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.

Comments

Not this again...

[Darth Maul]

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.

Re:Not this again...

[adrianmonk]

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.

Actually, the memory is a lot faster on the new machines, but you're absolutely right about disk and all that other stuff.

Just so people don't have to fast-forward through the keynote (which is over an hour long), here's what Steve Jobs actually said about iMac Core Duo performance compared to the iMac G5:

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.

So, what Jobs is saying is that the SPECint2000 and the SPECfp2000 performance is 2-3 times as fast, and he's also saying that those benchmarks are important, which admittedly is debatable. :-)

For what it's worth, I noticed that lots of the MacWorld tests focused on image processing. That's a useful thing to know about, but aren't most of thoses tasks going to be done using special stuff like Altivec or SSE? If that's the case, they're not really good comparisons of the regular performance of the processors.

Re:Compiler?

[sgant]

At the moment I think they're using gcc.

And another thing...

[kongjie]

First poster hit the nail on the head, this is the same old story of real-world speed gains versus more "pure" testing.

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."

Re:Newsflash!

[ltwally]

"and that said ... CISC processors sucked until they switched to them."

None of Intel's desktop, notebook or server cpu's are CISC. They haven't been for several years, now. They are actually RISC-like in nature, with a big fat CISC decoder that transforms those nasty CISC commands into "micro-ops."

Re:Is this really a surprise?

[turgid]

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.

If only 't were so simple.

Unix-like operating systems (Linux, *BSD, Solaris, AIX, HP/UX etc.) present a common standard interface to the world, however the implementation details behind that interface differs radically amongst those platforms, and even between kernel versions with Linux.

As such, while these OSes may be able to run the same software, they do so with very different performance characteristics.

As a starting point, you should consider the differences between System VR4, Linux 2.4, Linux 2.6 and FreeBSD. There are many good books on the subject.

Re:Newsflash!

[crmartin]

That's pretty much the way CISC has been implemented since the IBM 360. John Cocke started the RISC thing with the IBM 801 because he believed the microcode interpreter loop could be replaced wwith better compilation.

Steve vs Apple's website

[dalamar70]

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".

Pro apps

[Belseth]

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.

Re:Newsflash!

[Golias]

That never stopped Apple from publicly bashing the architecture whenver they could.

Actually, the Intel turtle and the smoked bunny ads ended their run years ago. Ever since Jobs came back and re-hired Chat-Day for their adds, it's all been saccharine pop music and pretty colors. Apple hasn't bashed an Intel chip via their marketing since back when the G4 was actually considered a fast chip.

Re:Newsflash!

[afidel]

Actually the CISC frontend is a very GOOD thing as it allows better utilization of cache resources and lowers overall latency due to memory fetching. A pure RISC architecture would fail to perform today because of the disparity between CPU performance and main memory performance. Even socalled RISC chips like the PPC bear little resemblance to earlier RISC chips like MIPS.

Re:Compiler?

[laffer1]

Xcode includes 4.0.1 of GCC but apple was using GCC 3.x to compile the kernel in 10.4. Kernel modules are C++, so it wasn't possible to use GCC 4.0 yet. (since GCC 4 tried to be more compliant.. even KDE 3.x didn't compile on it) Apple said they used intel compilers for the testing though I believe on the intel macs and ibm's compiler for the ppc build. I wish they would have used GCC since its more fair in a way. If anything its optimized for the x86 platform more, but its more apples to apples. :)

Only intel zealots would think that an intel chip would be 3 times faster anyway. POWER isn't that bad or Microsoft wouldn't have put them in xbox 360s. Another factor is that the software "optimized" for x86 hasn't been out long. Sure apple's been keeping the old nextstep port alive all these years (it ran on intel and 68k), but making it run and tuning it for the latest pentium chip are two different things.

Re:Newsflash!

[Jeff DeMaagd]

I think people may be missing the fact that the dual core thing might be throwing a wrench into the mix, which could account for all of the discrepencies. There aren't many native apps, and I think the iLife suite isn't multi-processor capable yet, so a benchmarks won't show the benefits of the second core.

Xcode compiling seem to be rather good...

[shawnce]

From a email to the xcode-users list...

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.

...also from a blog entry...

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.

Putting words in Steve's mouth?

[fbg111]

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]."