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MacWorld's iMac Core Duo Benchmarks Debunked?
madgunde writes "Looks like MacWorld magazine was a little premature in reporting that the new Apple iMac Core Duo doesn't live up to Apple's speed claims. The folks over at MacSpeedZone have done some performance testing of their own that debunks MacWorld's results and shows that the new iMac Core Duo DOES live up to the hype. Not only did the new iMac wipe the floor with the old model in their tests, but using MacWorld's own test methodology would allow MacSpeedZone to conclude that the new Intel iMac is almost as fast as a PowerMac Quad G5. " I see only one way to solve this: Give me one. I'll run WoW on it, and decide.
How many stories can we have about the Intel-based iMac's benchmarks?
1 2/2478
All of these "benchmarks" are true, as far as they go.
Apple's original SPEC benchmarks are "true".
Macworld's "real world" application benchmarks are "true".
And now, MacSpeedZone's further tests of various tasks also are "true".
I mean, obviously the new iMac isn't going to be 2 times faster for everything under the sun. In fact, Jobs even spoke to this fact in the keynote when he directly said that the tests were just for the CPU and that everything else, like disk I/O and other subsystems, weren't all twice as fast, but it was to illustrate the performance (and performance per watt) of the new Core Duo, which is indeed impressive by any measure.
I think it's safe to say that the new iMac running native applications is definitely faster - sometimes up to twice as fast, and sometimes even more - than the iMac it's replacing. And Rosetta is so impressive that while non-native applications will run slower, it's damned good until native versions of those applications come out, too.
And speaking of CmdrTaco's request for a WoW test on the new iMac...
http://arstechnica.com/journals/apple.ars/2006/1/
"It's fast, fast as in a superlative and not a comparative sense. One wonders why Steve Jobs didn't blow the crowd away with the saturated colors and excessive frame rates of WoW on an iMac. It loaded fast, and when the first character popped up in town, the frame rate never dropped below 60, and this was pretty much going full tilt in the settings."
MacWorld uncovers secret Apple contributions to MacSpeedZone.
OR
Prices for flying pigs drop dramatically as supply increases after Apple products live up to claimed bench marks.
i'm completley convinced that for using email, web browser, iPhoto, etc.. that the new iiMacs wipe the floor with comparably priced PPC macs.
what i want to know - and what holds me back from moving to an iiMac from my DP g5 1.8 - is
1. how they will perform when rendering with Compressor
2. how much faster is FCP when hooked up to similar disk packs (like cheap desktop FW400 raids)
3. Will i still be able to run background processing tasks like Compressor and handbrake yet get good foreground performance so i can email, websurf and get on with life while waiting for those 30-1 hour long tasks, instead of walking away from the machine, lest i get tempted to use it and really slow down the renders.
4. Will Aperture stop sucking performance wise?
guns kill people like spoons make Rosie O'Donnell fat.
The machines themselves have to be faster. If the old chips were on par with similar PC chips the very fact they are dual core increases the speed. The real problem is in applications. Even in the PC world most apps don't take advantage of the dual core architecture. Even Maya only uses multiple processors when rendering. If you have a quad machine, a dual/dual core, it will only use one processor for most functions but will use all four nodes in rendering. If I ran a benchmark that involved modelling it would show no improvement in speed over a single chip machine. If I ran a render test would clock in around 4X faster. Both tests are accurate and simply reflect how the software is designed not how the chips themselves function.
...as it's not a Universal Binary yet.
It's time for Blizzard to step up to the plate and use the massive amounts of money we give them monthly to get some better servers. I'm not so good with math but 5,000,000 users paying 12 dollars a month is .... $60 million?
most of it goes to NPC salaries. [/deadpan]
AltiVec! Velocity Engine!
I thought this was the best CPU technology?
Steve Jobs told me I had a super computer when I bought
my G3, G4 and G5.
My PowerPC processors were unique. It made me special. Anyone
can have an Intel processor. Even poor people. How is that exclusive?
I'm an upper middle class elitist snob. Why did Apple take away my bragging rights! Now I'm a technological nobody. I'm plain and boring again. For pete's sake, poor people can even buy IPODS now!!
I want my super computer back! Because I lack a personality and I have no soul what product can help? Please Steve Jobs tell me what to buy to get my soul back. What can I buy so that I feel whole again?
What about a Hybrid car, will that help me?
Maybe they should have run that article off of the new iMac before Slashdot got ahold of it.
Microsoft says their software is secure...
Oracle says their database is hack-proof...
Symantec says their software protects me from hackers...
That's the point of the article. The Macworld article never considered processor useage. They said the new Intel Mac is "10-20% faster" without considering whether their benchmarks used the full capacity of the processor. They claimed that Jobs' statement that the new Mac was "2x faster" was wrong because they got smaller speedups. What this article s howed is that if you used Macworld's methodology (showing benchmark results without showing processor usage) you could argue that the quad-core G5 is only 14% faster than the Intel iMac running Quicktime. They're not saying that such a conclusion is correct, they're using it as an example to show what conclusions you can arrive at if you use Macworld's logic.
The basic problem was that Macworld's benchmarks were not CPU benchmarks and didn't make full use of the second core in the Intel Mac. The '2x' number Apple said was for the CPU --- even SJ mentioned that it doesn't mean apps will be 2x faster since the disks and everything else are the same. This article shows that in cases where the benchmark is CPU bound, the new Intel Mac can be almost twice as fast.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Its referring to tests that don't max out the CPU anyway, and therefore presumably have bottlenecks in some other part of the system. Here's a more rediculous example using the same theory:
Test: Compressing and sending a 16MB file over the network
iMac: 83 seconds (cpu usage 23%)
quad: 84 seconds (cpu usage 11%)
Wow! The iMac is faster than the quad! Of course, in reality it was working much harder to accomplish the same task (compressing at a bandwidth-limited speed). The articles point - and it is very poorly written, I will agree - is that this kind of test is crap.
The Macworld test used the same theories in the other direction. After all, if you perform a task that takes the old G5 iMac 20 seconds but uses 99% of its CPU, and takes the new intel iMac 19 seconds but only uses 45% of its total CPU power, I think you'd say that the iMac was more than 5% more powerful, right?
Admittedly if all you ever do is one task at a time, you wouldn't notice the difference. Considering that many people like to do multiple tasks - watching the recent keynote in a background window while doing some other work in a foreground window, for example - this is not an inconsequential point.
That brings up the example from the linked MacSpeedZone article:
Encoding one QuickTime movie:
intel dual core iMac: 97.02 seconds (87% CPU)
g5 quad core powermac: 84.85 seconds (42% CPU)
advantage g5: 14% faster
Encoding two QuickTime movies:
intel dual core iMac: 176.60 seconds (100% CPU)
g5 quad core powermac: 86.25 seconds (87% CPU)
advantage g5: 105% faster
Even that's a little misleading, since the quad still had spare processor bandwidth. This is why a lot of benchmark tests are designed to test each piece separately, spinning them up to 100%. Of course, real world tests are great as well - but only if your usage actually parallels those tests.
You're special forces then? That's great! I just love your olympics!
For most purposes, the key question for most users is not going to be how fast it is really, but how fast it "feels," in practice, say watching a QT movie with maybe a browser loading a couple of windows in the background and a Spotlight search in progress.
The OS X seems to be pretty good at spreading the load of multiple programs and the OS across processors. I remember that the dual 450 MHz Macs seemed dramatically snappier that the 800 MHz iBook, even though in most tests the iBook would come out ahead.
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
He then doesn't see much of a performance increase when he uses it for whatever he does with it. Will he be satisfied by some Apple PR guy saying "But look! It's not using as much of the CPU as your old Mac! That means it's MUCH faster!"
The average Smoky McPotts Mac freak won't really care if it's using less of the CPU if it still takes as long to do the same stuff as before.
There's WAY too much flawed logic comparisons going on right now to make ANY sense of it. Benchmarks matter to a certain point, but what really matters is how long it takes to do stuff that you use it for. If it takes forever to do most of the tasks you want it to do, it doesn't matter what kind of benchmark scores it got by which review site.
OK, lots of talk about these but here it is from someone with both G5 and Intel iMac 20" machines. For some things the Intel is faster than the G5 by a significant margin (Safari in particular feels quite snappy) but when you have to run PPC apps the G5 is much better. For the moment there are really quite a lot of apps that are not Intel native so the overall impression when using the two machines is that the Intel is no quicker, and some times much much slower. For PPC apps the Intel machine is no better than my 933Mhz iBook G4. Worse, there is significant pain at the moment in doing much that is taken for granted with the G5 iMac. Many programs do not run (we use BlueJ and Eclipse, neither work on the Intel). You still get the spinning beachball of death, and it seems quite often too. All in all, it feels just like any other previous Mac.
One thing that impressed me was the fact that Rosetta is able to run command line apps compiled for PPC. Gives a good idea of just how fast Rosetta is when running raw PPC code without a GUI. The answer is that a 2Ghz Intel chip running PPC code is about the same speed as a 500Mhz PPC. very reasonable compared with something like PearPC but still a significant drain. You get some back with the GUI as much of that code is native so something like MS Office actually feels usable. Our 2.3Ghz G5 Xserves smoke both the G5 iMac and the Intel even when the Intel is running native code at least with our apps.
So, do I recommend the Intel iMac? Probably. Would I recommend against a G5? Nope. Buy whichever you like. With the G5, you know what you are getting and it will still run software for the forseeable future. The Intel machine is pretty hard work at the moment but has the promise of getting better as more universal apps come along. Of course, there is currently no viable fast PC emulator so you can't run Windows or Linux on it. With Qemu or VPC on the G5 you can run Windows quite reasonably but not as quickly as you will be able to in say, six months when MS get off their arses and build VPC for the Intel Mac.
I can see why Apple released the iMac first, makes sense. The G5 iMac was never really a speed demon so the Intel one doesn't suffer too much overall. Same goes for the MacBook Pro which should be able to keep up with the G4 PowerBooks. It will take a while yet before slotting an Intel chip into the pro towers makes sense though.
A Mac is a Mac though, doesn't really matter what is inside chip wise.
"I have the attention span of a strobe lit goldfish, please get to the point quickly!"
Give me one. I'll run WoW on it, and decide.
One of my guildmates just got her one up and going last night, Running WoW under rosetta. It wasn't actually a comprehensive test, but here comment was "Wow I'm in orgrimar and not lagging". So I'm guessing at default settings it's OK.
Performance should improve when bliz relases 1.9.3 and she dosn't have to use rosetta anymore.
-Qyiet
Yes, if you're upgrading to an Intel-based iMac from an iMac G5 you bought just a few months ago, all of your non-Universal software will run at half speed.
:) [pat. pending]
I know apple users have a reputation for following fads, but I hope people don't rush out and by a new iMac every time they do a CPU upgrade (not even a new form factor!), please tell me they don't!!
Yes, but who really cares about CPU benchmarks?
My 2.6GHz Thinkpad smokes my 1.0GHz G4 iMac in CPU benchmarks. I use them both every day for many hours a day and for many common tasks. However, in spite of the CPU performance difference, the iMac seems faster (i.e. it's more responsive AND my productivity/output is higher).
Now I'm sure that there are some applications (that I never use) where the standard benchmarks do give meaningful results... However, for the applications that I use, I find most benchmarks to be a meaningless waste of time (with the possible exception of the old ByteMark).
There's an old saying about standards, but I think it applies equally well to benchmarks, so I'm going to co-opt it...
The nice thing about benchmarks is that there are so many to choose from...
The point being is that everyone has different expectations and different ways of using computers. Alternatively, the point may be that benchmarks are just another way of lying with statistics...
You know, the one that shows an Intel iMac and a G5 iMac getting powered up simultaneously?
The Intel iMac flat out smokes the G5 iMac. It's not even close.
You missed my point - perhaps I was too subtle.
I challenge your assertion: there are NOT a lot of apps that are cpu bound (or rather, the percentage of apps and users of those apps is a fraction of a fraction of the general population of users). I acknowledge that there are examples where CPU speed is king, but often, even these are limited by memory access and worse still disk access or even worse still network bandwidth... My point is that the legitimate examples of cpu-bound usage do not represent the mainstream usage of computers.
In the mainstream, most users click a button or hit a key and trigger some cpu event that completes long before they even recognize that it's done. Meanwhile, the cpu blazes away... waiting for the next request for a burst of useful activity. Real performance benefits come not from making the bursts faster and certainly not from making the waits faster, but rather from reducing the cycle time between the bursts. In other words, most users benefit more from smarter user interfaces than faster cpus.
Is there a market for faster cpus? Of course, just not the market that that is being pandered to by the standard benchmarks. If you have a cpu-bound application and your business depends on competitive performance, you're going to do your own benchmark and your performance assessment probably won't agree with everyone else's performance assessment.
So the dual core Intel is twice as fast at running integer code as the single core G5 it replaces. give or take. yippee.
Intel wanted in, because long term, Apple was a threat. (AMD is a short term threat) If OSX were to take off on somebody else's processor, well, that's somebody else's processor (that they can't build) selling, and Bill Gates would compile Windows in a heartbeat to run on that processor too. He's done it before for less. So Intel offers Apple everything; all you can eat chips, cheap, delivered, tested and wrapped up in a custom motherboard that you didn't have to build. And less power. And cheap.
I bet it's shocking what Apple's paying for duos. I bet they're paying next to nothing on the first round. Steve talked bad to them and they said yes sir. There was only one thing Intel insisted on...
Intel wouldn't put their chip in anything that said "Power" on it.
"MacBook" is stupid enough that weird California types could have conceivably come up with it. And they did, in a way; when forbidden to use "power", they had to keep the other half of the name; it is a book, after all. And a Mac.
Anyway, as soon as they can scrape AMD off, look for processor improvements to "plateau" soon after.
I'm underwhelmed.
The '2x' number Apple said was for the CPU
c 20060113.jpg/
Go to apple.com and there's a picture of an iMac, the tagline below is "2x faster. Twice as amazing."
That clearly gives the impression the machine is 2x faster. The machine isn't going to be twice as amazing if only one small part of it is 2x faster.
The tagline isn't "2x faster processor" ( of course the processor is 2x faster, there's two of them! )
And the picture isn't of the CPU.
here's a link to the pic incase the apple homepage changes
http://images.apple.com/home/2006/images/intelima