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Intel Developer Macs Outperform G5s
bonch writes "Developers working with the new Intel-based, developer-only Macs are impressed with the performance. The machines take as little as 10 seconds to boot from Apple logo to desktop, and apparently run Windows XP at 'blazing speeds.' Rosetta tests demonstrate the PowerPC-native build of Firefox running just as fast as it does on a high-end G5."
Although, Firefox doesn't run particularly fast on my G5 compared to my run-of-the-mill XP box at work.
OS boot times are usually disk and network bound.
I don't see how even an order of magnitude increase in CPU power could shorten boot times to the extent described here.
There must be other factors.
--
Toby
Didn't you RTFA? It's not an "emulator", it's a dynamic binary translator. Duh...
ResidntGeek
The real question is, will their x86 Laptops maintain the four hour battery life Mac users have come to expect? Performance is nice, but it isn't always everything. Being able to work through a long car trip, plane flight, or train ride can be far MORE important to laptop users.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
The developer version of OS X can run on non-apple hardware, but only if you think troubleshooting is fun (read: not well). The versions that will reach consumers on Intel systems will be DRM'ed to prevent this. It will be crackable, but the 1% of the population that can do this isn't Apple's target market anyways.
The real litigious bastards...
For God's sake, will you please stop beating this issue to death? No, MacOS will not officially run on non-Apple hardware. Yes, l337 h4x0rs will probably find a way to make it happen. No, it will not be the rosy seamless computing experience MacOS provides on controlled hardware. Apple's success in OS development is in no small amount tied to their control of the hardware it runs on; don't expect that to go away anytime soon.
"The apps run at about 65 to 70 percent of their normal speed."
Doesn't sound like Rosetta is transparent for everything, then?
Intel outperforming PowerPC was kind of expected. However I am impressed with a technology behind Rosetta. Are ther any open source projects like that?
my sstream of consciousness
That's a quite remarkable emulation feat. I wonder if this is on x64 with the added registers or if it's just plain x86. I imagine that the added registers in x64 (or whatever you want to call it without using an AMD or Intel moniker), combined with less restricted usage combinations, would make emulating the PowerPC ISA well easier.
Sometimes I have the need to develop on Mac environment for compatibility requirements, but I don't really want to buy a Mac just for that. For example I don't buy a TUX machine to run Linux.
You would if it was important enough to you. I bought mine so that I could support Apple users. i.e. I saw a very real use for the machine. (Best purchase I ever made, BTW.) With Linux, there's just too much noise and not enough signal to make anyone want to purchase a Linux-built Desktop machine.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
It could also mean that firefox's apparent speed is based more on network throughput than code execution. I'd like to see some more robust benchmarks than "it seems just as fast".
We can start by how long it takes to crunch a lot of floating point operations and integer math operations.
It's good to use your head, but not as a battering ram.
So simple stuff runs as fast or faster...
How does the Mactel box do on floating point, 64bit and/or vector based code? The main reason for getting a G5 was to improve performance of 64bit/floating/vector code like is used in video production and scientific apps.
Since Intel has always been shaky in floating point and probably doesn't really know the meaning of vector I'm wondering how those kinds of apps will fare on the Mactel boxes.
Clearly the speed boost comes from the amazing graphics capabilities of the Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 900. I mean, the 900 stands for 450 times better than their last integrated system which was numberd 2, right?
No. The version of OS X on the developer Macs may be compatible with other PCs, but the final product will be tied to an special Intel DRM chip that will prevent it from running on other machines.
The developer machines are loaners and will go back to Apple in two years, and will not continue to be supported.
omnia tua castra sunt nobis
So now that Apple is going to use Intel processors, Apple developers are allowed to note that Intel makes faster processors?
I should feel vindicated, I suppose.
So...the development Mac's run XP faster than other vendor's boxen? This is getting weird.
I don't want to start a holy war here, but what is the deal with Intel Mac hard drive performance? I've been sitting here at my freelance gig in front of a Intel Mac for about 20 minutes now while it attempts to copy a 17 Meg file from one folder on the hard drive to another folder. 20 minutes. At home, on my Pentium Pro 200 running NT 4, which by all standards should be a lot slower than this Mac, the same operation would take about 2 minutes. If that.
In addition, during this file transfer, Safari will not work. And everything else has ground to a halt. Even SubEthaEdit is straining to keep up as I type this.
I won't bore you with the laundry list of other problems that I've encountered while working on my Intel Mac, but suffice it to say there have been many, not the least of which is I've never seen a Intel Mac that has run faster than its Wintel counterpart, despite the Intel Mac's faster chip architecture. My 486/66 with 8 megs of ram runs faster than this 300 mhz machine at times. From a productivity standpoint, I don't get how people can claim that the Intel Mac is a superior machine.
Intel Mac addicts, flame me if you'd like, but I'd rather hear some intelligent reasons why anyone would choose to use a Intel Mac over other faster, cheaper, more stable systems.
Took long enough, but it looks like OS X will finally be 'snappy' ;)
I think most of us expected the P4 to perform better for Integer like code on applications that don't effectively SMP. So that's not that surprising. I am surprised at the speed of Rosetta, although that will be a mixed bag once again depending upon the application.
What I'm really interested in is speed on stuff that really leveraged Altivec, like A/V programs. I'm curious about Quicktime 7 for instance. Now some of these programs can use some similar functions on the P4. But from what the Altivec folks were telling me some code ought differ by as much as 50%. (i.e. the PPC is twice as fast) A nice simple test is to compare programs like iMovie on both platforms.
So stop saying it like it's a fact, please.
Culture is more than commerce
To boot up into XP on my latest WinTel kit takes very little time, and XP runs lightening quick on that box, expectedly faster than my one or two year old Macs, though not as expectedly fast as my 5 year old Mac. OTOH, my three year old WinTel laptop with XP is such a dog it is painful to use.
Which is to say there is no surprise that Apple shipped a fast computer, and no surprise that the latest machine can boot faster than my older machines. I expect MacOS will run faster, as Intel has been ramping up the cycles, damn the electricity, while IBM has not. The concern is, as always, no that Intel is in the picture, is there going to be a philosophy change that makes the computer less consumer friendly. Like more DRM, or more serial numbers, or b0rked math.
I mean, fundementally, the important thing to me is that the computer wakes up in 5 seconds, not that it takes a minute to get to the desktop. And that in five years I still have a usable computer with the latest OS.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Actually, Apple makes money selling iPods!
But seriously, I hate the "Apple makes money selling machines, not software" myth. Apple also makes a killing on software, and there's higher margins than hardware. Steve Jobs said Tiger had already sold a million boxed copies of Tiger at the WWDC. Multiply by $129? That's a lot of cash coming from just the OS. And don't forget about their stance in the professional media market. How much is Final Cut Pro selling for these days? What does Motion cost?
Oh, we're supposed to use the comments as a source for facts? Even the ones crawling with Apple fanbois?
I must be new here, maybe that has always been the case.
It's likely that Rosetta is pulling a lot of tricks, I/O level and otherwise, and when you're reading data from a hard disk or the network, using a few spare CPU cycles to swap some bytes around isn't going to be noticed *at all*, because if you're doing that sort of I/O bound processing, you'll likely have plenty of CPU cycles laying around to swap bytes in memory.
If you're not talking about Rosetta, but about multi-platform applications more generally, the long answer is in the Universal Binary Programming Guidelines PDF. The short answer is that you abstract away from your own code byte-order issues where possible, and where not possible, you otherwise have separate code paths that do the right thing depending on the targeted platform.
Seasoned developers who coded applications under NeXTStep have been through this once before, remember. This is not a new problem. We've been here before... I avoid binary data formats where it's reasonable to do so.
This problem was resolved about 12 years ago when NextStep shipped on Intel.
The IO libs just take care of it.
Also, it's worth noting that binary storage in a "native" format is always a Bad Idea and most serious projects would be expected to avoid it.
This just means that the G5 crap being better performing than the Intel stuff was pure marketing BS
Maybe G5s are not so fast. But:
"It's fast," said one developer source of Mac OS X running on Intel's Pentium processors. "Faster than [Mac OS X] on my Dual 2GHz Power Mac G5."
So, uh, a 3.6 Ghz P4 is faster than two 2 Ghz G5 - 4 Ghz? - SMP, but 4 Ghz.
Sorry, I don't buy that. Even more if you take into account that Intel isn't exactly the performance/Hz leader - in fact it's the worst performer these days, Opteron and PM beats the sh*t out of that P4 at much lower speeds from what I've read.
There're lots of factors that can change things - freebsd algorithms, are, for one, optimized for i386 variants. Also, Mac OS X is compiled with -Os - optimized for size, no for speed. (Paranoic mode on=Hey, maybe this switch was planned and it's not a coincidence)
And then there's the Placebo effect. IOW: Show me numbers, don't tell me "it's fast", I don't trust you. In Linus' words: "If we can't measure it, it doesn't exists". Unless someone writes a decent comparative, I'll take this article as Apple Marketing - Apple has been very critized for this change, I wouldn't be suprised that Apple is interested in articles like that, showing how good move has been the switch to intel
The reported threading problems were not, in fact, threading problems at all. Instead, they are the result of F_FULLFSYNC fcntl. You will probably find this thread interesting.
So when will the DVD leak and I'll be able to see hackers working on getting it to run on regular x86-machines at http://www.osx86.classicbeta.com/ ? :)
"Yes, l337 h4x0rs will probably find a way to make it happen. No, it will not be the rosy seamless computing experience MacOS provides on controlled hardware. Apple's success in OS development is in no small amount tied to their control of the hardware it runs on; don't expect that to go away anytime soon."
These Apple boxes will use generic harware found in your standard hp or dell box. Home made pcs will run MacOS just fine. Apple is using a DRM to raise the barrier of entry to nearly infinity for competing hardware companies who want to sell mac clones to maintain a monopoly on selling hardware that runs MacOS. That way they can charge a premium on hardware to subsidize their OS development and make a healthy profit by choosing their own price without worrying about market forces. Apple knows their product is differentiated enough from an MS PC that these machines are not really competing head-to-head, so my monopoly arguement is valid.
Vote for Pedro
This is going to be a real problem for Mac software, because most of it isn't frame limited, and isn't designed to run this fast. You'll be typing a sentence in a word processor, and before you know it, the cursor will have zoomed off and crashed into the right hand edge of the window.
Not good.
Don't buy a Mac until you can get an Intel one; and of course you ought to wait six months after that release so vendors have had time to port their software over. A year to a year and a half in other words. Also, do not buy expensive software like Photoshop or Illustrator at this time, since you'll have to shell out all over for them again when you get an Intel Mac (and that can easily come to more than the cost of the machine itself).
It would be really fascinating to see what the sales figures will be like for the next year or two.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
Well I think that by transparent they mean that you can see through it. I mean, metaphorically speaking, if Rosetta was a person and it was wearing the apps that ran using it, it would be frightening to see those apps walking around with no body. Very frightening indeed, like a ghost. 65 to 70 percent of normal speed is definitely frightening, so this must be exactly what they mean.
Seven seconds. Trust me.
Seven chipmunks twirlin' on a branch, eatin' lots of sunflowers on my uncle's ranch. You know that old children's tale from the sea.
Ironically, the word ironically is often used incorrectly.
Get rid of the unnecessary crap installed on your system to help improve your boot times. Have you seen the junk FC4 installs and starts at boot by default?
Deleted
If I were AppleInsider, I'd be ashamed to print this. Of course, it's not likely that AppleInsider could be ashamed of anything, so there you go ;-)
Really, wake me up when there's an article where someone publishes comparative numbers of PostgeSQL inserts or NSImage composites or timed renders of Safari web pages.
And no, I'm not really interested in Rosetta performance as much as I'm interested in native app performance. I'm interested, don't get me wrong. Just not as interested.
Ethical concerns aside, for many companies Intel is such a desirable choice because they do the testing with components and certify a complete package for you. That's expensive work, but Intel does it because they know that people will pay for it.
Sure, I'd love to see AMD in macs. I have fond memories of my last AMD machine. But, only if AMD can give us a good, inexpensive motherboard that they certify and test. If AMD wants to compete on this front, they're going to need to offer a package deal.
Back to ethics, it's entirely possible that Intel has crossed a major line and is due for a DOJ-powered slap, but I'm going to reserve judgement on that until I see more evidence. Just because AMD says they are being anti-competitive doesn't prove it. We'll know soon enough.
Slashdot. It's Not For Common Sense
So if you think about waiting for an Intel PowerMac, think 1.5 years. But even then, Apple is not reknown for getting the first revision right, plus they have a major platform shift to deal with. And it will take years to have an Intel-native software catalog the size of the current PPC one.
The MWSF refresh could bring dual core dual processors. Or maybe not. But anyway it won't be too much of a difference from the current line, so I think now's a good time to buy.
Tuff that Smatters.
Rather than using DRM, if they use specific altered BIOS and/or a specific chipset then that is all that is necessary. The OS will not have the drivers/ability to work on other hardware.
Apple will most likely still be designing their own MB's, even if they do include Intel chips, so this is a very easy way for them to maintain sales on their own, still technically proprietary, machines. DRM may be used, but if it does then it will probably be a second line of attack, not the primary.
Shawn's Tech Articles
But by the time they did that, the $500 market had become the $250 market...
Horseshit. They're running this stuff under Rosetta (oooh, a web browser is snappy on a 3.6ghz processor!), which does NOT run Altivec code. Altivec-enabled apps on a G5 will undoubtedly stomp a native Intel app on one of these developer rigs. That, and this is Appleinsider, so take it with a grain of salt. These guys are way off the mark so often that it isn't even funny.
I definitely won't be buying a PPC Mac. I'll wait for Intel Macs next year.
What overall effect will this have on Mac sales?
It will reduce total sales by one.
Technically, since this is Windows XP we are talking about (thus 10% processor usage in idle), and its running on a Pentium 4, then it IS running at "blazing" speeds.
Better put out that fire.
I rememember what happened to OS/2, with their vow to make "a better Windows than Windows". They did a good job of making sure that Windows apps ran well under OS/2... so good, in fact, that many app vendors stopped developing the OS/2 versions of their software. (After all, why spend money to develop both a Windows and an OS/2 port of your software, when OS/2 customers can just run the Windows version?) The result: less "native" OS/2 software, and the eventual decline and death of OS/2.
Apple may want to watch out for that trap...
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
Yeah, as much as I'd love to believe this, the logical part of my brain says no way.
Plus with details from the article as technical as "it's fast," and "blazing speeds," you just know that's some newsworthy stuff there.
Also the opposite is also going to be true. An intel compiled binary is going to stomp all over a PPC binary run with Rosetta.
Why even bother making such a comparison, and even more so, why bother making such a claim?
If you absolutely have to run PPC code on Intel you will, and you're not going to be impressed at the speed.
And as for comparing the intel hardware to PPC hardware it's Apples and oranges as far as I'm concerned. It seemed like the article was going as far as to say an Intel osx machine is just as fast when running PPC binaries with an emulator than a top of the line dual processor G5 running native PPC binaries?
Come on! Give us a break. Those would be fine claims to make, as long as they were backed with something a little more concrete than "my web browser seemed to run about the same."
Like I said, I'd love to believe this, I'm no fanboy either way (intel/ppc), and I've never owned a Mac, but this whole article is trite.
If you've got some developers with access to the machines, just spend the 15 minutes and do a couple benchies.
From what I understand from Phil Schiller at Apple, there are no plans to not allow Windows to boot. That said, it doesn't mean that Apple is going to force compatibility (eg, "Oh, we can't use such-and-such technology because then Macs wouldn't be able to run Windows").
For example, from what I understand, the chances are essentially nil that Apple will use whatever PCs use to boot--whatever the PC equivalent to Open Firmware is. Now Apple has pretty much said that they're not going to use Open Firmware on the Intel Macs, but there is some Intel Four-Letter-Acronym that is a leading candidate to be used instead. If that boots Windows, huzzah! If it doesn't, though, I doubt Apple would say, "Gosh. We can't use that because then our users won't be able to boot Windows."
Also, if Apple uses some really cool custom-built chip for doing audio, they will probably not write Windows drivers so that it will work under Windows. Somebody else might--hey, that's cool--and someone could download and install those drivers and everything would work fine. Heck, maybe Microsoft will even include them.
Apple isn't going to go out of their way to support Windows, I agree. But I'm sure some people will figure out a way to run Windows on one.
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Bye!
SeqBox
The IO libs just take care of it.
You're kind of missing all of those Mac apps which were written prior to OS X and those afterwards which are based on Carbon and not Cocoa, or which are pure C/C++. The Cocoa IO libs might handle byte swapping ( in fact they do ) but neither the Carbon IO APIs or the C/C++ standard IO APIs do, and a lot of apps use those. MacOS development != NeXT derived.
Jo Meder
Intel 3 GHz P4.. kinda in the midrange of PC hardware. I want to know how OS X86 would run on my new home system .. Athlon X2 4400+ SLI mobo.
It won't. Apple will never allow OSX X86 to run on a non-Apple system. Expect to see on-chip Intel DRM enforcing this.
"When the president does it, that means it's not illegal." - Richard M. Nixon
I think it will impact sales per se, but not any more then it is already affecting sales. Let me explain.
I bought a 15" Powerbook in September 2003 - this system is a G4 at 1.25 GHz. I love it but I would really like something faster (and with a better graphics chip) so it could be a real desktop replacement. But, this simply doesn't exist. Today's fastest powerbooks are still G4s at 1.67 GHz - an increase of just 34% in nearly 2 years. This isn't enough to make me buy a new machine. The way it was looking, I was waiting for Powerbook G5s - but it wasn't happening (and now, of course, it won't happen).
I am guessing that the significantly faster machines (both desktops and notebooks) with significantly help Apple sales, but will not hurt them more than the lack of speed was already. Increases in performance will correlate to sales, and if IBM was unable to deliver but Intel can, than I think it will help Apple immensely. If people need an Apple box they'll buy one, but right now they're just too slow or too expensive for people to consider (i.e., the fast machines are too expensive).
I look forward to finally replacing my Powerbook with a nice speedy Intel-powered machine in a year or two, and I bet many Apple users will be with me. The new speed will then make it a lot easier to get new switchers on board.
The space unintentionally left unblank.
The biggest gotcha with Rosetta is that it will not translate opcodes for G4 or G5 processors. There are already some applications for Mac OS X that require a G4 processor.... these *will not* run via Rosetta and will require an x86 recompile to run under the new Mactel machines.
Damn. I've still got a stack of Intel Inside slug stickers
I guess I can't continue to stick them overtop all the Intel Inside plates I run across, so I need some creative ideas as to what I should do with them. Any ideas?
G4 Optimized Firefox 1.1 pre-alpha nightlies (fast!)
http://homepage.mac.com/krmathis/
Well that's the key right there .... The G5 had decent FPU and Altivec of course, but the Integer ("mainstream") performance was never competitive.
Whenever I hear the word 'Innovation', I reach for my pistol.
I just so happen to be reading Gravity's Rainbow...
Well, there is a one in three chance that this study is nonsense.
For instance, as ubiquitous as Creative Labs hardware is, Apple can't support it because it's really low quality compared to Apple's on board audio (designed by Bang Olufsen)
I won't get into the debate about the quality (or lack therof) of Creative's products, except to say that there is a thriving market for aftermarket audio products for the Mac platform (M-Audio being one such vendor).
My point of contention with your post is your assertation that Apple employs the aid of Bang and Olufsen for its built-in audio. While searching on Google reveals others using superlatives that compare Apple's design to the afformentioned company's products, there is no evidence of collaboration. There are aftermarket products made for lines such as the iPod, but that's as close as it gets.
A few more little known facts: Apple uses all Bose speakers even down to the smallest speakers in their systems. And Bose designs the case section where the speaker will be housed in order to provide high quality, room filling sound no matter what system you have.
Furthermore, Bose has only had a limited relationship with Apple, starting and ending with the PowerMac 6400 family. And for the record, the logevity of this particular piece of design has been lacking. Apple has collaborated with other companies on their speaker design, such as utilizing Harman Kardon enclosures/speakers starting with the iMac DV.
Your references to startup tones are tangential, more a matter of taste and style than metrics. Apple succeeds in the the fields of arts primarily because of their decent first-party applications, and additionally because of their ISVs and aftermarket hardware. Many creative types still call the Mac home, and I don't think it's because of trendy start-up tones or hardware companies.
As to Apple's success and appeal, I wholly agree it is due in large part to the bottom-to-top control they have of the platform. I may have made mistakes in calling you out on some of these facts you are presenting. I have spent nearly 10 years working in and around Apple's various offerings, and have admired their industrial design (with a number of exceptions). That said, I would like to think that whatever zeal that I may have for them is grounded in reality. If you can find reference to any of your above claims, I would appreciate that they be presented for sake of perusal.
This article is thin on everything. In fact, it's little more than a mutated form of the inevitable discussions of increased "snappiness" that occur every time Apple updates either hardware or system software. The information in the article is all vague: "as little as 10 seconds," "It's fast," etc. Most ludicrous of all is the claim that the PPC build of Firefox runs just as quickly on the x86 Mac as it does on native hardware. Bollocks, sez I. Rosetta's nice, but it's no replacement for native and never will be. Like Classic, it's value will diminish with time. It's intended to ease a transition, in this case to universal binaries. When Apple deems that transition complete, Rosetta will, I think, be deprecated, if not abandoned altogether, barring any decisions in Cupertino to switch to, say, sparc.
I've got access to a Mactel dev box, and the performance is good, but it's not so much better as to be revelatory. Compiling the source for several projects I work on is faster on the dual G5 2GHz machine than the Mactel (gcc4 on both machines). While not a great measure of performance, at least it's tangible. Of course, if you prefer to accept the nebulous claims from one of several notorious Mac rumor sites, be my guest.
If you want a Mac, why wait for several moths to a year or more?
Instead just buy whatever Mac you like now and enjoy it - after all you'll have to spend some time learning a new OS anyway. If the newer Intel macs are really a lot more powerful - then sell the current Mac, which is easy to do since used Macs hold value well. And yes PPC macs will hold value just as well as new softwrae will still be comiled for them for several years anyway.
If you want to maximize resale value consider an Apple laptop of some sort, even really old ones fetch quite a lot.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Who told you "increased performance . . . is what the whole Intel switch is about"?
:)
Oh yeah. Steve Jobs said that, I forgot.
The switch from 680x0 to PPC was about increased performance. The switch from Mac OS to Mac OS X was about increased performance. The switch from PPC to X86 is not, it's just a business decision. It's not necessarily a bad business decision, but it's not something Apple's engineers dreamed up as a great way of moving their platform into the future. It's not something the customers were crying out for. It's old fashioned deal-making.
I think it's an understandable move, and one that's likely to pay off in the long haul. But. . . I can't help feeling disappointed that every OS seems destined to someday grow up and become Unix running on a X86 instruction set. It's not the future we all hoped for.
There's no way a P4 will run a PPC emulation at 70% of the speed of native apps, unless there's something terribly wrong with native app performance. Optimization matters, and even if they're doing absolutely brilliant transcoding they're translating code optimized for a larger register file into the P4's tiny register set... if a native compiler can't beat that with one optimizer tied behind its back there's something seriously wrong with that compiler.
AltiVec emulation can still be made faster than the linear code path.
The reason for this is that the AltiVec emulation can avoid many of the problems with the linear code. To list some...
* AltiVec has only alligned loads and stores, so you do not have to worry about emulating cross-page accesses
* AltiVec can load more information into your register map faster than your generic code (less address translation per word loaded/stored)
* AltiVec allows the emulating processor to parallel execute many of the instructions of the mathematical operations. So, you can make better use of the superscalar design of the emulating processor
There's a ton more, but I hope you get the idea. With PearPC there's a noticable increase in performance from ~1 MOPS for scalar integer arithmetic, and worse even MFLOPS for scalar floating point arithmetic to ~300 MFLOPS with even the scalar AltiVec emulation code.
Everyone seems to think emulating PowerPC and AltiVec on x86 and SSE/SSE2 (SSE3 provides no useful operations for AltiVec emulation) will make it slower than dirt. People think that emulating AltiVec with scalar operations will only slow the emulation down.
Why don't people actually look at some empirical data first, befor making such claims.
I am unamerican, and proud of it!
What a silly article. Of course the newer macs are going to be faster than the older generation. Why would Apple switch to Intel if they couldn't provide a faster chip? Imagine the headlines:
"New Intel-based Macs not as fast as the G5"
You will see Apple selling OSX to "generic" hardware the day Dell creates and licenses their own OS to make more profits. If you think that will happen, you're nuts.