Mach threads" (to quote the Apple technote whence they got that threads architecture diagram) means? (Hint to the authors: it does not mean "all the pthreads in a process are implemented in userland inside a single schedulable entity, so only one can be running at a time".)
And the answer on the first page, right under the pictures:
So apparently they meant to try and see beyond Apple's marketing - and that meant testing Apple's product, *OSX* Now, that this deed is done and curiositi piqued, they(say, at least, that they) intend to test the bare hardware in the next round - Linux, ppc vs. x86-64.
If they put linux on the G5, then is it a homo hippies or scuffy metrosexuals? I mean really, who are we suppose to root for then?
It's not. OS X's threading model is not at all similar to FreeBSD 4.x's all-in-userland threading; the authors of the article were deeply confused on that point.
I should have said compare OS8 or OS9 to OSX on the same machine, and you'll see the difference in speed, I assumed that my meaning was clear, but apparently it was not.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
The reason these tests ARE relevant is that the vast majority of users do not run Linux on their Macs, nor do they run BSD on their PCs.
The tests are pitting the common OS on each platform against each other. That is a fine comparison, because it represents the basic choice that people face when they want to choose a platform.
You just have to be careful how you interpret the results. Since neither the hardware nor the software are held in common as a "control" variable, there is no way to compare System A's software against system B's, or System A's hardware against System B's.
The best conclusion you can draw from a system level comparison like this one is that, given the test environment, System A was faster than System B overall.
And in this case, it looks like the G5-OSX combo is "System B"...
Isn't GCC 4 supposed to be slow (for now). Did they use it because it's the only one that compiles 64-bit code?
I'm interested to know just how the threading implementation on MacOS X stands up to others. Anyone with a G5 and some time mind benchmarking with Mac OS X, Linux, and maybe NetBSD? That would settle if it was just OS X using pthreads and pthreads being slow.
The conclusion of this article seems to be that MySQL and Apache don't run well on OS X. While Apache certainly is pervasive, most database servers are Oracle or J2EE based. And I believe both would perform well on XServe or PowerMac G5. Most multithreaded servers use thread pools of a fixed size. During peak loads, they can grow, but generally threads are expensive to create (or assumed to be).
Oracle database typically doesn't use threads in UNIX (they do in Windows). They have two modes: dedicated (1 process per session), or shared (a pool of processes). I can't see how Oracle would be affected by slow thread creation (process creation is generally expensive on most platforms). I know there's been some talk recently on comp.databases.oracle.server that Oracle 10g RAC is very fast on XServe G5 with XServe RAID, with a much better price/performance during informal tests, and that Oracle themselves are starting to adopt Mac hardware for their own data centre (at least the XServe RAID arrays, don't know about G5 yet).
-Stu
I meant to say "most database or application servers" are Oracle or J2EE based.
-Stu
Technically there is process called WindowServer and every GUI process is a child process of WindowServer (run Activity Monitor and select All Processes, Hierarchically to see this for yourself). Aqua is Apple's name for the look and feel of their WindowServer. It is *not* X windows.
Apple also has a version of X11 which has an Aqua look and feel (sort of) window manager called quartz-wm. If you launch X11.app you'll see that it is a child of WindowServer, and quartz-wm is, in turn a child of X11.app.
In other words, Apple's version of X11 tries to play nice with Apple's native GUI WindowServer by putting on Aqua clothes provided by quartz-wm. X11 is almost never used by ordinary Mac users - commercial apps are all written to Mac APIs which are designed to run under WindowServer. X11 is only used by ported *nix apps - GIMP for example.
Upgrading is not a solution. They are not willing to leave well enough alone.
"Apple has officially decided to drop IBM, and will use Intel processors starting in their '06 line of systems"
So now I know all my old software is going to be emulated on an x86 which means it's going to slow things down when people upgrade. I don't care if this is true or not they keep doing things like this. I work for a small development shop and keeping up with Apple is starting to be a waste of time. Yea, they needed to change to OSX (or somthing like it) but if they want us to optomise things for them they need to stop jumping from from one new idea to the next. People did no re invent UNIX every 3-5 years and for the most part it just works.
Yes. I read that but did not see where they said they were going to do PPC Linux versus IBM Linux. Thanks for pointing that out. :-)
Someone put a black hole in my pocket and now I'm broke.
You don't remember OpenLinux? It was brought to you by the fine folks at SCO -- well, Caldera.
/me falls out of chair laughing
Sure, the joke itself is pretty germane, but I think you'd be pretty silly to say there isn't a homophobic element to the stereotypes which that joke parodies. "Only gay people use macs," or "Macs are gay" are statements playing off an assumption that gay people are somehow less than you, and thus only fit to use the 'inferior' macs.
Incorrect. In many cases, such jokes are playing off the fact that these ridiculous stereotypes exist in the first place. Transcendant post-modern humor.
I checking out pc prices for next fiscal year's budget. I notice that Powermacs are the cheapest of the dual processor systems. Pretty much, if Xeon/opteron are better, you will be paying extra for it.
You don't have to be smart to use a Mac, you just have to be smart enough to buy one
No, actually, I remember reading an article linked to /. that compared Linux with Solaris, BSD and Win2k, probably more than 2 years ago though, that showed that BSD was 5 times slower on average at fork(). It's not POA, I just can't find it...
Well, the explanation for this is OSX may have a different forking/threading model than the latest stock FreeBSD. OSX may have started out with way older code than what you can find in FreeBSD today, as would be logical if you were trying to adapt the thing to Mach and didn't want to mess with patching the changes back in until you had something to release.
Some of the benchmarks in the article actually used OS9, by the way, so they were really running around the map with it. They seemed to be more interested in generating controversy than actually getting comparable results.
Say what ?
Cocoa is written in Objective C, which is very much a compiled-to-machine-code language. It has Java bindings as well, but they're not the prime target. Objective C has runtime binding to its objects' methods (selectors) but there's no bytecode involved, as far as I know!
aside: ObjC is a gorgeous language - sufficiently simple that C programmers "just get it" immediately, and without the horrendous baggage that is the cruft of C++. It comes with a nice standard library (the NS... class set) that mirrors the java ones in many respects, but it compiles to almost-as-fast-as-C++ code (the runtime binding takes a toll). About the only thing that puts people off is the odd syntax for method declarations and method calls. Even that becomes second-nature after a while.
Considering the language is so old now, I'm surprised it hasn't caught on more - it does make development very rapid (akin to Java), but without the speed issues...
Simon
Physicists get Hadrons!
"Only gay people use macs," or "Macs are gay" are statements playing off an assumption that gay people are somehow less than you, and thus only fit to use the 'inferior' macs.
Ummm, no. I see things all the time that I associate with gay men. Like VW Jettas, little dogs, and the Bravo channel. This doesn't mean I think those things are inferior... just gay.
Ironically, the word ironically is often used incorrectly.
since Apple is apparently ditching PPC for Intel.
So they'll have a crappy OS running on a crappy chip. Glad I sold my AAPL stock...
"Lack of technical competence coupled with the arrogance of power, as usual, leads to no good end."
Can you tell me how OS X kernel extensions are somehow inferior to having to recompile a linux kernel for driver updates?
Wanna have a throwdown and you try to tell me that /etc/rc shell scripts are better than XML-based launchd (like SMF in Solaris 10)?
Does linux have fine-grained locking in its kernel? Does linux have or support Access Control Lists? How does Linux file-type; MIME or filename extensions, with their weaknesses? OS X Tiger supports both, along with Classic type and creator codes, and the new Uniform Type Identifiers.
Go read John Siracusa's review and analysis of Tiger.
As a man in an orange Bandicoot suit once said, "Booya, Grandma! Booya!"
I think the point is that with OSX you don't have to worry about all those pedantic distinctions between UIs/window managers/window systems/layers etc., you just get a decent interface.
You can argue that KDE is a good window manager, or that X is a good window system, but it's the interface as a whole which counts. An average user trying to install something or configure something doesn't care whether it's the window manager or the desktop which is making things difficult, it's the interface as a whole which is the problem.
Don't believe that rumor. And don't use it as an excuse to give up. Seriously, try 10.4, it's got some amazing under-the-hood improvements, like a much more refined kernel and XCode2.
You're a fucking idiot. Perhaps your automobile, shoes, DVD player and calculator were all made by Reebok. I managed to pick and choose mine from different brands (and non-brands).
I think your Mac comment is a little too general, but...
My brother permanently damaged an Accord's seat by reversing the head rest as a joke (so the back was facing forward). He didn't expect it to fit. He didn't expect it to slide into place. And he certainly didn't expect that when he pulled it out he'd blow the internal mechanism that held it all in place.
Luckily, the owner didn't mind too much.
k, I don't know whether this "between 2 and 5(!) times slower" stat is true, but even if it is, it should hardly matter. The time it takes to create a thread should be insignificant compared to the time it takes for the thread to do its work (at least, in a good program). Not to mention that in the case of a multithreaded server (like Apache 2), thread pools are used so that less time is spent creating and destroying threads.
The bits on the bus go on and off... on and off... on and off...
Would have been nice to have included a PowerPC linux distro running on the same G5 boxes as a part of the benchmarks. Then we could have seen how the CPUs performed, unhindered by the microkernel
Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of congress. But then I repeat myself. -- Mark Twain
but the article wasn't about OS X as a desktop, it was OS X as a server. And OS X Server got rocked.
To be fair, the article was a bit about both. But yes, OS X as a server got rocked.
It was a very interesting article. I started the article as a Mac OS X user and remain one, but it opened my eyes a bit. With luck, Apple will eventually admit it is a problem and fix it. Mac OS X still my choice for development and small scale offline testing of web stuff, but I won't suggest it for the server room and will bring this article to the attention of anyone who does.
Outstanding article, really.
It just means that you can choose a benchmark that fits what you want as a result, if you like.
In fact, those "college guys" - if I understood the article correctly - were quite clearly making the point that the hardware was mostly comparable.
What would be interesting to see is things like: how would the Xserve hardware perform with a PPC Linux?
Another thing I'm very much looking forward to is the Darwin compatibility layer in NetBSD/ppc. It's been a while since I read about it, but I think one of the things used for testing was the interface engine (WindowServer? Quarz?) It would be interesting to see how running Mac OS X applications on top of the NetBSD kernel would be, compared to the normal Mac OS X kernel. Alas, the development of this seems to be progressing very slowly.
-Lasse
Exactly. It's that and the fact that Macs are so Gay...
Is it this commercial you are talking about?
Yes, very extensive benchmarks. You better follow their advice.
yes... all this... but I think they should have added compiler tests for Java as well... I'm curious to see how Linux on the G5 compiling Java would be compared to Tiger or just Darwin doing the same. Also, I think it is obligatory to throw in a few machines running at the same clock speed as the G5... just to see... But why can't benchmarkers get it right? Control control control! If only they could eliminate the variables, and do the right tests, then we could really see what we are looking at!! (uh... you know what I mean)
The Admin and the Engineer
I don't see the point anymore. We decided to go 100% Java a while ago. It's got enough critical mass that it's not going to go away quickly and when you look at products like Azureus can see just how refined java has become.
Some people call java slow but it's easy to avoid doing slow things in java because it's a stable platform. If you don't use code like Str = St1 + St2 + St3...St22 it's fast enough and you don't have to worry about things suddenly not working on the "latest release" or your old optimizations slowing things down.
XCode2 looks cool but that does not help any of our legacy code. I still have over 6megs of Object Pascal code from the late 70's and early 80's that never really got carbonized. It's got an install base of around 500 machines and is working well so nobody wanted to pay to finish carbonizing it. I can look at the code and see leftovers from when they changed CPU types and all sorts of other junk.
How long do you think it's going to be before your XCode2 code just stops working? So for it's seems like every 5 to 10 years they just say ops sorry you need to write code not to make you software better but just because we felt like changing some things and never got around to emulating the old way of doing things. I don't mind when say Apple Talk dies because TCP/IP becomes the standard shure it was some work but that's not apple's problem but the real reason bill G won was because all the legacy apps stopped working just one to many times.
As far as I know, Intel makes processors. Intel makes RISC processors, too. The ARM processors, which Apple and Intel have been working together on for years. are RISC processors.
When you install Xcode 2 you have the option of installing development environments for 10.2.8 and 10.3.9 so that your new code is compatible with older computers.
Tiger is also the last of the yearly releases for OS X. Keep in mind OS X (public beta) was released in 2000. In 5 years, it had to become a fully mature operating system. In 2003 there was Jaguar, where a lot of people stayed because they didn't want to upgrade again to Panther and Jaguar worked nicely. Tiger however is such a good upgrade, and also the last of the yearly upgrades, that it was needed.
Actually, what's funnier is that your comment got rated as Funny and the parent was modded down. Or is it just Bizarro?
Currently hooked on AMP
1:The kernel is definitely a weird chimera of kernels, but I guess that'll be fixed for OS XI or something.
2: Carbon and Cocoa are both superficial, high-level layers that don't interfere with each other nor slow anything down. Classic also doesn't interfere and just slows itself down.
No. See 1.
The reason why the kernel so messed up is it has so many interfaces. If everything was running in Cocoa then they could optimize for it but you can have Cocoa, Carbon, Classic, and BSD threads all running at the same time which mean you can't give say Cocoa access to low level kernel functions with out going though an interface built to support everything else. If they had built an interface for BSD and Coca then emulated Carbon from coca and emulated Cocoa from Carbon then Carbon and Classic would not have slowed Cocoa down but by making an interface that they all have to go though they slowed the path down for everyone.
..due to Apple's planned/hinted switch over to an Intel chip.
For every present, there is a past
It was a good artical up until the tried to explain the poor server performance with MySQL and Apache. They totally blew it there. For starters, fork and exec have nothing to do with pthreads (and probably have nothing to do with the performance issue at hand either). Also, (as has already been pointed out), each POSIX thread gets its own Mach thread (actually task in MACH terminology) -- the POSIX threads are not implemented in user mode.
What I have heard is bad about OS X threading is that the mach threads use the POSIX mutexes and the POSIX mutexes cause priority inversion problems, but that would be the same with all POSIX thread implementations.
I would guess that the more likely cause of problems is the way I/O drivers are written as mach tasks that run in the kernel process (or was it that all drivers ran in a single kernel thread -- something like that). There might also be a big hammer lock around the entire file system. The downside of messaging systems is that they tend to bottleneck when one thread does too much work. The same as the way a locking system behaves when the locks don't have a fine enough granularity. Neither architecture is really "the answer". Neither architecture makes doing MP easy...
An engineer who ran for Congress. http://herbrobinson.us
And if they had used the IBM compilers on PPC, then they would have also gotten a huge increase there as well. I think it would have been better to use the Intel compiler on x86, and the IBM compiler on PPC, and then compare those results. If you're looking to see what the platforms can do, you might as well use the best compilers for those platforms. Seems to me you might get a more meaningful comparison. But, like you said, I might just be wrong again.
Your insight is appreciated; do you have more details?
I nonetheless stand by my point...
If the authors THINK that that's the problem... they should've actually tested it.
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Somebody must really be affraid of what I say cause I went in my personnal page today and a guy (or girl) actually took the time to use its mod points to systematicaly rate my posts overrated, thank you for proving me right :) by using such lame technique to hinder the value of my speech.
That's the fly in the ointment. The vast majority of people are easy marks for rigged benchmarks (and marketing types know it all too well).
For instance, a tiny detail like the Mac memory timing is CAS3 whereas the Xeon memory is CAS2.5 slips right by most casual observers and can make fair bit of difference. If that's the way the Macs are always shipped, that's one thing, but if the people doing the benchmark deliberately chose that configuration on purpose to make the Mac look bad then that's quite another.
That's why I prefer having a control for experiments. It makes those sorts of details harder to slip by. If my computer is slow, I want to know why so I can make informed purchases, upgrades or changes.
I agree that most people will just want to know the emotionally charged and page-hit generating "if the Mac is faster," but things change so quickly that the value of the simplistic finding will be of use for a very short time (and override more important user concerns). By the time the public perception accepts a fact, it will no longer be true... So, it is better for people to conclude that benchmarks with simple answers are too prone to be a front for marketing, and that there is no substitute for being informed about what one is getting.
So while everyone's coming out of the woodwork to declare themselves both creative and professional, I figured it was a good time to point out how this term grew out of the marketing of products like the Macintosh. I can't say this is how the term originated, but it's certainly where it's found its niche.
Several years ago, Apple had a problem finding a market for their desktop systems outside the domain of graphic artists and musicians, for whom the brand still had significant cachet.
They pursued a couple of strategies. The first, which most people are aware of, was finding a home market for audiovisual technologies like video editing and music, and bringing their low-end price point down to meet at least the affluent home user's preferences.
The second was to try to find ways to leverage the popularity of Macs among artists to the rest of the business community. "Think Different," while not so effective, was one stab at this. Another was to start referring to their systems' core market not as "artists" but as "creative professionals."
This had a couple of effects -- "creative professional" connotes not just an artist, but a financially successful (or at least self-sustaining) artist, which was a more favorable connotation from Apple's point of view.
Second, though, it was a sufficiently ambiguous term that it invited everyone, even those not in Apple's core market, to redefine themselves as a potential Mac buyer because they were both "creative" and "professional," even though from the context it was clear that Apple was using the term to mean graphic artists, filmmakers, musicians, writers, and publishers
I was not trying to knock sysadmins down a notch by saying "being a sysadmin does not make you a 'creative professional...'," but instead was pointing out that neither Apple (nor the authors of the comparison that this thread talks about) uses the term in a general sense to mean everyone who's a little bit of either.
Apple, of course, would love for people to say "Well, I'm creative, I'm professional, I guess I must be the target market they're talking about!" And that's precisely what several people have done in this thread. And that's exactly why talking about "creative professionals preferring Macs" is powerful marketing.
-- Mark
I have compiled a set of benchmarks for scientific computing applications which are broadly consistent with the posted benchmarks:
http://jsekhon.fas.harvard.edu/macosx/
Y'know, if all you do is watch porn and download bootleg music files in your mom's basement, I'm sure the mac kernel seems fast to you.
And which one is easier to use?
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
I said, "OSX hacks a BSD kernel into a Mach microkernel, and thus performance is nearly as bad as Mach despite the existence of the mature, standardized interfaces of a BSD."
and you said "This is completely wrong."
So, you claim that OSX is NOT comprised of a BSD kernel hacked into a Mach microkernel? And that the performance is worse than Mach? Or maybe that performance of the hybrid kernel is better than a monolith?
Or is there some new meaning of the word "completely" that I haven't heard yet?
I don't get it.