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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.
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
Yep. I have an older 1GHz G4 PowerBook and just received the iMac 2.0 GHz dual-core. I compiled Qt 4.1 for both, and *roughly* (I wasn't paying exact attention to the clock) the iMac compiled the entire library (identical configure options) about 7 times faster than the single G4. About what I'd expect. For my shorter jobs it's also about 6-7x faster. The compiler (gcc) utilizes both cores nicely, as I can see with the system load monitor.
Not all companies go for showing the "absolute best case" benchmark. AMD is generally rather conservative with their performance ratings, and it's pretty rare that third-party benchmarks show an Athlon with a given performance rating having significantly different average performance than the "baseline comparison" CPU (One of the older P4s) running at the same clock rate as that performance rating.
A great example of just how conservative AMD is - The Venice core Athlon 64 3200+ has a 2.0 GHz core clock and 512k of L2 cache, using a 90nm process. Its closest dual-core variant (the Manchester core X2 3800+) has the same core clock, L2 cache per core, and manufacturing process. (They also have the same FSB speed, 1 GHz HyperTransport) Yes, that's right, the dual-core variant is only rated 18% higher than its closest single-core counterpart. (This is because currently, on average, a second core usually doesn't net you much benefit because so many CPU-intensive tasks do all the work in a single thread.)
Apple, on the other hand, is notorious for being overly optimistic in their speed comparisons - They always pick the benchmark which will make the competition look as bad as possible, to the point of even failing to use important performance features of the competition's CPU. (For example, back in the P2/P3 era, Apple constantly marketed their systems as being faster than a P2 or P3 with twice the clock speed - While the PPC did in general perform somewhat better per clock cycle than Intel's CPUs, the difference was not anywhere close to what Apple claimed it to be. The benchmark in question used Altivec on the PPC but failed to optimize for Intel whatsoever - No MMX or SSE was used, despite being available.)
To compare it to my previous example, Apple would have called the Athlon 64 X2 3800+ a 6400+ because it had two cores equivalent to the 3200+.
When it comes to inflated/BS benchmarks, Apple is one of the kings.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?