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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?
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.
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
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Stick Men
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.
Um, I think it's pretty safe to say that a dual-core CPU, from Intel or anybody else, is likely to be about 2x faster than the single G5 which the old iMac had.
I think it's also pretty safe to say that a dual-core Intel chip in the new MacBook Pro is going to scream past the single-core G4 (at a vastly slower clock speed) which the old PowerBooks were saddled with.
Anybody who says any different is relying more on religion than math.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
Wow... I got modded troll with responses like this? I thought it would be common sense.
A) I was talking about the G5 in my comparison, the g4 laptops are irrelevant.
b) Dual core != 2x performance, not even close.
Hmmm... Pie...
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.
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.
... 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.
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
...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?
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]."
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