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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?
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.
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...
You do realize there is a *reason* no one has tried such, right?
Integrate Keynote and LaTeX
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Linux and Unix flavors are bred for universal comptibility. You have to give up some power to gain some portability.
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.
Possibly, but then why does their web site specifically word things to make the 'average' consumer think the new computers are going to be twice as fast?
Did he not convey this to his Marketing and Web team well enough that they wouldn't use wording to mislead customers again?
www.apple.com
"iMac has always made it fast and easy to do the most amazing things. Now the fast and easy part literally doubles overnight -- because the newest iMac computers are powered by the Intel Core Duo."
This is going to be another one of the 'first 64bit desktop computer' things... Which was very closely worded, but yet mislead the majority of the Apple consumer market (to the point the UK made Apple pull ads stating such facts)
And ironically, OSX still isn't a 64bit OS before the G5 is already outdated, and now their new 'performance' Mac is running on a Dual Core 32bit processor...
What happened to leading the 64bit revolution crap we had to listen to uninformed Mac Users recite from the Apple Marketing book?
And here I am sitting with a Dual Core 64bit Notebook, that is almost twice the rated SPEC 'benchmark' of the Mac Intel Duo, and the Apple world is going crazy on how superior their stuff is already. (Even Apple's Web Site, not just the fan boys and girls.)
Lame, once again, and ONCE AGAIN - MAC Customers SHOULD BE DEMANDING MORE FROM APPLE, and instead are just drinking whatever kool-aid the Apple Marketing Buzz gives them...
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?
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.
I think that Apple has usually done a pretty good job at being very specific and far about their benchmarks. They are as specific as anyone else's, but they don't usually pull the underhanded tricks that other places have. As examples:
Apple usually has a full Photoshop routine that is fairly complex, and almost always is putting together a movie poster. The construction of the movie poster is very realistic, and exactly duplicates the routine that a graphic artist would follow. They have traditionally made sure that there are a number of filters along the way, and filters have traditionally a place where Altivec allowed the PowerPC to shine. So they were choosing an area where they performed really well, but it was a very realistic demonstration for a large section of their customer base.
Despite being criticized/demonized for turning off HyperThreading on one of their bakeoffs, it turns out that by turning it off they improved the performance of the PC, and if they had left it on they would have been being dishonest. In other words: Apple did the right thing, and was criticized for it.
Apple has always compared reasonable competitor systems. They don't compare whiteboxes because those are not really competitors, but they do a good job of finding reasonable comparisons to make.
Apple is advertising the SpecInt/SpecFP, exactly the same benchmarks that people have been throwing at Apple for years as proof that "Macs are slow and overpriced for their speed". Now that they are using the same thing they are going to be called liars for doing this? I don't think that SpecInt/SpecFP are very valuable, but this is exactly how every one else markets, so you can't single Apple out on this one.
So, would you care to explain where you feel that "Apple benchmarks" are less honest than other benchmarks out there?
... 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."
...with the exception that I/O Kit and the HFS+ filesystem seem to think a hard drive is a floppy and do their best to set its performance to that level.
I fully understand that my wife's iMac isn't an Xserve, but holy cow, the drive is slow. I'm not exaggerating when I say that the estimate stage of an Amanda backup - that is, basically running "tar --file /dev/null" - takes over an hour to complete on 20GB of content.
For a (not very) quick comparison, here's how long that process takes to run on my home directory on my FreeBSD desktop:
On the Mac, though, we see:Even though my home directory in the Mac has 35% fewer files and directories to glance at, the tar run takes 17 times longer.
Now, I don't want to be that "a file copy takes 20 minutes!" guy, but this thing really is incredibly slow at certain operations. Just because parts of OS X have a Unix heritage doesn't mean that the whole package has Unix-like performance.
Buy a Mac because you like the OS and applications. We did. If you buy one because you think it's going to dominate all available benchmarks, though, then you're going to be sadly disappointed.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
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.
It's not. The iMac Intel just has a dual core processor. The actual increase in speed from a G5 to a Core Duo is only about 10~25%, the rest just comes from getting two of them.
So, SURPRISE, comsumer level single-threaded apps only get a 10~25% increase, it's AMAZING.
I am unamerican, and proud of it!
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.