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Ars Technica Reviews Intel iMacs
Milton Waddams writes "Ars kick off what I'm sure will be a torrent of reviews of the of the new Intel iMac. Overall it looks like it's a bit faster than the iMac G5 and a bit slower than the PowerMac G5 dual core. I'm sure it will surprise many slashdotters to find out that Jobs' statements about the new iMac being twice as fast as the iMac G5 as being slightly over optimistic. AND it doesn't run Windows...yet..." I'm still waiting for the most important benchmark: frames per second in molten core combat.
To be fair, Steve's statements were absolutely 100% accurate (assuming the figures are accurate, which I expect them to be). For that benchmark, the intel machine is 2x-3x faster. If anyone really expected them to provide not-the-best-benchmark-results, can I have some of what you're smoking ? And I have several bridges to sell you too...
My point is that the story write-up makes it sound like SJ is lying, and he's not. He's just presenting the best set of benchmarks he can, which is pretty much what I expect from the CEO of the company...
As for the multimedia-style benchmarks presented in the review, I think you can expect those to improve as Apple gets its collective head around SSE3. I would have thought the G5/G4 implementations would have been altivec'd to hell and back, and SSE doesn't have the immensely useful 'permute' operation, so the transform operation will have to be rewritten to SSE's strengths - I doubt that has happened yet...
Simon.
Physicists get Hadrons!
It doesn't surprise me that it still competes with Intel's latest offering. I wonder if it makes sense for Apple to continue supporting both x86 and PPC platforms long term. I'm sure Intel will -- in time -- crush the G5 in performance. But if Apple wants to dominate the HDTV editing workstation market, Cell looks like the most appropriate processor for that task. Are fat binaries really so obnoxious as to prevent permanent multi-arch support over the long term?
But what about if someone wants to run games (and perhaps other software that runs only on Windows) *and* still get the superior OS/apps found in Macs? Why should they be forced to buy two computers just so that they can preserve their "entire Mac experience"?
Many Bothans died to bring you this sig.
Haven't you heard? It's cool to hate Apple now. It makes you '1337.
Anybody who says anything remotely positive about Apple, or especially about Steve Jobs, is a "fanboy." You don't want to be called a fanbody, do you? Then get with the program. Talk about how cheaply you can get a Gateway that's just as good as the new iMac or something, and insist that Woz is the only person who ever had anything to do with Apple worthy of any respect at all.
Oh... and maybe Tog, if you are a UI nerd.
I am a geek. I work on computers. A more flexible computer is better for me.
:-(
During the day I work on a multimedia engine that is currently Windows-only, but will soon be cross-platform. At night I hack on my linux boxes, surf the web on whatever webbrowser is on my couch, and laugh along with my friends at the Flash animations they show me. Generally speaking, it doesn't matter what OS I'm running as long as I can browse the web and ssh places.
But when someone asks me a question about OSX, I don't have a test machine to poke at. My lappy can dual-boot Linux and Windows, so if I need to I can switch from one to the other and poke at things. If I could just run one OS and emulate the others on top of it, that would be awesome, but I can't make that work (fast enough) on a laptop today (at least not one I could buy on my budget). So what if I had a triple-boot machine? That would be cool. Of course, being able to run OSX on stock hardware would be even cooler, but maybe Apple just can't handle that much coolness right now. Maybe soon... soon they will be able to be that awesome.
Though I still am wary of Apple's power cords. Too much breakage/sparking of them in the past to forgive and forget this soon.
coding is life
It's not a Power Mac, nor has it ever tried to be - one wouldn't have bought the original bondi blue iMac when it first came out if they needed the power of the Power Mac G3 then, either. Also, Jobs admitted that Rosetta wasn't really professional-level yet - Photoshop and the like are usable, but professionals will want to wait for the x86-native releases. They'll come, and so will an Intel-based Power Mac - until then, the G5 Quad will be more than sufficient and will last a long time to come.
And tomorrow the stock exchange will be the human race
It has insane floating point throughput capability which will help on some apps, but for most desktop apps the Cell is extremely slow. It was designed for a very specific set of tasks.
Existing PPC binaries won't run fast on the Cell. In fact, they most likely won't run at all.
There is no way we'll see a general purpose desktop system based on the Cell - it's just not designed for that kind of purpose. We might see some sort of Cell coprocessor board become available though.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
Thats a bad analogy. Its more like buying a race car and deciding you really want to have turn signals, seat belts, emergency brake and other stuff you need to drive your vehicle once in a while on the same roads everyone else is on.
Excuse me, but while Apple is big on noise, they're not big on production. I'm sure AMD could have given them all the chips they need. They might not have been so forthcoming with the Marketing Money however.
For Intel, getting Apple is a coup worth paying enough for that even if they never make a cent from Steve Jobs, they've still silenced the biggest critic of the i86 architecture.
Their problem right now is keeping Dell/HP happy, both of whom sell a lot more systems than Apple will, and who aren't very pleased about Apple being allowed to announce the newest, latest and greatest systems first.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
At something on the order of 80 million chips per year (counting dual-proc, dual-core machines as two, obviously) Apple would instantly become AMD's largest customer, by far. There's no way AMD could hope to keep the pipeline full, and Apple's biggest constraint to growth has always been supply-chain issues.
Using the "D" key to force a boot from an internal optical device on a Mac is new to me. I have been using the machines for many years and never heard of that, nor I can get my current Macs to boot from the optical by holding down the "D".
:-)
The "C" key, is a horse of another color. That is the traditional key and it works fine under every version of the Mac operating system that I have ever used since the advent of optical drives for computers up through now OS X.4.4.
Interesting that the author didn't mention the "C" key. And no, I did not read the story. Just looking at your quote.
These benchmarks don't seem entirely objective.
The older imac was sporting twice the memory, and the g5 desktop had 9 times the memory.
Clearly the memory disparity was a factor in many of the tests.
I would give more credence to a test where all three machines had the same amount of memory so that paging/swapping/caching would be more at parity.
The guy seems to be a bit confused in what he writes.
"Rosetta runs in the same thread as the application, and translates blocks of code as they come up. "
Then
"...That allows the translation to run on one core while the application thread executes on the other core, meaning that the translated code will have a short distance to travel."
So, which is it? Does Rosetta run in a separate thread or not? Maybe he meant it runs in the same process, I don't know.
What is the significance of arstechnica benchmarking the 3 macs with the following ram configurations:
iMac Core Duo: 512MB
iMac G5: 1GB
PowerMac G5: 4.5GB
Wouldn't such a large difference in the ammount of ram have a significant impact on benchmarks?
Apple chose the same processor that Dell so heavily rely on. Of all the reasons, I just don't believe AMD can't manufacture enough chips. I think Steve Jobs always wanted to use Dell as the model to follow whether his mouth admits it or not.
Are you trolling or just slow in the head? Apple went with Intel for laptops. They needed a fast portable. AMD has nothing useful for laptops right now. their top chip uses 15-60% more power and is slightly slower than the Intel Duo. It uses more power idle than the Intel does at 100%. Choosing between going from a 6 hour battery with the g4 to a 3 hour battery with the Intel or a 2 hour battery with the AMD. Gee, tough choice. Apple may very well ship AMD chips some day, but not in portables or all-in-ones until they get their power consumption under control (AMD 65nm is due Q4). As for business models, Dell is about cheap, cheap, cheap with little inventory and interchangable supply. Apple is about grabbing the high end with innovative tech as a differentiator. The business models are very different.
IT's not Apple's job to help you run Windows software. Least of all on their hardware.
As the OP said, if I bought a new Mac, the last thing I'd want to do is try to figure out how to run software for Windows on it. Period.
Nobody is forcing you to buy a second machine to do anything. You can do without that software, buy a second machine, or (possibly) void your warranty by trying to get Windows to run on it. That doesn't mean you should expect Apple to roll over and give you a machine which it is easy to make run both OS's. They want to give you a good user experience if you bought their stuff.
If I buy a Honda Accord, is it reasonable to expect Honda to ensure that the turbo-kit I got for my Ford Escort runs on that Honda? Of course not. What does Honda care? And it's not about "the full Honda experience", I'll tell you that.
Apple would probably prefer you leave them out of the equation when it comes to running your Windows games. Specifically so they don't get calls from people who have either bodged their systems together from spare parts, or generally done stupid things with them.
You have complete freedom to buy, or not buy an Apple computer, and all that implies. Whining about being 'forced' to own a second computer to be able to have another platform is a completely specious argument in my opinion -- how is this any different than from when the computers were on completely different platforms?
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
--
I'm suprised Steve lets the mods talk with their mouth full.
I think I am on sig revision 5 now, still trying to get something that is intellectually provocative yet appealing to slashdot moderators. I never post as an AC, maybe that is my problem.
I get so annoyed everytime someone supposedly benchmarks something on a PC and includes no experimental error figures, no mean, no standard deviation. Maybe that's because when you only test things once, the sample standard deviation is infinite! Doing this in an engineering or scientific paper would get you laughed out of the journal or conference. Reading the following in the Ars discussion forum just reinforced my thoughts:
XBench is not great for benchmarking unless you repeat it's tests about 10 times or more each... its results vary too much (even from one run to another on the same machine, never mind when comparing two different ones).
Come on people, do many tests, compute the data, adjust with Student's t-distribution. This is elementary stuff yet no one does it.
"Nature doesn't care how smart you are. You can still be wrong." - Richard Feynman
I'm not confusing them at all - there's no real difference between the two. You certainly notice low frame rates in video games more then a video, however - and it's not just motion blur. Some of it is response time and the fact that you control it, some of it is the fact that you sit very close to a screen when you play video games as a general rule. Another factor is that video games are still not life-like enough to pass as "real" and smoother video helps offset the lack of realism in graphics by adding more immersion.
Next time you watch a movie, pay attention to pans across landscapes and such. Usually a DVD is sourced from 24FPS film, so it applies here too. You can usually easily see the jerkiness of the video when it pans. Then, watch some panning video from a home camcorder which usually records at 60 interlaced frames a second. The difference is immediately noticeable.
My point is, the human eye is perfectly capable of perceiving well over 25FPS. 24FPS is the standard for movie film, and it's really the minimum you can use and still have it seem fluid enough. Any lower and it's distracting. Any higher and it looks strange because we're so conditioned to 24/25FPS. That's why home video tends to look like exactly that (cheesy) - it's a much higher frame rate.
Video games exasperate the issue, and frame rates mean even more. 60FPS is smooth enough for most people that it seems perfectly fluid, which is why the industry has pretty much standardized on it as a base-line.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
Parent is absolutely right. I'm certain that the vast majority of viewers could tell the difference between a video captured at 24fps vs 60 fps.
And the claim that the blurryness of video offsets ths framerate is also debateable. I'd argue the opposite, in fact - 60fps video is much, much more sharp than 24fps because the motion blur obscures the detail(you only notice it on the edges, but it affects the entire frame).
The intel iMac supports spanning! I'm surprised Steve didn't make a big deal about this. There goes one more major reason for people to buy a powermac. Kudos for Ars for mentioning that on the first page.
I could be wrong, but I bet it only supports spanning because they didn't have time (or it wasn't worth the trouble) to cripple it.
I'd lay odds on the next generation of iMacs losing that feature. Which may explain why the Apple publicity machine is mum about it...