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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."
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
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.
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
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?
I get 7 hours on my p4-m notebook.
so I'm thinking they may see an increase.
-nB
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
Performance is nice, but it isn't always everything
Will you explain that to my girlfriend please? Please?
Free XBox, PS2
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.
That's becaus you're running the wrong builds. :)
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
Methinks you've been had. This is an update of a quite famous rant made about one of the earlier PPC Macs, the 8600/300, as found here.
And tomorrow the stock exchange will be the human race
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?
Yes, the MacOS port of Firefox is an embarrasment. The interface is responsive in the same way that steering a rocket by sending olfactory messages to slugs is responsive.
I rarely criticize things I don't care about.
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 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
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.
Compare this to the G4, another weak linear performer that Apple more or less specialized in getting to fly through good use of the excellent Altivec unit. The G5 on the other hand has a somewhat weak Altivec unit but a much beefed up set of single-element FPU units, yielding so-so vector performing but good linear performance. IBM did probably not focus much energy on the Altivec unit but instead threw it in since Apple required it (after all, the single-element FPU performance of the G5 almost puts the Altivec unit to shame).
Some might now be quick to point out that Altivec is a nicer instruction set than SSE2/SSE3, this is by most standards true, but if you are hand-coding assembly you can make do with either. On the flip side Intel has quite impressive auto-vectorization support in their compiler.
So, what does this add up to? The G5 is in a good place for beating the P4 on unoptimized unvectorized code, but the P4 really screams if things are tuned up a bit. Considering Apples history with Altivec I think we can safely assume that they won't be afraid of doing some hand-tuning to get good perfomance.
This all ends up looking quite favorable for the P4, I still don't think we will see a commercial Mac with a P4 derivative in it, but anyone who thinks the P4 is a weak performer has another thing coming. For a bit more on my opinion on the state of the x86 vs. PPC today see my earlier post in the "Apple Switch to Intel Not a Big Loss for IBM" story.
No, the real point is in relationships you want to avoid the 'boot' process.
Edward@Tomato - /home/Edward/ man woman
man: no entry for woman in the manual.
"Qua!?"
But by the time they did that, the $500 market had become the $250 market...
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.
Your frame of reference makes me really wonder how the hell you spend your weekends!
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G4 Optimized Firefox 1.1 pre-alpha nightlies (fast!)
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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.