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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.
YouTube.com has a video of both systems booting. So if you're in to computer drag racing here ya go: http://www.youtube.com/?v=zmaAZwkhYeQ
http://religiousfreaks.com/not to mention the intel GMA900 graphics processor isn't exactly the speediest thing around.
1000fps in glxgears? I can beat that by a good 50% with a 4 year old NV GE440 go in my compaq laptop
watch what happens when there are nvidia drivers and ATI drivers available.
P.S. ATI 800 series cards do work (fully accelerated) on the development platform.
I'd post a link but the lawyers are loose.
The truth about Led Zep should never be told on
The benchmarks from the article are useful.
It sounds like from the review that Apple's pro apps aren't well suited for the Intel-based Macs until they have the Universal Binary versions (suggested to be in late March). Maybe that's why they left FireWire 800 off the initial MacBook Pro -- if you need FireWire 800, you're probably doing pro work. So Apple left it out to reduce costs until they have a complete system for pros.
Insert simplistic political, ideological, or personal proselytization here.
Have you seen the new apple commercial? "...for years it's been trapped in a PC, dull little boxes doing dull little tasks"... Honestly I felt down the whole evening... How many people know the new macs actually ARE pc's? Of course they aren't, cuz there are macs and pcs right?... macs have this apple thingie on the top of the screen and ya now the pc's come with this colored flag and it says windows. Of course in the public mind, mac and pc's are opposed on the operating system side... this is really Mac OS Versus Windows, no one gives a shit about the internal architecture... but people don't make the difference between a machine and an OS... so Apple is doing a good job, bashing PC's, it's still there concurrent...but it really makes me sad that this commercial will deepen public confusion... shame shame shame on them. Shame on people for being easy marketting prays. Fortunately, porting OS X to standard PC will maybe awaken some puzzling among the general audience.
\u262D = \u5350
vMac Mini, a open source Plus emulator, can run System 6 (which you can get from Apple for Free (you can get up to 7.5.5 for free)
"being slightly over optimistic"
In the real world that is called a Lie.
Jobs doesn't look like he even remotely concerned about even making -plausible- performance claims about the Intel stuff.
Looks like Jobs is going to be doing a 'optimistic' spinning this year with the mess Intel's Roadmap(tm) looks to be in. He should have been less of a pain in the ass to IBM he wouldn't be in the mess Apple is in with their hardware.
When you are selling something it is always the best policy to lie with the truth.
KFG
Look at the history of Apple's processor switches. The first generation PPC machines (6100/7100/8100) were nice, but the second generation PPC machines (7500/8500/9500) were much better. The 2nd gen PPC machines had PCI instead of NuBus, a faster interleaved memory architecture, and a much improved dual-SCSI bus. With the first Macintel, it's obvious that Apple worked very quickly to put Intel Inside and I'm sure that some parts of the design represent a borrowing from PPC designs. I bet that second generation Intel machines are both faster, less likely to have flaws, and more likely to enjoy longer-term OS upgrades.
I know its ungeek of me not to want to be on the bleeding edge, but I'm waiting for the second generation machines.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
The fat binaries (or Universal) has been around for a very long time. NeXT first introduced them in this exact same format. Knowing that Mac OS X is the current incarnation of NextStep (the OS for NeXT machines), I assumed the Intel move would be relatively easy, if the had been maintaining the code.
Now, in retrospect, it looks like they have for Mac OS X, but maybe not for all the other applications (iLife, FCP, etc).
Now, given that the OS has a long history of multi-platform support, it is only a piece of the puzzle.
Application level changes are a bit harder, especially in relying upon functions specific to a chip. Which, for some applications, is the case. Others should be able to do a direct recompile, if the application is still around in source form, the author is interested, etc.
Back when I had acess to NeXT Cubes, I didn't have to worry about it. However, when I later bought NeXTStep 486, I had to. There were lots of applications for the 680x0 systems, I sometimes had to search for those 486 applications. I assume we are headed back into that world.
So, can it happen? Yes. However, I suspect that Apple will move on with the Intel architecture. I assume the PowerMac G5 will be a well respected machine in the meantime, as it does great for video editing, something Widnows machines still work hard to do poorly.
I suspect it might be like the Amiga. While the Amiga didn't get a lot of respect, those in the video editing world used it much longer than people antipicated.
But, in the end, the new macs will be Intel. As a side note, I just sold my G5 DP to someone looking to do video editing with FCP. Even with them knowing the Intel systems were coming out, they still wanted it.
A lot of people don't seem to see why you would really want to do this. Many businesses and universities are very PC only, even though they are curious about using/integrating Macs.
When I worked for a satellite campus of Indiana University, I was directly in charge of 2 Mac labs and 6 PC labs. One of the departments seriously was discussing moving their 3 PC only labs to Intel Mac if they could dual boot.
Why?
Because then they could still have all the software they already use, and the faculty and students could reboot into Mac OS to play around and see what was up with it. Surprisingly it was the most hard core PC only faculty that was really excited about this option. A chance for them to work in the same room(s) they always work in, but try out the other side.
Many of the students we encouraged to work on both ended up purchasing a Mac, but that is only because they had the ability to get exposed to them. In many universities this isn't the case anymore.
Most of the students where using Adobe and Macromedia products, but the fastest to consider switching where the Maya students. Showing them a lower spec'ed Mac easily outperforming our PC's (Opterons BTW) was very interesting. The only way we got better performance was on the PC's under Linux, which after trying that most students found they did not like dealing with Linux (sorry, I'll probably get mod'ed down for that, but it was truthfully what I saw).
Apple not hindering the ability to run windows, which they have stated they haven't done, and I have no reason to believe they have, in some cases could actually net them quite a few sales they would not have been able to get otherwise.
Shawn's Tech Articles
The fact is that lies and deception are (a) common and (b) shouldn't be. It is completely legitimate to (a) criticise liars and decievers, even if you haven't done so and (b) (as the submitter did) highlight lies and deceptions to reduce their impact. If Joe Blow tells me that Blow Inc's Widgets are "99% plutonium free", by which he means that 1% of each widget is plutonium, rather than that they contain 100 times less plutonium than his competitors as would be the most likely initial reading, I'll tell people. I'll not sit there and say "Hey, there are probably a lot of people who think that his widgets contain less plutonium than everyone else's" simply because of some misplaced "moral code" that says I shouldn't be seen to be apparently critical of someone for doing something that a lot of other people do.
The Intel iMac isn't significantly faster than the iMac G5, despite Job's attempts to imply otherwise. Indeed, if the iMac G5 had undergone the same revisions that the PowerMac line had a few months ago, the chances are they'd be faster than the Pentium equivalents. I've written in my journal that I really don't understand why people reacted with such enthusiasm to the Stevenote this year: read between the lines Jobs spoke and you find that Apple actually was struggling to come up with convincing evidence that justifies the Intel switch. Nonetheless, Jobs used wording that implied massive (2-4X!) improvements in performance, which, surprise surprise, are clearly massive exaggerations and, in the context of comparing this year's Pentiums to last year's G5s, are actually covers for practical failure on their side.
If you're going to use wording that implies massive (and 2-4X really is massive) improvements in performance, don't expect your honesty and virtue to be unquestioned when we subsequently find that no such improvements have actually occurred. If Michael Dell does the same thing, we'll criticise him too. If Intel's CEO does, we'll do the same thing. Today it's Steve Jobs.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Jobs ran photoshop in the keynote, and Adobe has not yet released a "universal" binary (built for intel and PPC chips) of anything so it is run through rosetta(PPC chip emulation). it works, but it is not zippy. i guess some of it was that it took a little time to start up (also loading rosetta), maybe how classic would load in OS X. i know the keynote was done on Intel chipped machines, but i am not sure what kind of machine? these user reports are done on iMacs, and as decent as they seem, they are still considered consumer level machines.
i do agree though, it would be interesting to see some side by side tests of what the iMac is made for, on software that is universal. like an iLife06 shootout of a new iMac versus what they were selling at Christmas. that would be pretty real world comparisons for the average iMac user.
As one who agrees with the OP - why indeed? I am seriously considereing this new Mac (aka Unix) platform for my home PC as an upgrade to my Win2K desktop. I can't imagine dual-booting to something as lame as XP or that future hog, Vista.
For those of use who need to test stuff under Wintendo - such as Java apps or PHP scripts, there's a lot to be said for Virtual PC or VM Ware. Even on my Linux laptop I only run Windows apps in a Crossover Office (Wine) session when I need to test compatibility.
The Kai's Semi-Updated Website Thingy
glxgears is not a benchmark. Differences in the way the drivers handle synchronisation between frames mean that the limiting factor may be the number of frames per second, not the complexity of the objects drawn. Going from Xorg 6.7 to 6.8, my glxgears FPS values dropped. My UT ones went up. This ought to tell you something.
The Intel iMac isn't significantly faster than the iMac G5
There's not nearly enough evidence to reach a conclusion either way. QuickTime export is one of Altivec's strongest areas, and Xbench scores are notoriously bad at having any relationship to reality. Let's wait and see how they do in real life; perhaps you'll find Apple really does have a clue.
Indeed, if the iMac G5 had undergone the same revisions that the PowerMac line had a few months ago, the chances are they'd be faster than the Pentium equivalents.
Yeah, all they had to do was put quad G5s in the iMac and Powerbook enclosures...
I really don't understand why people reacted with such enthusiasm to the Stevenote this year:
Because we get faster Macs for the same cost, and in the case of Powerbooks, *much* faster. Desktop PPC is dead; deal with it. Yes, it's a fundamentally better architecture, but IBM and Freescale have repeatedly shown they have no interest in developing products suitable for Apple unless they're bribed heavily. I'd much rather have Apple focus on their software.
How to solve most of our problems: 1.Lots of nuclear plants. 2.Cure aging.
How, pray tell, did AMD invent the "Myth of the Megahertz"?
Consistently, since even the early 486 and Pentium days, AMD (and in fact also Cyrix) CPUs routinely beat Intel CPUs running at somewhat higher clock rates. With a small exception near the end of the Pentium III's lifetime and prior to the introduction of the Pentium 4, AMD CPUs have almost never been available with equivalent or higher raw clock rates than Intel's finest. They HAVE been available with performance matching or beating Intel's finest in many cases, but AMD has rarely ever been the winner in terms of raw clock rate. The one time they were, Intel's Netburst (Pentium 4) architecture was already well along in the development phase, Netburst was NOT a direct response to raw clock rates from AMD.
Intel CPUs have consistently been near the bottom of the barrel in terms of performance per clock cycle, with the exception of specialized low-cost/low-power CPUs.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
This comparison really makes me wonder about the Intel-based PowerMac replacement. What kind of processor are they going to put into that? The logical choice would seem to be the Conroe. There are rumors of a 3.3 GHz dual-cores being sent out later this month. Intel claims that Conroe will outperform Core Duo 2-1 on a performance-per-watt basis. So a 3.3 GHz Conroe might be as much as 3.6 times as fast (pure performance, it's ok for a desktop chip to consume twice as much juice as a laptop, right?) as a Core Duo. So if you take the iMac comparisons against the current G5s and extrapolate... well a PowerMac based on a Conroe could be a mighty beast. Give it 4 GB of RAM like the PowerMac in the comparison, and it should easily outperform the PowerMac (at least on non-Altivec tasks, but that's a different story.) Of course it's still going to have the stupid front side bus, albeit running at 1.0+ GHz with 4 MB of L2 cache.
Another possibility would be for Apple to wait for the Extreme Edition of the Conroe, the Kentsfield. That would give them four cores, like the current PowerMacs. It won't be out until 2007, and Apple seems anxious to switch everything over ASAP. So they could go with Woodcrest, basically Conroe for servers. This might let them put together a dual-cpu/dual-core setup like they have with the current PowerMacs. This kind of setup was demonstrated by Intel last fall. There were also rumors last year of Apple pressuring Intel to give them Woodcrest chips ahead of schedule.
And of course there's the more mundane question of what will they call the PowerMac replacement? They seem to want to get away from the Power prefix, while stressing the Pro tie-in to their Pro apps. So maybe Mac Pro? Seems too short. Maybe bring out the whole name, Macintosh Pro. Whatever it is, can it make people as upset as "MacBook" did?
The average human can see at 60 fps. What happens is that your eyes average what they see over 1/60 of a second, so if you start the 60 fps in time with your eyes, you could theoretically make out all 60 frames. What's likely to happen is that you see a blur at 60 fps because the show is out of time with your eyes. At 30fps, you have reliable vision of every frame. At any frame rate above 60, whether your monitor can show it or not (unlikely, and I haven't seen above 90) you will not be able to see each frame.
That would depend on the working set size for the given app.
512MB may be slightly cramping the style of the new imac, but it didn't look like any of Ars' benchmarks would need much more than that. Certainly 4.5GB isn't going to make any difference, and if you've been following Ars' articles, you'd know why that particular machine is so loaded. The CPU-bound, disk-bound, or graphics-bound benchmarks aren't going to notice the change in RAM amount. The photoshop test, being done on a fairly large image, might have seen some impact from the difference in available memory.
Given how heterogenous the systems are already, I'm not too concerned with a slight difference in memory size. Given the different instruction sets, execution hardware, cache layout, and memory controller, I think having only 512MB rather than a gig is unlikely to show up in the benchmarks or in most users' usage.
High-speed Road Trip (18.000KPH)
You're fabricating all of this.
Let's see. AMD creates the K5, and coins the PR rating precisely to fight the "MHz Myth." The K5 while having a superior, more modern design with better integer performance had an inferior FPU than the Pentium. This would plague AMD until the K7. The K6 line (K6-2, K6-3) carried with it the same superior integer performance, dropped the PR rating (there was a lot of backlash at the PR rating because of the "MHz Myth") in favor of its clockspeed, that never surpassed the Pentium 2. Then came the K7, and the K7 was clock-per-clock faster than the Pentium 3 up through Coppermine. AMD's clockrate outpaced Intel's simply because their architecture was better. With NetBurst Intel wanted to have high clockrates (not for the purposes of the MHz Myth, but that certainly helped) but for streaming performance. The NetBurst architecture was designed under the idea that Intel could produce 5GHz+ Pentium 4 processors with high-bandwidth RDRAM. The sacked FPU performance, created a huge pipeline, and cranked up clock speeds. Intel took the MHz Myth to the next dimension while trying to maximize throughput. This forced the K7 back into using PR ratings for Athlon XP and forward. When Intel couldn't increase their clockrate any further, what did they do? They increased the pipeline length and increased the clock speed. Making the "MHz Myth" all the worse. Ironically Intel has fallen victim to its own failed architecture and opted using PR ratings for their own new processors.
I have to disagree. OS X 10.4, as wonderful an OS as it is, uses LOTS of memory. Dashboard is a notorious hog, as is the core OS.
My G4/1.4 GHz is definitely much snappier at everything with a gig than 512.
I think these benchmarks are a little off, because nobody in their right mind would leave this machine at 512 MB in this day and age.
I read somewhere that they tried shooting the second season of the original Twilight Zone in 60 fps video, over 24 fps film, in order to save money. The experiment lasted six episodes, the result being so bad that they eventually ditched the idea and went back to 24 fps. It depends entirely on what mood the movie tries to create. Yes, frame rate matters. No, one isn't always better than the other.
I have discovered a truly marvelous demonstration of this post that this sig is too narrow to contain.
Jobs can't win.
He never claimed the new iMacs were 2-4 times as fast. Watch the keynote. He claimed that on the SPEC scores, which he said were key indicators of performance, they were 2-4 times as fast.
He then went on to say that the speed improvements won't be across the whole system, because other components (he singled out hard drives) aren't improved over the G5 models.
I say that he can't win because for years he put up Photoshop numbers, and many people around here said "show us the SPEC numbers!"
Now he puts up SPEC numbers and people miss the bit where he said that they weren't the whole story.
He didn't lie. He told the full picture, but so many people haven't watched the keynote and are rushing to judgement based on second-hand information.
It's still a benchmark, though! It's certainly not a game, which is what the comment I responded to and the lengthy discussion spinning off it seemed to think. The debate of whether >60 fps in glxgears is meaningful is ridiculous -- nobody sits and watches glxgears.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...