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.

Comments

Benchmarks, accuracy, and choice

[Space cowboy]

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.

Re:Benchmarks, accuracy, and choice

[AKAImBatman]

You've really just shown your bias haven't you? Absolutely 100% accurate, oh, unless they're not accurate.

I think you've missed his point. This is a common industry practice used for just about every piece of hardware and software on the market. To single Steve Jobs out for this practice rather than accepting it as the "norm" shows a distinct anti-Mac bias.

Steve Jobs may not have been lying, but he was most certainly being deliberately deceitful.

It's hard to be deceitful when it comes to something as nebulous as benchmarks. Every benchmark you run will tell a different story. The result is that you can pull a variety of different conclusions from the benchmarks depending on how you spin it. Given that Steve Jobs is the CEO of Apple, we can expect that he will spin the benchmarks positively. On the flip-side, we can expect that the Mac haters will spin the benchmarks negatively. The ones to really listen to are the moderates who tell us whether we're generally being delivered what we're promised or not.

Re:Benchmarks, accuracy, and choice

[pi42]

This isn't entirely accurate -- most people can tell the difference between 25fps and 60fps in a computer game, while they can't on a film or video. I believe 3dfx released an infamous demo back in the day with a spinning cube at 30fps and 60fps and you could always tell the difference.

What's the difference? Video and film have motion blur, which makes for smooth transitions between frames whereas games display things in discrete frames with no blur whatsoever.

Ever tried waving your hand underneath a strobe light going at 30 cycles/sec? That's 30fps yet the motion still looks strange, since it's like you're seeing discrete frames and not continous motion burred between frames.

Re:Benchmarks, accuracy, and choice

[djohnsto]

While the dev systems uses intel GMA900 integrated graphics, both the MacBook and new iMac use ATI Radeon X1600 chips.

The iBook and mini may use integrated graphics, but they will probably use newer chipsets with graphics faster than the GMA900.

Notable, regarding Windows

[daveschroeder]

http://arstechnica.com/reviews/hardware/imac-cored uo.ars/7

I tried to boot from a Windows XP installer CD. No dice. I then tried booting from a Vista installer DVD (Build 5270). Again, no dice. When holding down the Option key, the only icon that appeared was for the iMac's internal hard drive. Holding down the D key to try to force booting off of the optical drive failed as well. With the Vista DVD, the optical drive churned a bit and the iMac hesitated as though it were contemplating whether it wanted to boot the foreign OS. Soon afterwards, the familiar gray Apple logo appeared on screen and Mac OS X finished booting.

The new Intel Macs don't have an EFI shell, so there's no way to directly get at the EFI. Someone is ultimately going to have to write and/or use an existing EFI shell to tell the EFI to boot from alternate media to get things going. Naturally, running Windows under virtualization, with technologies like Intel's VT/Vanderpool, which the Core Duo in the new Macs does support, are going to be the way to go for most users anyway.

Re:Why?

[TooMuchEspressoGuy]

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"?

Re:Watch boot video here.

[shippo]

There's obviously something seriously wrong with that G5 if it is taking that amount of time to boot. My G5 boots in roughly the same amount of time as that Intel iMac.

Shut up!

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Waiting for the second generation

[G4from128k]

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.

Re:Waiting for the second generation

[geoff2]

I think the 68k-PowerPC transition is not quite apt. You are correct that the first generation of PPC boxes were not nearly as nice as the second generation boxes, which had much more extensive changes than just the processor. But I think there was a lot more room for improvement in the last 68K boxes versus the PC state of the art at the time than there is in the last PPC boxes versus the PC state of the art. The NuBus expansion card bus versus the PCI bus is just one example. Both the last PPC boxes and the first Intel boxes have the latest and greatest interfaces such as USB2 and PCI Express.

In addition, the first Intel box is not a motherboard that Apple slapped together on its own, like it did for the first PPC boxes. It is a state-of-the-art Intel motherboard with all the latest doodads. Sure, Apple could stick in a fastre graphics card or hard drive, but the motherboard support chips are all modern. I think the next rev of the MacBook Pro will include Firewire 800, which I assume Apple couldn't integrate into the MacBook Pro motherboard in time to meet their ship date, but that's more of an incremental change than was included in the second-generation PPC boxes. (And don't forget the problems with the then-new PCI-bus Macs. Networking was so broken -- remember the Open Transport fiasco? The brand-new networking architecture that wasn't ready at the time the 7200/7500/8500 were released and which those new machines relied on, MacTCP having been deliberately obsoleted? It took several months after the boxes were shipped for *any* PPP dialing software to work at all with the Mac, and it took more than a year after that until most of the more significant networking bugs to be quashed.)

Steve doesn't lie

[palad1]

He just momentarily bends reality to his will.

He's Q, with a turtleneck and a pair of jeans.

Spanning

[ronanbear]

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.

Don't people WTFK??? Speed claims were qualified!

[Jewdass]

Who here actually watched the keynote? Show of hands? I know I did.

Let's all go to www.apple.com/quicktime/qtv/mwsf06/ and load the keynote up to 1:07:00.

Steve Jobs is completely up front about which testsproduced the numbers (SPECint_rate2000 and SPEC_fp2000) and outright says "Now, everything is not going to run 2-3x, the discs aren't 2-3x faster, etc." He makes it very clear that his numbers are based off of these two benchmarks. He claims they are the most important benchmarks of performance, which is debatable, but they are certainly a fair test of raw cpu power. Other than the chip and motherboard, the only other significant component that has changed is the GPU, going from a Radeon x600 to an x1600. Does anyone disagree that this is in the 2-3x faster range?

All in all, people are making a mountain out of a molehill rather than checking the source of the numbers. god bless the internet.

-justinb

amount of ram in benchmark

[DietFluffy]

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?