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Intel Mac Performance Behind Hype
Barry Norton writes "Steve Jobs, at the MacWorld tradeshow, boasted: 'the new iMac [with] Intel processor is two to three times faster than the iMac G5.' MacWorld (the publication) has been putting the iMacs through their paces. The results are a good deal less impressive than Steve's boast, showing an average performance increase of 10 to 25 per cent while performing a series of everyday tasks with software specially designed for the new systems." Ars Technica had another perspective on the new systems earlier this week.
Company performs benchmarks to show product in best light!
From http://www.apple.com/imac/intelcoreduo.html:
2. Testing conducted by Apple in December 2005 using preproduction 20-inch iMac units with 2GHz Intel Core Duo; all other systems were shipping units. All scores are estimated.SPEC is a registered trademark of the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation (SPEC); see www.spec.org for more information. Benchmarks were compiled using the IBM compiler and a beta version of the Intel compiler for Mac OS.
3. Testing conducted by Apple in December 2005 using preproduction 20-inch iMac units with 2GHz Intel Core Duo; all other systems were shipping units. All of the iMac and iMac G5 systems ran beta Universal version of Modo. All other applications were beta versions.
And since actual application performance has been subjective since the dawn of time, how is this surprising?
I mean, we're talking about a company that said no one wanted flash players until they made one, that no one wanted to watch video on an iPod until they made an iPod that played video, and that said all x86 architecture and CISC processors sucked until they switched to them.
And you know what? All of the above statements had significant elements of truth to them. Apple is doing nothing more than showing its products, accurately insofar as it goes, in the best possible light. Is this the least bit stunning?
Shocked, SHOCKED I am, to hear that Steve may have exaggerated the performance claims!
What compiler does Apple use? As they are starting from scratch, they should be able to optimise for this specific chip without taking backward compatibility into account...
10 ?"Hello World" life was simple then
Steve Jobs said that he was talking about the processors being faster...and he specifically said not everything is going to be faster like the hard drives and memory etc etc. Just the processors which is why he showed the SPECmarks or whatever this phantom benchmark that, to my knowledge, isn't a free download from anywhere. Or was I the only one that heard him prefacing the results?
Oh well, let the Mac bashing continue, blood is in the water.
"Leo Fender was in a 'state of grace' when he designed the Stratocaster." -- Paul Reed Smith
Despite the switch to Intel CPUs, the time honored tradition of "Apple benchmarks" continues :)
Steve Jobs was reporting improvments in CPU benchmarks, but the article refers to application benchmarks.
The CPU is going to be doing different things from those benchmarks in those applications- and may not even be the bottleneck in any given "real world" task.
Now whether Steve should have demonstrated "real world" improvements is up for debate, but all he presented were CPU benchmarks. He made no claim about application performance.
Lots of people here have run Linux or a Unix variant on very similar hardware. Surely they knew already the kind of performance they would get out of it, since OS X is basically unix under the covers. I don't think this should really be a surprise to many.
Apparently nobody watched the Keynote, in which Steve himself said that other components (hard disk, memory, etc) were not faster, so the overall experience would not be as fast as the 2-3x numbers he posted. Based on the specInt numbers he shows, sure, it's a 2-3 times improvement, but even he caveated it!
If this were digg I'd call for a "No digg!" right about now.
--- witty signature
Try it using only things that have changed, and you'll notice the difference. But as soon as you introduce something that hasn't changed, such as reading the contents of a folder, you'll bog it down. It's only natural for Apple to showcase that which has changed for the better.
AC's modded -6. I don't see you, I don't mod you, anything you say is lost. Don't like it? Don't be a coward.
But what was more significant was his frank acknowledgement that Photoshop operating via Rosetta wasn't going to be usable by professionals. The people jumping on the accusation of hype bandwagon need to take those comments into consideration. It's not often that on a new product rollout something is said that directly translates into "Hey, don't go out and buy this right now."
it should be noted that these are all single-threaded benchmarks so the second core doesn't help that much.
it should be interesting how these machines compare doing more things at once or running multi-threaded tasks.
"Sideshow" Steve Jobs is not above a little showmanship. I mean it's part of his repertoire, being Apple's head man and biggest booster. So he goes out and whips up interest in his products and engages in a little verbal sleight-of-hand. It's not an outright lie:
From MacWorld: Instead, our tests found the new 2.0GHz Core Duo iMac takes rougly 10 to 25 percent less time than the G5 iMac to perform the same native application tasks, albeit with some notable exceptions. (If you'd prefer, that makes the Core Duo iMac 1.1 to 1.3 times as fast.) And we also found that applications that aren't yet Intel-native--which must run using Apple's Rosetta code-translation technology--tend to run half as fast as the same applications running natively on the iMac G5.
Not blazingly faster, but faster nonetheless. And who's really going to notice? Graphic designers and CAD people maybe, but the casual user isn't really going to notice the pickup in speed. So perhaps it's a bit of exaggeration but in the end it isn't hurting anyone.
GetOuttaMySpace - The Anti-Social Network
Nobody has tried a vector desktop computer.
Could have killed all the floating point benchmarks.
You are bound to get upsides and downsides to everything new. While it might not be 3-4 times the performance per say, it is certainly faster and not much pricier than the predecessors...I would say thats a good thing (damn, I sound like Martha Stewart here).
We cant complain really, now we get even better compatibility in and with our hardware. Remember all the time Mac users have wanted windows compatibility for certain software solutions because of their work? Now Mac lovers can enjoy future compatibility with ease.
What this world is coming to - is for you and me to decide.
And the only reason I expected it to be any faster was due to the clockspeed being much higher on many of Intel's chips (Yes, clock speed doesn't matter, but there comes a point in difference where it does make a difference). Only thing I've really expected was consideribly better power usage (for Laptops).
In undeveloped countries, the consumer controls the market. In capitalist America, the market controls you.
Yes, Mac users have a well-deserved reputation for being fanatical (and sometimes even for good reason). But then along comes a story like this one that smears Apple for no particularly good reason and without much of an argument, and you have to ask yourself WTF.
Um, it's pretty safe to say that even in pure cpu performance the intel processor is NOT 2-3x faster then the G5's overall.
Steve probably just showed just one category of a processor benchmark where intel exceeded it and probably played around a bit more with it to make it look better.
Hmmm... Pie...
Steve Jobs during the keynote at MacExpo when presenting Photoshop running on Rosetta:
Speed is a marketing issue. Real world performance not surprisingly lower.
memomo: free web based language trainer DE-EN-ES-FR-IT
But when Apple users did the same thing to bash Intel in the past, it was OK.
And even though Mac carried on a subversion PC program for a while, they stopped a while ago. As the OS changed, the code changed, and they had to start all over.
Somehow, I can't help but feel this article is encouraging Microsoft-fanboy flaming.
Let's reserve judgement for "Mac Pro" (that is, the pro level desktop machine) when it comes out. There will be no excuses at all if that machine does not kick serious ass.
Obviously, Slashdot is not prepared for the speed of your fingers. Had it been running on a new Mac with a core duo, it could have kept up you would have had first post. Drat!
Benchmarks are always hyped by a company. But the fact is, my 20" iMac is noticeably faster than the dual 2ghz G5 it replaced. Anyone who believes subjective benchmarks anymore is naive.
Or just listened to their marketing department
Shouldn't they have thrown in comparing single core G5 to a dual core G5 so we could tell what performance improvement was due to having 2 cores and what was due to being x86? We need to factor out Amdahl's Law here.
Apparently the iMovie compression/export times were "dramatically slower" on the intel machine. They didn't list the results, stating that it was likely a bug; probably just the lack of Altivec support though. I think the value of Altivec on the PowerPC will only become more apparent over time.
The Core Duo is about twice as fast because, as Steve said, each core is about as fast as a G5 and there are two of them.
This means that for most tasks which are single-threaded (searching for text in BBEdit) there's going to be a modest or zero speed increase. For those rare tasks that are written to be multithreaded it'll be ~1.8x as fast (thread overhead, bus contention, etc.)
I'm not surprised either by Steve's stated SPEC benchmarks or real world app benchmarks. That's how concurrency works in the real world whether it's on a dual-core Mac running OSX or a dual-core Athlon running Linux.
and the FUD goes on.
in context: "Twin Power
The Intel Core Duo and a whole new architecture give iMac up to twice the horsepower it had previously, accelerating your digital life 1."
http://www.apple.com/uk/imac/
On these benchmarks we see the Intel chip taking a slight lead nearly across the board. Considering that these are the first products after a major archetecture change, I think Apple is handling the transition smoothly so far with the only major holdup being the availibility of native binaries for third party applications.
The reviewer seems to be hung up on the way that some benchmarks are 30% better while some are nearly equal to the G5 predecessor. This shouldn't be surprising. In any comparison between closely matched AMD and Intel chips, you always see a variation as to which processor is best depending on what type of task you are performing. Why should Intel vs. Power be any different?
My God! It's full of eval()'s.
Yes, Steve said that processors are faster in 2 specific benchmark tests. /. to do that.
Yes, the marketing on the website is misleading. (2x, 4x)
It's bad enough that Apple and clueless media are taking things out of their context, we don't need
Everyone on slashdot, I presume, knows at least the basics of how to benchmark a CPU, system, process whatever...
We don't process media feeds on IT specs as facts.
If you don't know what AltaVista is (was), get off my lawn.
Since when? I have never known Steve Jobs to overhype Apple products with fictitious performance claims and grand statements like "Super Computer for your Desktop".
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
There wouldn't be complaints about the performance if Steve hadn't made a big deal about the performance. Twice as fast as the iMac G5, four times as fast as the Powermac G4. And that actually doesn't sound like an outrageous claim, since it's replacing a single CPU with two CPUs, and OSX has a history of making good use of dual-CPU systems, so it's reasonable to believe it could really be that amazing.
And, well, it doesn't really meet those expectations.
People don't react well when their expectations aren't met. That's only normal. It's not a biggie.
Performance apart, it seems that good ol' Apple is charging $1300 for a machine that costs around $900(according to market research firm iSuppli) to them. A markup of around 45% in a ultra-competitive market like PC hardware!
Build cheap, claim big, advertise huge...no wonder the stock market can't get enough of Steve Jobs. I'd envy a man who has the ability to charge above market prices for a near commodity product(a PC) and in the process command a cultish following among the buyers.
I don't understand why Jobs would say something false that we know will be quickly tested and analyzed in order to verify that claim?
Wouldn't it have been better for Apple's credibility to just say it is a significant improvement and will be faster than its predecessor?
Public Enemy was right - Don't believe the hype.
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
Sure it is. Apple doesn't want "pros" to go out and buy 20" iMacs, hook up a second 20" display for dual-head (YES, it does this) and be happy campers, since the iMac runs photoshop et. al. at the same approximate speed as dual G5 powermacs...not to mention, enjoy the self-service program for iMacs so they can get back to work faster. Then they wouldn't run out and place orders on "Mac Pros" or whatever Apple calls the G5 replacement, and sales of the current G5 dualies would be hurt more than they already are. Who wants a 2Ghz Dual G5 for $2k, when you can have the same speed AND a 20" display, for $1700? $300 comes within $50-100 of buying you an on-sale Dell 20" second display, or extra ram, or a big fat fast firewire drive, or or...
Hence the "not really useable yet for pros" comments from Steve. When universal binaries come out(prediction: Apple has told Adobe + others not to do so until the "pro" intel macs come out), intel-iMac pro users will be laughing, while other "pros" are waiting 2-3 months for their ordered machines to show up. The G5 replacement will be faster than a current iMac, but it'll also be noisier, 2x-3x the price, and with no huge display built-in...
Please help metamoderate.
...until somepone puts a POWER CPU and a Cell multicore on the same mobo. We'll see some competition back in the desktop market then.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_3#GNU.2FLinux
The Playstation 3 will run Linux. For some types of graphic applications (Blender comes to mind) it should have really excellent performance. Just ssh over and go nuts.
Given that graphics has always been one of Apple's fortes, using something like the cell isn't such a crazy idea.
Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.
sulli
RTFJ.
Steve may have prefaced his remarks, but the 2x speed claims are mentioned several times on the Apple website. http://www.apple.com/imac/ In most places they do include a footnote disclaimer or say "up to" 2x, but the boldface text on the intro page clearly says "Rev up your digital life at speeds twice as fast as the previous iMac." There's also a blurb about a "whole new architecture".
Normally people say "upto" 4 times faster etc. Because it really does depend on the software mix and application. This is going to especially be true of dual core or dual CPU systems.
I for one see no great conspiracy here.
Think Deeply.
Benchmarks tend to show extremes which are useful for hype. Seeing a 10-20% increase in everyday things doesn't sound too bad to me. Not as much as I'd like to have seen, of course, but it's a good start IMO.
Hexy - a strategy game for iPhone/iPod Touch
Get a bunch of Mac experts together and watch out for the low-flying misinformation! I don't recall Jobs claiming the disk drives were 4-5X faster, so why would I/O-bound benchmarks be a fair comparison of processor and memory speed? I can understand MacWorld not wanting to have customers be disappointed by the typically less-than-4X performance gain of their spanking new Core Duo iMac, but let's describe the whole picture, okay? For example, BBEdit did run 1.26X faster on the Intel iMac and it only uses one processor. Until such time as BBEdit and friends are multi-threaded, that leaves a whole 'nuther processor core to work on other things.
SHEESH!
I'd love to see some tests with Pro Apps like Apeture and Final Cut Pro. The other telling one would be Maya for rendering. Most people don't need their word processor to run faster but higher end graphics software needs speed. The Apple tests seemed to lean on the side of graphics intensive software so I'm curious about those numbers. I did play with Apeture on one. It was a single chip dual core. Opening files and some functions hesitated but we're talking RAW files on a single chip machine. I was pretty impressed and I'm not a Mac person. I'm sure if most of that was Apeture and not the machine but it's pretty amazing either way. There definately seems to be an overall speed increase no matter who tests them. These are transitional machines and they are selling basically for what current Macs of a similar speed do. I have to believe once they settle in and the chips are better supported they will be much faster. One of the biggest benefits no one hardly talks about is hardware multitasking. I think if you started a shot rendering say in Maya then started working on a model in Modo you'd find little or no slow down if Maya was set to single node. Normally the apps would be stepping on each other. I haven't had a chance to try running multiple apps since I haven't had a chance to build out a dual chip PC system but there's a definate benefit over software multitasking. I'd give the new Mac a year to settle in before debating speed too seriously. Remember the debacle with the P4s when they came out? They cost a fortune and inspite of denials at the time turned out to be much slower because the apps weren't taking advantage of the P4 architecture. Apple switched to a whole new chipset. Having them come out faster is impressive on it's own. Even the apps that are called native I'm sure need refinements. Most of these aren't going to be optimized for dual chips. Non pro apps normally either don't take advantage or don't take full advantage. With dual core the new standard that will change.
...will the upcoming MacBookPro be better than my aging 2002 Titanium PowerBook? I didn't buy an iMac G5, and if I did, I wouldn't be looking at a new Intel iMac already...
Similarly, importing 100 photos into iPhoto 6 took 35 percent less time on the Intel-based iMac, and exporting from iPhoto to a QuickTime movie took 25 percent less time. But exporting iPhoto images to a Web page took only 8 percent less time. And exporting those images to files actually took 9 percent more time on the Intel-based Macs.
Few of these tasks are processor bound. They are either bus, network, or harddisk bound.
Furthermore, I'd be curious as to the ability of these new iMacs to do two of these things at the same time, versus the old G5 iMac. Most people don't benchmark their machines, they run multiple apps at the same time, they listen to music while ripping CDs while exporting photos.
Dual processors (cores) are a tricky business. You need multiple threads or multiple apps to really see if there is a speedup, and few of these benchmarks even acknowledge that.
Not that I'm convinced this machine is a godsend, however, its easy to pick out the flaws in these intial benchmark's methodology.
WhiteWolf666 an exBush supporter. All you new-school,compassionate,save the children Republicans can rot in hell
...is this in any way related to the dip in stock price? It seems that when the stock is soaring, everyone is a fanboy. When the stock is tanking (as is much of the tech sector at the moment), there are many nay-sayers. This is funny to me. Kind of like, kicking the man while he is down.
"Give up hope, dreams are for suckers."
People want a number. It's easier for the average joe to wrap his head around a simple metric than something nebulous such as "considerably faster."
This guy's the limit!
holy cow, he sighted the SPEC ratings... and in fact, it is about that much faster when compiling code which shows that the statement is accurate.
Your right.
Yet You were moded a troll.
Steve jobs said the processors faster but not the drives and the memory etc, so the whole machine wouldn't be. Its not slower, thats for sure.
Didn't they used to say that the iMac G5 was faster than a PC with an Intel chip? Love that cyclical logic.
Nobody has tried a SuperCPU desktop computer.
Could have killed all the Cell benchmarks.
It took Intel until now to come up with something a little more powerful than a G5 that runs cooler than a G5. And they had to go dual-core and next-generation 65-nanometer to do it. This does not reflect well on the x86 architecture. But now that Steve is committed to x86, he seems to have resorted to citing the old tried-and-true PC-fan-boy benchmark, SPEC. Steve really was right about the G5 being faster before. If Intel's latest and greatest dual-core is only 10-15% faster than the single-core G5, he was spot-on about performance claims before the architecture change.
Nice machines though.
Interesting how all the WinTel fans used to use SPEC benchmarks to bash Macs and the PowerPC processor. Now, in some ironic twist of fate, the same people are using the fact that SPECmarks are fairly useless to say that Apple is lying. The bottom line is that the benchmarks are useless except for people doing specialized tasks. The amount of work you can get done in a day has not changed much unless you do serious rendering work, finite element work, or something similarly CPU intensive.
I understand that it is not really a fair fight, but they are directly comparing chips available in that specific model, and to the best of my knowledge, the dual-core G5s did not make it into the iMacs. If Apple wanted to see what chips were the fastest bar none, yeah, then they would put a dual-core G5 vs. a Core Duo.
Just "gittin-r-done," day after day.
Funny, most of the posts on this story make exactly that point. Crap stories like this remove a lot of the value from reading slashdot. Maybe I'll start looking for my "stuff that matters" elsewhere.
I'm going to encourage everyone to start replying to crap stories with "mod STORY down" comments. I've had enough. If we all start doing this, I can quickly check the comments for a long list of 0-moderated "mod STORY down" comments and just skip the story. We'd be doing each other a favor. The 'editors' are going to kill slashdot with this kind of crap. Surely there's some actual news, or even some interesting tech-related web page to look at somewhere, instead of this rehashed garbage?
Of all the people who have submitted stories, there has to be *one* that isn't a dupe, right?
Or should I cynically assume that this story ( and others ) are duplicated based on the number of posts/pageviews they generate ?
So the MacIntels using the Core Duo, seem to be faster than the G5, but not by much (at least in real life). From the keynote we learnt that MacBook Pros are also faster than PowerBooks G4. I wonder, in real life, how faster will the successors of the iBooks G4 be, since they will most likely use the Core Solo? I am really curious, since the iBooks G4 uses chips that are not significantly different from the Powerbooks G4. Will the Core Solo be up to the job?
I'm waiting for a comparison on apps like Photoshop on a MacBook Pro using Rosetta versus running natively on a PowerBook G4. If the MacBook Pro runs Photoshop faster in Rosetta than the G4 can run it, I'll be super impressed and definitely be placing my order.
if you have any taste or intellect at all you will mod this post up after I say:
Won't the mac just die already? It'll never beat a PC.
How much does the extra core help here? Someone needs to fire up CHUD, turn off one of the procs and re-run the benchmarks.
So a Dual core 2.0Ghz Intel is only 1.2-1.3 times faster then the SINGLE CORE 2.1Ghz G5? Seems to solve the issue once and for all - the PPC is a better chip as far as RAW power goes. The only reason Apple went Intel was for the laptop chips (typing this on my G4 iBook). Lets face it, the PowerBooks, et. al. were getting behind the curve as far as the CPU went. To bad seeing as how the G5 is a better CPU when it comes to RAW power.
Still, I plan on getting a new Mac Book Pro.
I think another pronunciation, other than "half fast" may be in order.
Tim
yeah, so what did you expect? that was all marketing babble, this is just the start ...
... ... yer regular digg post ... yawn ...
nothing here, move on
It blew away MMX back when it was first released, and was somewhat better than SSE.
It isn't really much better than SSE2 at all.
The issue here is that Apple had years to do hand optimization of key routines for Altivec, they haven't had as much time to optimize for SSE2.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
You speak as though the stock price is not linked to Apple's performance... Like it is a seperate entity.
Maybe, just maybe, the stock price IS linked to Apple's performance.
Maybe, just maybe, the stock is lower because of performance, and hence people are "kicking the man" because of performance. Not we're kicking apple because the stock is low.
Modesty is one of life's greatest attributes
I doubt that Apple's move to Intel had a great deal to do with performance, and I dislike this fact being used as a key selling point for the iMac. If you refer to the "definitive" G5 vs. everyone else benchmarks at http://www.anandtech.com/mac/showdoc.aspx?i=2436 it is apparent that the G5 is largely comparable to offerings from AMD and Intel (admitedly the new Intel Core Duo is not benchmarked) and although the G5 is, in many cases, not the fastest chip, it is similar. The increases of 2-3x in performance between the G5 and MacIntel iMac are a consequence of having a dual core chip (and being a generation ahead of the G5) besides, Apple could have feasibly used the dual-core G5 chips that they've had at their disposal for a while now. Any Mac zealot will argue that their PowerPC Mac is "just" as fast as an intel based system, but performance is NOT the issue. This is why the iMac was updated first, it is a consumer product, supporting Apple's fledgling attempts to enter the living room (consider front row ) - it desperately needs Intel's brand name associated with its hardware.
The significance of this new product is long term and cannot be underestimated.
Apple finanlly has penetrated the consumer electronics market with the iPod, and their brand recognition and image could not be better. Apple has shoehorned its way into the psyche of the common man. It now has to bring its key product, the mac, to the masses. Consumers will be attracted from a design perspective and because it shares the same logo as their iPod, the OS is a little different to windows, but now at least you have the reasurrance of dual booting into windows (I'd like proof of this concept, but I'm sure it will come) and the processor gives the security of a well recognised brand name (consider brand strengh of Intel vs. AMD). In the future, I doubt that IBM's die shrunk Power chips will share the low power consumption that I expect Intel will bring, and many concepts for great products will never be realised. I'll be interested to see if the new Intel chips can match up to the PowerPC altivec-ised vDSP FFT's , but in a way I don't care. It is an exciting time to be a Mac user, as more people join the fantastic experience that we have had for so long, and new software and hardware comes our way. Either way, they're finally here and it will be interesting to see what the future holds.
Nothing sucks like a Vax, nothing blows like a PowerMac G4
You make some good points, but I feel that perhaps you've picked the wrong words, or else you simply have some inaccuracies in there: such as G5s running under "software emulation". Also "subversion PC program" -- I have absolutely no idea to what you're referring there, although I'd be intrigued to find out.
Worth pointing out here is that the PowerPC spec has always inclued 64-bit instructions alongside the 32-bit instructions, and has always included support for both 32-bit and 64-bit addressing modes. The G5 was the first processor in the series to actually implement those, but they've been part of the standard for a while now.
What this meant was that, when the G5 first came out, it mostly computed 32-bit memory addresses. The compilers were available, however, to make use of the 64-bit mathematic instructions available in the new processor, and those could be used from OS X 10.2.7 (the first version available on the G5) onwards. Well, on any OS really, they're just CPU instructions, they're not dependant on the OS.
OS X 10.4 has support for 64-bit addressing at the core. The software can also handle 32-bit addressing: it just promotes the 32-bit value from the 32-bit-oriented client process to a 64-bit value internally when it needs to get at a real (64-bit) memory address for mapping purposes. The kernel handles this all internally. Also, from what I've seen (in the Darwin source code) anything that would benefit from a ppc64-specific implementation gets it. Note that in C code, not much needs to change: the 'long long' 64-bit datatype is available under both ppc32 and ppc64 architectures, it's jus that ppc64 can fit such a value into a single register, while ppc32 uses two adjacent ones. The only potential problem is that the 'long' datatype is 64-bit on a G5, since OS X uses the LP64 model (Longs & Pointers are 64-bit).
Beyond those two things (CPU math instructions with 64-bit operands, 64-bit memory addressing), what else is there to expect? Those that think '64-bit-ness' translates to a performance gain for anything other than 64-bit datatypes are going to be disappointed; 32-bit instructions don't get executed two-at-a-time or anything like that.
-Q
maybe I worded it wrong...I agree with you, the stock price IS linked to Apple's performance. The stock price of AAPL (and most other tech stocks) has been down this week. Coincidentally, there have been lots of negative Apple stories this week. RSS is implemented wrong in one of their products, Privacy issues with iTunes and Intel on Mac is overhyped. However, for the last several months as I have watched my share value almost double I have seen positive story after story after story in the media about Apple (especially Slashdot).
"Give up hope, dreams are for suckers."
For one, UI responsiveness and multitasking. I know that if I've got an application soaking up all of 1 processor, I'm not going to cause it to go belly-up by shoving it in the background and surfing the web while some single-threaded app happily churns away on that thread.
<Mac Snobbery>Oh, and that reminds me of the nicest feature of OS X: That pop-ups can't take the focus away from you. I hate hitting spacebar, thinking I'm typing into Notepad, and actually I've agreed to a window that flashed up on my screen for about a half a second and I'm wondering if I just bought viagra.</Mac Snobbery>
Right on both counts, and I think these are the reasons:
People who actually will buy a top-of-the-line system because a few extra FLOPS saves them hours and hours of time running photoshop filters are going to see the improvements because by and large, the applications that they use are designed to leverage multiple processors. If they're not, they need to bitch at their vendors, because that's ostensibly why Photoshop costs x-hundred dollars.
People like me, who just want to run World of Warcraft in the foreground and have safari open to look things up on Thottbot as necessary and surf the web during transit, are going to notice the UI responsiveness. Nothing's more annoying than when I can't click on Start for 10 seconds because I'm ripping a CD, or the Java VM is starting up for the first time at the behest of a web application running in the background.
Single-threaded performance is slightly overrated. No task I do, except compilation, gaming, and XSLT transformations, is going to benefit heavily from being twice as fast, even on a single thread. If you stuck a gigabyte of ram into my circa-2001 1GHz P3, set it up next to my office 3.2GHz P4 with HT disabled, and had me take the Pepsi Challenge, I would be hard-pressed to tell the difference in most of the applications I use without getting a stop watch or running Doom 3.
It would be nice to see some CPU-only benchmarks, like the integer and floating point benchmarks posted on the site. The new hardware is all about using Intel CPU's, it makes more sense comparing the differences between the PowerPC and Intel cores.
Actually, it doesn't reflect well on intel architecture. I'm sure everyone by now knows that AMD processors run faster and are not as hot. Apple's switch had more to do with Intel agreeing to do other work on things like chipsets and board design than processors, IMO. Otherwise, why would Apple have chosen Intel as their supplier?
From a email to the xcode-users list...
...also from a blog entry...
In our tests, a large C++ project finishes a full clean build slightly (a matter of seconds) sooner on a Quad Tower than it does on a Core Duo iMac. So the 2-core Intel is only slightly slower than the 4-core Quad for full builds.
Warning: every project is different, and the dynamics of disk and cache speed and latency, processor saturation, process threading, and system memory will affect your results significantly. But we are very pleased with the IDE and compiler performance on the Intel chip.
gcc is certainly faster. Subversion compiled in 5 minutes, 16 seconds on my dual 2.7 g5 with 1.5 gigs of ram. It compiles in 4:32 on the 1.83ghz intel mac with 1 gig of ram. Which makes me happy.
Note to self... mac guys are vicous... never talk down steve jobs with perceived common sense (common sense for computer nerds that is!) without absolute proof or risk get modded down to hell!
e st1/index.php
I personally thought it was common sense that the intel dual core processors were not 2-3x then the last generation of g5 processors. Here is why:
1)Intel's dualcore on pc has been less efficient then amd's. AMD's dual core at best came to about 70-80% efficiency. Intel's is worse so your not definately not getting 2x the performance.
2)The PPC970 (or whatever the latest version of the G5 was) by ibm is hella more ipc then the p4 and is probably near that of the yonah which is core used in the new dual core chips for apples.
3)Ars Technica (cpu analyzation gods of the interweb said so a week ago and the article was posted on this site).
4) This article supports that theory:
http://www.macworld.com/2006/01/features/imaclabt
Even among cpu heavy tests (filtration ones) we are seeing a increase of 1.84x on the best test. It's pretty safe to say that the average performance increase is not 2-3x, eh?
Also it seems one of my grandchilds (thread wise! i got no real kids!) of the modded down post mentioned his G4 laptop. Well that certainly is interesting but the G4 is vastly inferior to the G5 so that is expected. Not to mention numerous chipset and ram improvements to go along with it.
Hmmm... Pie...
I don't even think author wanted this to be rated funny. He is quite correct and is correcting the pointing out a flaw in the grandparent's post.
Hmmm... Pie...
"The results are a good deal less impressive than Steve's boast"
Whoa, now. Not that that's ever happened before.
You need a FREE iPod Nano
The hard-core Mac fanboys are really hurt by Apple's switch to Intel processors. I expect at least a few more months of stories dinging the new Macs as a last ditch rear-guard action against the change.
The export speed is aided by the fact that the memory interface and the actual memory is quite a bit faster.
Hmmm... Pie...
... for some time.
Really, be serious. They take a dual core - which is much like 2 seperate CPUs - and throw a bunch of non-optimized, single-threaded applications at it.
*NO WONDER* that the CPU does not perform 2-3 times as fast as the PowerPC; one of the two cores can't on his own. Steve never told us that applications will be 2-3 times faster. He just showed some flops. If people still can't understand a benchmark *phew*
In fact, the 10-20% increase in spead is exactly the gain that one would expect who knows that MacOS X usually takes 10-20% system load when doing any transfer task (like memory-to-disk and stuff); so it seems to me that this is what happened with those programs.
Also, the article does not give any suspicions why the architecture performes so bad, no background information about the hardware at all (like, jikes, completly different motherboard architecture, different bus system).
In short: from the technical aspect, bad article.
PLEASE, guys, next time, throw in some common sense and benchmark at least one real multiprocessor optimized program, i.e. Cinema4D rendering.
From Steve's keynote:
And we've got the numbers which speak for themselves, so let's take a look at them. The iMac G5 and the iMac Core Duo. Let's take a look at SPECmarks. SPEC2000, integer performance, the most important benchmark of computer performance: 10.2 on the iMac G5, 32.6 on the iMac Core Duo. 3.2X. And these are using the best compilers on each: IBM's compilers on the G5, and Intel's compilers on the Core Duo. For floating point, 13.0 on the G5, 27.1 on the Core Duo, for 2.1. So, in the most important benchmarks of performance, 2-3X. Now everything's not going to run 2-3X. You know the disks aren't 2-3X faster, etc., but on the most important benchmarks, 2 to 3 times faster.
What, you say? Everyone here bitching about Steve Jobs and his "hype" didn't even watch the keynote where Jobs honestly described the new Mac performance? I bet they don't read the articles either...
"Sufferin' succotash."
The test show two things: 1) Steve Jobs' comment about "the disks, bus and memory are not faster" was importent. Listen to the talk again carfully. He DOES say this clearly although not as many times nor as loudly as the "4X" number was said. 2) That it is hard to test a multi-CPU system. The tests that they ran were ran mostly on just one of the two CPUs. A better test of a multi-core system would be to run all the benchmarks at one, all eight or ten of them and publish the total wall-clock time from start to the time the last test finished. A multi-core system would then show it's advantage. In the next couple years we will have eight-core systems available. Sun is already shiping 8-core SPARC chips, Intel will follow. With four or eight cores, relistic testing will be even harder and simple XCPU benchmarks even more meaningless. But is this the way users use systems? Do they actually transcode video in the background while they surf the web and listen to iTunes all at once? I do this but I might be in the minority.
Did you read the article? The only non-Rosetta result that was slower was iPhoto (export to files). It came in at a "dramatic" 0.91x as fast as the G5. Well, I wouldn't call that dramatically slower.
Why was it slower? It's probably spending the vast majority of its time writing data to files. And guess what's the bottleneck there? The hard disk. The disk in the new Intel iMac is most likely slower than the disk in the older G5 (non-iSight) iMac. this post at the Ars forum explains why. Apparently older iMacs had Maxtor disks, newer ones have Western Digital. And according to that post, the Maxtors are faster. Case closed.
As for the other tests, it would be interesting to see the results with varying (but equal) RAM configurations -- say, 512M, 1G, 2G. Does the Intel machine get faster relative to the G5 when both have more memory? Or does the memory help the G5 more? Does extra memory help Rosetta? What about running Rosetta apps multiple times?
It's a shame that none of the current reviews have done such a thorough enough test yet. It should be fairly easy to do, and vastly more informative!
Say hello to zMac.
Since, as you point out, Apple's numbers are probably misleading, there is all the more reason to measure it objectively. And the article endevours to perform just this useful service.
Why would there need to be stun involved to motivate this??
Wait, I don't get it. Are we making fun of Apple because now it appears that G4/5 CPUs are actually about the same as Intel?
Isn't this what Mac lovers have been saying for the past 10 years, but were laughed out of the room?
Does Intel automatically start sucking, because Apple moves to the the CPU? Does PPC get magically better?
Maybe those Macs that were "1/2 as fast and twice as expensive" for the last few years weren't really so slow or so expensive after all--meaning who's the fool?
--
$tar -xvf
You misspelled "torrents"
Parent is on the money...
This round of Intelimacs are essentially consumer models...
Wait for Merom... Until then enjoy Quad goodness...
We apologise for the fault in this post. Those responsible have been sacked. -- Signed RICHARD M. NIXON
From the keynote:
"Now everything's not going to run 2-3X. You know the disks aren't 2-3X faster, etc., but on the most important benchmarks, 2 to 3 times faster." -- Steve Jobs
Oh, sorry, you were using your post to bitch about a bunch of other off-topic Apple things that didn't have to do with the discussion while praising your expensive nuclear laptop with the 1 hour battery life. My bad.
"Sufferin' succotash."
by Richard M. Stallman rms@gnu.org To the Management of the Boston Public Library, Don Saklad forwarded me your message which reports that OverDrive Audio Books use "copyright protection technology" made by Microsoft. The technology in question is an example of Digital Restrictions Management (DRM)--technology designed to restrict the public. Describing it as "copyright protection" puts a favorable spin on a mechanism intended to deny the public the exercise of those rights which copyright law has not yet denied them. The use of that format for distributing books is not a fact of nature; it is a choice. When a choice leads to bad consequences, it ought to be changed, and that is the case here. I respectfully submit that the Boston Public Library has a responsibility to refuse to distribute anything in this format, even if it seems "convenient" to some in the short term. By making the choice to use this format, the Boston Public Library gives additional power to a corporation already twice convicted of unfair competition. This choice excludes more than just Macintosh users. The users of the GNU/Linux system, an operating system made up of free/libre software, are excluded as well. Since these audiobooks are locked up with Digital Restrictions Management (DRM), it is illegal in the US to release free/libre software capable of reading these audiobooks. Apple may make some sort of arrangement to include capable software in MacOS (which is, itself, non-free software for which users cannot get source code). But we in the free software community will never be allowed to provide software to play them, unless laws are changed. There is another, deeper issue at stake here. The tendency of digitalization is to convert public libraries into retail stores for vendors of digital works. The choice to distribute information in a secret format--information designed to evaporate and become unreadable--is the antithesis of the spirit of the public library. Libraries which participate in this have lost their hearts. I therefore urge the Boston Public Library to terminate its association with OverDrive Audio Books, and adopt a policy of refusing to be agents for the propagation of Digital Restrictions Management. Sincerely Richard Stallman President, Free Software Foundation MacArthur Fellow cc: John Sullivan for posting on http://fsf.org General Reference gref@bpl.org This is a follow-up message to our response to your recommendation that the Library's digital audio book collection be accessible to Mac users. OverDrive Audio Books use copyright protection technology from Microsoft Corporation. Unfortunately the iPod (and Mac) do not currently support copyright-protected Windows Media Audio (WMA) files. OverDrive, along with hundreds of online music and audio book providers, is hopeful that Apple and Microsoft can reach an agreement that would enable support for Microsoft-based copyright-protected materials on the iPod/Mac. We are hopeful too - and in the mean time, we will keep looking for a vendor that will serve a broader audience. There is a workaround, however, that allows you to upload OverDrive content to an iPod, provided your computer is a PC, you have a CD recordable drive, and the title may be burned to a CD. If you would like to try this, follow the instructions in the OverDrive Media Console to burn the downloaded files to CD. Then, rip the CD into iTunes for synchronization with your iPod. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact us. Thank you very much. Sincerely, General Reference Department Boston Public Library 700 Boylston St Boston MA 02116 Phone: 617 859-2270 We thank you for your suggestion. We are forwarding your message to the staff members working on the OverDrive Audio Book and OverDrive eMusic program. Thank you very much. Sincerely, General Reference Department Boston Public Library 700 Boylston St Boston MA 02116 Phone: 617 859-2270 -----Original Message----- Please make http://overdrive.bpl.org/ available to mac users !
Apparently many Windows users do too. I can't tell you how many times I've seen people fork over $600 or so to get Photoshop, only to use it for the occasional web graphic. Nothing they do ever uses a feature that's not also in Photoshop Elements, which is vastly cheaper. It's that whole mentality of "gotta have the best" or if it's cheaper it must be inferior. Adobe must love people like that.
Elements is a pretty good deal, even if you only use it occasionally. 95% of my image editing is done in Gimp, but for the 5% of the time that Elements does something much better, it was worth the mere $50 (edu) I paid for it.
Say hello to zMac.
All I see are comments on how the G5 is only marginally slower than the Core Duo. This makes no sense Apple does not have a G5 in their laptops. The Core Duo is a laptop (low power/low heat)chip.
I am waiting for the Mac Pro (or whatever) to see how the desktop chips fare. Whatever is in these machines can be fairly compared to the Core Duo.
As for Apples speed claims: If you pay heed to marketing spin you, my friend, are an idiot.
You did, but apparently I didn't. Doh!
Sorry, you were right, someone please mod me into oblivion.
(though my point about more thorough testing still stands)
Say hello to zMac.
Since the PowerBook turned into MacBook Pro, wouldn't the PowerMac become MacMac Pro?
You're right, of course. However, the long-term question is what relative performance will be like five years from now. Do you think the PPC will see as many speed boosts between now and then as the Intel chips? Steve apparently didn't. In fact, he basically bet the farm that Intel would widen that narrow margin.
From that perspective, he timed this move perfectly. A few years ago, everyone would have screamed bloody murder at migrating to a slower chip (regardless of whether it actually was slower - I'm staying out of that debate). A few years from now, everyone would have screamed bloody murder as their systems fell further behind the curve. Instead, he made the migration just at the time when performance was about equal, so the worst we can say is that there's no huge benefit from switching at this point in time.
I'm not a Mac fanboy by any stretch, but I'll give them credit for pulling this one off about as well as could be hoped.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Thank you for writing Jibes rather than JiVes. I almost wasn't sure I was reading /.
Cheers!
It's easier for the average joe to wrap his head around a simple metric than something nebulous such as "considerably faster."
You just gave me a great idea for a band name - "Nebulous Joe"
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
Gotta love 'em. :)
Apple didn't switch to Intel to improve performance.
They switched to Intel to get: (1) the ability to natively run the dominant platform (MS-Windows) on the same machine, thus making Macs an easier sell to PC users, and (2) a better low-power/low-heat mobile CPU and chipset for their laptops.
Even if performance gets slightly worse as a result of the switch to Intel architecture, the benefits of these other two points far outweigh that.
Moderator hint: a comment is neither "Flamebait" nor "Troll" if it is true.
Actually, the ads to which you refer were made by TBWA Chiat/Day, when Steve Jobs was CEO of Apple. However, you're right that it was a long time ago (1998). See the Great Apple Ads page for details.
Oh, and that reminds me of the nicest feature of OS X: That pop-ups can't take the focus away from you. I hate hitting spacebar, thinking I'm typing into Notepad, and actually I've agreed to a window that flashed up on my screen for about a half a second and I'm wondering if I just bought viagra.
Except here in Windowsland the spacebar doesn't consent to a popup, you need a enter key or a mouse click. Not to mention you can change this setting using power tools (or a simple RegEdit.
(And to be honest with you I can't remember the last time I had a Viagara popup... I use Windows 60+ hours a week. The most important part of the security system for your computer lies between the computer and the chair, perhaps yours is in need of an upgrade if this is an issue)
Actually, it doesn't reflect well on intel architecture. I'm sure everyone by now knows that AMD processors run faster and are not as hot.
I don't know that at all. Prove you're not just an AMD fanboy by showing me one reputable comparison showing an AMD chip that meets or beats the Intel Core Duo on performance, heat, and power used. All of my reading has indicated that the new Intels are significantly ahead of current AMD chips for performance/watt at acceptable powers for laptops.
Apple switched to Intel to get performance at a reasonable power usage. G4 had good power usage but poor performance. G5 had good performance and crappy power consumption. I suspect they chose Intel because it gave them the best of both worlds and looking at chip specs the battery will last about an hour longer using the Duo instead of an Athalon 4000 Mobile and has slightly better performance to boot.
Jobs needs his head examined for going with a has-been company like Intel.
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
Now that you've gotten the CPU to run 3X faster, why don't you leave that alone and work on the other aspects of the system? This way you can use the savings as Core Duo prices fall in the light of newer, faster chips to help the rest of the system catch up with no overall increase in price. After all, from this point forward, faster CPU's alone will show little improvement overall.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Read the original post - the guy said the compilation took significantly less time - arguing over the details isn't relevant to anyone who wants their compilation to go faster, and no-one apart from you mentioned multi-threaded compilers...
Who cares if it's gcc or make that's causing the speed-up? It. runs. faster.
Simon
Physicists get Hadrons!
...those Intel chips are finally getting to do something USEFUL!
:)
Not all that boring gaming and photo editing and video compressing and web/database/file serving they were doing before.
I love Mac commercials. It's like they're designed to piss off geeks
120 characters for a sig? That's bloody useless.
Uh this comparison while meaningful in it's own right is downright silly in the text desrciption.
The core Duo is a dual processor. The G5 in question is a single processor. The applications are not explicitly multi-processor applications. They might be multi-threaded having a Gui thread and a calaculation thread, but unless they are explicitly written for multiple processors the heavy lifting is going to be occurring on a single processor. Thus this comparison is essentially between a single processor Pentium M and Single processor G5.
Now on most days saying your new Single processor is 20% to 30 % faster is big news. And look you get two of them, so it's got twice the capacity. Not twice the speed.
I have little doubt that the Spec marks jobs cited were multi-processor aware. it's would be sort of stupid to be otherwise. So his claims seem pretty much in line with the results of the application tests in this article.
Additionally this article is doing imovie and iphoto operations which are disk and memory intensive. As a result you cannot expect the speed of the system to follow the speed of the processor.
One the other hand if you were actually working on the core duo you would notice the following. While your iDVD movie was being compressed to mpeg2, and you went to check your mail or perhaps were doing something else processor intensive the the machine would not be dogged at all by the intense iDVD calculation since it has two processors one of which is twiddling it's thumbs waiting slavishly on you.
In short the UI of the dual is going to seem very peppy no matter what apps you are running in the background. (*execpt ones that bog the disk).
Eventually more apps will be multi-processor aware and you will have a choce of faster apps or leaving that peppy UI.
In any case you have a machine that costs the same but is 20 to 30% faster for applications and has twice the processor capacity to either multi-task or exploit for mulit-processor aware apps. What's the big deal.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
It wasn't as you said:
"Steve Jobs, at the MacWorld tradeshow, boasted: 'the new iMac [with] Intel processor is two to three times faster than the iMac G5.'
But instead:
"Steve Jobs, at the MacWorld tradeshow, boasted: 'the new iMac Intel processor is two to three times faster than the iMac G5 [processor].'
Especially when considering current Intel frontside bus architectures!
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
This just in!
Advertisers lie.
Now please go back to your regularly scheduled programming. Thank you.
Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachtani?
www.fogbound.net
The tests that MacWorld did all appear to be at least partly bound by I/O speed. The RAM and disk in the Intel Mac aren't any faster than in the G5T he amount of time spent waiting for the this is the same for each processor. Therefore even if the CPU were twice as fast, you would still only expect to see about a 10% speedup in any application which reads data from disk, processes it, then writes it back to disk (if 80% of the time is spent waiting for the disk). Unfortunately, that's what any "real world" application usually does...
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
The comparison was also run on a computer with a crippled half speed memory buss. To get full speed from the bus you have to have two memory modules. They only had one 512DDR module. Thus they also hamstrung it on the memory speed which can be pretty important in video and photo applications.
basically this test is borked, and the fact the editors don't even know this means everything else they say is borked too. Notice the comment at the end of the article it turns out that in the first version of the article they did the math wrong and figuring out percentage increases in speed (they were using the larger number as the denominator in the ratio rather than the smaller one. ) Duh.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
As an indication, I've repeatedly tried Handbrake (http://handbrake.m0k.org/ a DVD ripper) on my ImacG5 2.0GHz and also on my AthlonXP3200+, running Gentoo Linux. Ripping a DVD takes 30 hours on the G5 and 6 hours on the PC with exactly the same options selected. I've repeated this test at least 10 times (took weeks, if you add up all those hours). As an interesting note, Handbrake was first developed for the Mac, and then ported to Linux. So you'd think it would perform better on the Mac.
Bottom line: From where I'm standing, I think Steve Jobs' estimate of 3 to 4 times the speed is *conservative*. It could be as high as 5 times the speed.
I think Jobs' boasting and straying from the real world was unexpected as he, like most executives, enjoys doing things like these to promote their products. I also think it's not expected to see first-generations platforms of a new architecture be below par of what's maybe aimed for. Same thing happened with the first Pentium 1 PC's, the horrible FSB of the first Pentium 2's, not to mention the Pentium 4's where the former Pentium 3's were actually faster on many tests.
I expect greater fruits to come from Apple's Intel love later this year as they start transitioning to more powerful 64 bit systems and more mature architectures.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
1) SPEC isn't a "PC fanboy" benchmark. It is the industry standard benchmark for comparing processor performance. That's why every press release about a new CPU is accompanied with "the processor has an estimated SPECint/etc of blah". The reason why The G4/G5 do so poorly in SPEC is because they really aren't very good general-purpose processors. SPEC is generic C code, not optimized for any specific platform. It's also compiler-dependent, and compilers for PPC aren't as good as compilers for x86 (especially GCC). The G5, in particular, can be quite fast on code painstakingly optimized for it, but the simple truth is that most code is not so optimized.
2) Application benchmarks like this one are completely useless for comparing processors. They don't run the same code on each machine. How many hours went into tuning Quicktime for Altivec on the G5? How many went into tuning Quicktime for SSE on the Core Duo? Do the benchmarks even use SSE on the Core Duo? Are they multithreaded?
3) As for x86 versus the G5 --- my 2.2 GHz Athlon64 dual-core is significantly faster (20%) than my 2.3 GHz G5 dual-core. For some important software I use (GCC), it's 50% faster. Each Athlon64 core is nearly identical to the Opteron core that came out in 2003. Each G5 core is actually an improvement over the G5 that came out in 2003, having twice the cache. Its safe to say x86 has been schooling the G5 pretty much just months after it was released.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
...Core Duo and Core Solo (?) laptops should beat the pants off previous G4 models.
Pro-Apple comments modded up, anti-Apple comments modded down. What's the point of even posting Apple articles here when they'd rather discuss it in one of the 10,000 Apple forums where nobody will "pick on" Steve Jobs? You'd think after somebody spent all that money on a Mac, they wouldn't feel like they owe it to Apple to defend them against any attack, that instead maybe Apple owes them.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
If all things other things were equal, then I would agree that dual core does not mean double the performance.
However, it is just about that with the new AMD architectures. The core did double, but other things changed improve performance outside the core. Looking forward, it will be more common with other architectures.
The reason for my comment is that doubling the cores is not the only thing going on. Memory architectures, I/O architectures, cache architectures are all changing as well. The end result, almost linear SYSTEM performance (outside of drive I/O) improvement with the newer processors, which happen to have additional cores.
I don't really get web-based popups very much either, I was exaggerating for effect. Yeah, it wasn't very clever, but sometimes that's difficult to see when you're writing it.
It's actually more of a problem with things like chat clients, Windows Update, or even Windows Explorer. They are more than happy to take focus away from your current app, say, if a conversation starts, or if you need to shut down your computer, or to ask you if you'd like to overwrite a file if you're copying over a few MB or GB of files in the background.
What OS X does is this: if something needs to get your attention, its icon bounces on the dock until you click it. It's a really good feature and I wish Windows had it too, because I work for a Windows shop and even though most of my real work is done in cygwin, I can't eat the company dog food unless I'm on a Windows box.
Well, I'll forgive that since I'm posting on a Mac topic and you have clearly misconstrued me as a fashionable young Apple fanboy. Seriously, I know why that stereotype exists. Half the time people my PowerBook they talk to me in that condescending kindergarten teacher manner until I open up Emacs and Terminal. Seriously, I posted a detailed report on the performance of World of Warcraft through Rosetta yesterday on the Blizzard Mac forums, along with some tests to confirm that the CPU was being saturated, and I swear if the first person didn't come across exactly like this:
Well, anyway, the point is this: if you assume somebody's a moron and talk in a condescending manner to them, in the end you generally only make an ass out of yourself.
And regarding the user as the most important part of the security model, I can tell you this much: if everybody I knew had a mac, I wouldn't spend nearly as much time fixing their computers.
I'm shocked you didn't flame me for writing such a demeaning posting.
Really really shocked, and impressed.
Modesty is one of life's greatest attributes
I mention this for the benefit of people who think I'm comparing an entry-level iMac to some hyper-powered 16-way Unix box with SCSI RAID. By all rights, the Mac should spank this laptop, but that's not how it usually works out.
Other than that, the iMac is pretty snappy and extremely usable. I just wish I could find the "[_]make my drive not crawl" system setting.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Look at the grandparent of your post... I basically said steve probably showed a test result in which intel was probably already stronger and you just reinforced it.
I did learn something new though... i thought the g5 design was a great leap ahead of the g4 but i guess i was wrong. However the overall system with the g5 especially around the same price range of their peaks (high end vs. high end, and low end vs. low end) is still a good deal more superior. Comparing a whole system with a 1ghz g4 and a 2 ghz g5 is pretty uh... crazy when you consider the clock rate difference and the chipset/memory interface.
Hmmm... Pie...
Barry Norton writes "Steve Jobs, at the MacWorld tradeshow, boasted: 'the new iMac [with] Intel processor is two to three times faster than the iMac G5.'
No, that's not what he said, stop twisting his words to set up a straw man you can then revel in knocking down. If you watch Jobs' full keynote presentation you'll see that he specifically compares only processor benchmarks, not system benchmarks. He even made the disclaimer: "Now everything's not gonna run 2 to 3 X faster, you know the disks aren't 2 to 3 X, etc., but on the most important benchmarks, [the Core Duo] is 2 to 3 times faster [than the G5]."
Flying is easy, just throw yourself at the ground and miss. -Douglas Adams
Furthermore, I'd be curious as to the ability of these new iMacs to do two of these things at the same time, versus the old G5 iMac.
I imagine they're pretty good, and application benchmarks are more likely to show this. Pretty much no real apps in OS X are single-threaded, and GUI apps are excersizing WindowServer as well.
is the user's satisfaction with the purchase of his/her new machine. Because ultimately that's what will sell the next machine, not esoteric performance benchmarks that most consumers don't even understand, let alone have almost nothing to do with the way in which they use their machines.
The only thing benchmarks are good for is nerd quibbling. Let's all pray that is where it will forever remain.
As a former employee of Apple and an avid Apple fan I must ask a few things of the posters in this section.
STOP THE LAME ASS COMPLAINTS ABOUT "we should have swithed to AMD, at least they have a 64 bit laptop chip". NO FUCKING SHIT. AMD also has HALF the production facilities that Intel has.
Lastly,
To utilize a 64 bit processor [and I type in caps so every dumbass can hear me] YOU NEED 4 GB OF MEMORY!
WHO THE FUCK DOES WORK REQUIRES 4 GB OF MEMORY ON A DAMN LAPTOP? DAMN YOU GUYS ARE SOME FUCKTARDS. Hell while Im at it ill but a 450 cubic inch engine in my Honda Civic.
Laptops are about practicality retards.
On another note I have a 20 iMac PPC G5 w/SD and 2 GB of DDR 400 memory. I dont ever use more than 1 GB of memory at any one time. So please enjoy the move to intel as it DOES offer performance increases.
Sorry for the flaming.
He was talking about CPU performance, and he said in the same breath that the disk and the memory weren't going to be faster than the G5 iMac. If the SPECMarks weren't what he claimed, then there'd be a story here.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Go motherfuck yourself, you mac fanboy faggot.
How does it feel to have (blow)Jobs jamming you in the ass with the force of a jackhammer? You fucking queers.
Do you enjoy getting fucked in the ass by Jobs? Bang bang bang! Steve Jobs has your honky ass! Bang Bang Bang!
Any chance you could re-run that test using UFS as your file system on the Mac instead of HFS+? It would be an interesting comparison.
I don't know which compiler they used to build the OS or any of those apps, but even if they used gcc, it has WAY WAY WAY more optimizations for x86 architecture than it does for any other architecture(or probably even all the rest put together). This alone would explain the slight increase in speed seen with an x86 based mac(v. a similarly clock rated G5), but I still don't think that x86 was a good move, especially when they decided to go with Intel over AMD...
I thought that jobs was switching to intel, in part, to get more life of apple notebook batteries.
I thought that intel had some low-power technology that apple wanted.
Subject says it all...
An engineer who ran for Congress. http://herbrobinson.us
drink the kool-aide while you can.
Ever heard the story about the driver who, when really frustrated about the dog chasing his car, stopped the car, got out, and asked the dog, "Hey, you want it? You got it. Now what?"
Yeah. You got it. But, just like the dog, I don't think you really get it.
So, now what?