1. I'll look up this thesis. Even then, the weak Speculative Execution unit hurts the Athlon vs. G4 or P4.
2. SPECfp2000 ain't an app, it's a synthetic benchmark whose results are highly suspect. Considering the moment you do app based benchmarks, for anything FP heavy without SSE optimisations, the Athlon will outperform a P4. Real world results indicate the P4 hasd a very weak FPU, alleviated by high bandwidth high latency RAM interface and a superior SIMD implementation, SSE is superior to 3D-Now, but inferior to Altivec, due to design constraints on the x86 platform, ie: the inability to add processor registers easily, due to compatibility issues. As to the latency tolerance of FP applications, it varies, some are tolerant, some aren't, like real-time encoders and sound software. Note that the P4/DDR SDRAM combination benchmarks relatively closely to the P4/RAMBUS, despite Via's inferior memory interface. Memory bandwidth is incredibly useful, but not the be all and end all of performance, a large high speed cache will usually do more for overall performance than a higher bandwidth memory implementaion, esle we would be seeing RAMBUS UltraSPARC's with 512Kb caches, instead of 8Mb cache with PC-133 RAM. Not to say that going DDR wouldn't get the Mac an additional 5% or so in the performance arena.
I tend to view the high end as any custom software, low end as any consumer software(If you can find it on the shelf at EBX, it's low-end) and mid-range as anything in between. $7500 is chump change for software for a business (Price MetaFrame or Win2K AS sometime, it's more $$ than that), so while Maya is definitely Professional quality software, I still consider it the top end of the mid-range. High end would be the custom developed/tweaked software that Mainframe or ILM would use(Wouldn't be shocked if it was a custom build of Maya though).
The memory controler in Uni-M can't handle anything bigger than 512Mb IIRC. Although someone should verify this, as Apple claims my 8500 can only take up to 64Mb DIMMS and it'll take 128Mb DIMMs easily.
A DP Blade will out perform the G4, no argument there. The 8Mb will make a difference, and a big one, for large data sets. As to serving remote users, I'd bet on the Mac, due to having a faster NIC in it stock, at least in comparable cost configs (The Blade will scale higher)
1. Except that your more likely to get a mispredict on a 10 stage pipeline than a 7 stage. Simply due to having more instructions in the pipe (Simple stats question). Not to mention the problems of CISC Latency (minor, but visible) due to Athlon using a RISC core and CISC2RISC decoder. Sure a 1.5GHz Athlon will Take less of a time hit, however it's going to take more of those hits. Don't forget that the Athlon has the weakest Speculative Execution unit out of the three CPU's (G4, P4, Athlon XP), the XP is an improvement over T-Bird, but not there yet in efficiency.
2. The Athlon is the poster child of why beefy FPU's rock, it's one of the main reason the Athlon keeps up with the P4, despite the defficiency in clock speed. The G4 gains most of it's performance here, with a huge advantage in SIMD power (200-300% over any x86 CPU, clock for clock). SIMD performance is where it's at for Multimedia, which is what these towers are aimed at. Show me a dual XP system doing MPEG-2 encoding at DVD quality in 1/2 time in software.
As to RAM Bandwidth, there's a reason high end systems stress Cache size and speed over absolute RAM Bandwidth. for large Data sets, the combination of 256K L2 and 2Mb L3, with PC133 system memory will out perform the Athlon's 512K L2 and faster system memory. Note that the actual performance improvement from PC133 to 266DDR was noticeable but not huge. Apple's DDR solution will debut with the G5, they had no reason to redesign a chipset they're going to replace in 6 months anyways. Rambus is an incredibly broken design except for applications where memory bandwidth is the only consideration, due to horrible latency. Northwood might finally catch up with PC1600 DDR in realworld performance.
Or a G4 1GHZ DP, with 1.5GB RAM, 2x2MB DDR Cache, 3x72GB Ultra160 SCSI and a 22" Flat panel, oh, and another $2500 to buy a real Video Card. The Apple will conveniently run those wonderfull Alias Apps too. I suspect a G4 1GHz DP will out perform a Blade 1000, let alone that MIPS R14KA@500MHz.
True on the CAD/CAM stuff, but that's mostly Solaris and AIX anyways. For animation and 3D, most of the mid range stuff is being ported to OS X, like Maya and Bryce. I don't think SGI is long for the world when they have less performance on their new box than Apple or x86 machines, and with their core market moving to Linux Render farms and Apple systems for the design and editing work.
The Crazy Finn
The G4 is a better chip for multimedia due to a superior FPU and a far superior SIMD implementation. For example, you can't combine SSE and FP calculations without a context switch that eats cycles, while you can do that with an Altivec instruction, due to the use of separate execution units and extra registers. Simply put, without a massive MHz advantage the Athlon and P4 are no match for a G4 system for tasks like doing software MPEG-2 encoding, or some of the more esoteric Photoshop filters.
Properly coded, that theoretical x86 app would be less efficient if it made heavy use of SIMD or a combination of FPU and SIMD instructions, which many multimedia apps do, especially video work. Athlon is a Integer Monster, and a killer FPU (almost as fast as a G4's), so it rocks in gaming (Which is FP & Integer intensive), while the P4 makes up for it's relatively weak Integer and FPU with pure MHz.
Oh, and you Matrox rig...if it's anything similar to the Matrox RT, check out the Mac version, it rocks.
The Crazy Finn
The Mac also has better hardware and OS integration, which does help.
The Athlon XP is SLOWER clock for clock than the T-Bird. It's the price payed for the extra MHz(Longer pipeline, usual story). The Athlon XP is faster for general Apps than a dual G4, for FPU heavy or optimised SIMD apps, the Dual G4 is king. Clock for clock, the G4 is fastest, followed by Athlon, then P4.
The current one does not interleave. I do believe the previous ones (From Sawtooth, Mystic and Yikes) does do interleaving (Although I'm not sure of anything post 9600)
Ever hear of an RS/6000??? yeah, IBM's killer box, runs on PowerPC's...and they regularly count uptimes in years. As to no mission critical servers on CISC chips, that's BS as well. Plenty of small to mid-range servers based on x86.
Yeah, 150fps from a cripple video card. If you want GF3 performance, put a GF3 in it. I Guarantee a GF3 and a Soundcard in a dual 1Gig G4 will get a lot more than 150fps.
The Crazy Finn
Nope. The Max is 3x512Mb DIMMS, good luck putting the 4th DIMM in a 3 DIMM Slot Machine, as all the QuickSilver G4's are 3 slot. Now you might be able to put 4 512's into an old Sawtooth and have it work.
I suggest you read the specs yourself Mr. Partridge.
Ummm....NO. What a longer pipeline does is allow you to run a higher clock speed. The P4 explicitly gave up IPC (Instructions per clock) and took a big hit for pipeline stalls (What happens when the speculative execution unit guesses wrong) in order to hit 1.5 GHz and above. The Athlon XP does this as well, but it's a much smaller hit than the P4, due to a shorter Pipeline (About 10-12 stage IIRC). In fact the Current G4 (PPC7450)made the same trade off, to get to 800+MHz, but it still only has a 7 stage pipeline, vs a ~10stage one for the Athlon and 20 stage pieline for the P4. The IPC on the G4 is higher than any current x86 processor, this gives the G4 about a 130% advantage over a similarly clocked Athlon, or a 150% advanyage over a P4. The G4's big advantage is Altivec. The G4's Altivec Unit is so much faster than the P4's SSE unit it's not funny, the G4's are also FPU monsters. This is where the big performance for Graphics and DV work comes from, otherwise, the Macs are still a bit slower than a top end PC overall, but since the G4 is the fastest thing out there in its target market, it doesn't matter.
The Crazy Finn
(Note that performance margins are guesstimates based on Benchmarks and relative IPC)
Hmmm, that looks about identical to the iMac, not the G4 tower. And how much is the equivalent iMac.......$1799 (OK, you give up graphics performance(GF2MX32Mb) and it has only 256Mb RAM but you get a 15" flat panel, fair trade.
As to the difference between a Dell and a Mac:That Dell ATA/100 drive is only 5400RPM, I highly suspect that DeskStar 75GXP in the Mac is going to be faster than the low-end Maxtor or Western Digital drives Dell uses in the 4400, even with the slower interface (Just add an ATA133 Raid Card from Sonnet for more speed). And your single P4 2GHz ain't gonna run rings around dual 1GHz P3's, let alone G4's. Not to mention the Mac has 64Bit PCI, and GigE which the Dell doesn't offer. The Mac also comes with Video editing software and DVD authoring software, which are extra on the Dell, both offer Office.
At the slot, true (My Bad), but Apple uses a 133MHz variant of PCI between the North and South Bridges instead of a custom proprietary bus like Intel, AMD and Via use. The only difference is speed, otherwise its vanilla PCI 2.1.
64Bit PCI cards are quite easy to find in the Mac world, where it has been standard for 3 years, since the Blue&White G3. The PC world is still stuck in the 32Bit world. (Find me a box at Best Buy or Future Shop with 64Bit PCI)
Apple has a distinct point about the Bridge chip, what they are referring to is the South Bridge or the P4 equivalent, whereas Apple puts this on the North Bridge along with the GigE controller.
Oh, the 215MB/s throughput is real-world, not maximum theoretical, which is 266MB/s. Their bus interconnect is 133MHz, which is in shouting range of a PC's.
Don't forget, the 'Average Consumer' is going to buy an iMac and use FireWire or USB for their limited expansion needs (Burners, harddrives, etc.) How many consumers ever add anything internal to their PC, beyond a faster burner and modem.
This is a Pro Box, and is a righteous Photoshop and DV system.
Ever heard of Bungie?? or Ambrosia Software(The shareware era id of the Mac world).
Yeah, there's a wait, but Macs get 90% of the PC hits out there, and a few of their own titles. And we get less buggy versions, usually with updated graphics.
As to Performance, that's a GeForce 4MX, not a GeForce4, it ain't going to be faster than the previous gen uber-card, if you want GeForce3 speed, get one, they're available for the Mac too. Also, that PC system has a DSP doing all the sound processing, the Mac uses it's CPU, you pick up 20-30% framerate by putting a proper Soundcard in the Mac (Come on Apple, put a Sound DSP on the damned thing, and support for 5.1 systems).
Actually, this is a speedbump, the MB is the same as the earlier Quicksilvers, the only real difference is the CPU Speed, Graphics options and HDD size. And the PCI bus is a Big step, it's 64Bitx133MHZ at the slot, vs the 32Bitx33MHz at the slot of most PC's (The actual bus on PC's is usually 64Bitx66MHz max capability)
It's also the fact that a moderately upgrade 6 year old Mac is quite useable, and runs modern software quite well.
For example, my 8500/150 will take a gig of RAM, can be upgraded to a G4 500, has AV in/out onboard.
I use it regularily, as it is, with 150MHz 604 and 96Mb of RAM, running OS 9.1, It's worth about $300 US.
Old Macs are much more usable than old PC's, in fact there's quite a Low End Mac underground out there, and several online stores that specialize in old Macs, like Other World Computing and CPUsed.
And to the Pricing of the new G4's, spec a Dell 1GHzDP system with a DVD-R, 64Bit 133MHz PCI, Firewire and a Geforce4MX....and watch it be significantly more expensive. G4 towers aren't expensive PC's, they're inexpensive Workstations, whle other market. Spec them against an HP Kayak or Sun Blade 1000 and look at the cost difference, quite Amazing eh?
Slashdot Mirror
1. I'll look up this thesis. Even then, the weak Speculative Execution unit hurts the Athlon vs. G4 or P4.
2. SPECfp2000 ain't an app, it's a synthetic benchmark whose results are highly suspect. Considering the moment you do app based benchmarks, for anything FP heavy without SSE optimisations, the Athlon will outperform a P4. Real world results indicate the P4 hasd a very weak FPU, alleviated by high bandwidth high latency RAM interface and a superior SIMD implementation, SSE is superior to 3D-Now, but inferior to Altivec, due to design constraints on the x86 platform, ie: the inability to add processor registers easily, due to compatibility issues. As to the latency tolerance of FP applications, it varies, some are tolerant, some aren't, like real-time encoders and sound software. Note that the P4/DDR SDRAM combination benchmarks relatively closely to the P4/RAMBUS, despite Via's inferior memory interface. Memory bandwidth is incredibly useful, but not the be all and end all of performance, a large high speed cache will usually do more for overall performance than a higher bandwidth memory implementaion, esle we would be seeing RAMBUS UltraSPARC's with 512Kb caches, instead of 8Mb cache with PC-133 RAM. Not to say that going DDR wouldn't get the Mac an additional 5% or so in the performance arena.
The Crazy Finn
I tend to view the high end as any custom software, low end as any consumer software(If you can find it on the shelf at EBX, it's low-end) and mid-range as anything in between. $7500 is chump change for software for a business (Price MetaFrame or Win2K AS sometime, it's more $$ than that), so while Maya is definitely Professional quality software, I still consider it the top end of the mid-range. High end would be the custom developed/tweaked software that Mainframe or ILM would use(Wouldn't be shocked if it was a custom build of Maya though).
The Crazy Finn
The memory controler in Uni-M can't handle anything bigger than 512Mb IIRC. Although someone should verify this, as Apple claims my 8500 can only take up to 64Mb DIMMS and it'll take 128Mb DIMMs easily.
The Crazy Finn
Bryce is a nice program on the low end of mid-range, Maya is the very high end of the same spectrum. Ever hear of covering all your bases?
The Crazy Finn
A DP Blade will out perform the G4, no argument there. The 8Mb will make a difference, and a big one, for large data sets. As to serving remote users, I'd bet on the Mac, due to having a faster NIC in it stock, at least in comparable cost configs (The Blade will scale higher)
The Crazy Finn
1. Except that your more likely to get a mispredict on a 10 stage pipeline than a 7 stage. Simply due to having more instructions in the pipe (Simple stats question). Not to mention the problems of CISC Latency (minor, but visible) due to Athlon using a RISC core and CISC2RISC decoder. Sure a 1.5GHz Athlon will Take less of a time hit, however it's going to take more of those hits. Don't forget that the Athlon has the weakest Speculative Execution unit out of the three CPU's (G4, P4, Athlon XP), the XP is an improvement over T-Bird, but not there yet in efficiency.
2. The Athlon is the poster child of why beefy FPU's rock, it's one of the main reason the Athlon keeps up with the P4, despite the defficiency in clock speed. The G4 gains most of it's performance here, with a huge advantage in SIMD power (200-300% over any x86 CPU, clock for clock). SIMD performance is where it's at for Multimedia, which is what these towers are aimed at. Show me a dual XP system doing MPEG-2 encoding at DVD quality in 1/2 time in software.
As to RAM Bandwidth, there's a reason high end systems stress Cache size and speed over absolute RAM Bandwidth. for large Data sets, the combination of 256K L2 and 2Mb L3, with PC133 system memory will out perform the Athlon's 512K L2 and faster system memory. Note that the actual performance improvement from PC133 to 266DDR was noticeable but not huge. Apple's DDR solution will debut with the G5, they had no reason to redesign a chipset they're going to replace in 6 months anyways. Rambus is an incredibly broken design except for applications where memory bandwidth is the only consideration, due to horrible latency. Northwood might finally catch up with PC1600 DDR in realworld performance.
The Crazy Finn
Like X?
At least Aqua/Quartz looks good. I've got no use for ugly resourcehogs like X, apart from exporting displays (Which even XP Pro can do now).
The Crazy Finn
Or a G4 1GHZ DP, with 1.5GB RAM, 2x2MB DDR Cache, 3x72GB Ultra160 SCSI and a 22" Flat panel, oh, and another $2500 to buy a real Video Card. The Apple will conveniently run those wonderfull Alias Apps too. I suspect a G4 1GHz DP will out perform a Blade 1000, let alone that MIPS R14KA@500MHz.
The Crazy Finn
True on the CAD/CAM stuff, but that's mostly Solaris and AIX anyways. For animation and 3D, most of the mid range stuff is being ported to OS X, like Maya and Bryce. I don't think SGI is long for the world when they have less performance on their new box than Apple or x86 machines, and with their core market moving to Linux Render farms and Apple systems for the design and editing work. The Crazy Finn
I've got it running on my old PS/2 Model 70 386 with 4Mb RAM and a 160Mb ESDI HDD. it'll run, but it craps out constantly (Probably doesn't like MCA)
Never thought I'd do anything with my fav. monitor stand though, now if I can find a use for those 2 dual serial cards sitting in it...
The Crazy Finn
The G4 is a better chip for multimedia due to a superior FPU and a far superior SIMD implementation. For example, you can't combine SSE and FP calculations without a context switch that eats cycles, while you can do that with an Altivec instruction, due to the use of separate execution units and extra registers. Simply put, without a massive MHz advantage the Athlon and P4 are no match for a G4 system for tasks like doing software MPEG-2 encoding, or some of the more esoteric Photoshop filters.
Properly coded, that theoretical x86 app would be less efficient if it made heavy use of SIMD or a combination of FPU and SIMD instructions, which many multimedia apps do, especially video work. Athlon is a Integer Monster, and a killer FPU (almost as fast as a G4's), so it rocks in gaming (Which is FP & Integer intensive), while the P4 makes up for it's relatively weak Integer and FPU with pure MHz.
Oh, and you Matrox rig...if it's anything similar to the Matrox RT, check out the Mac version, it rocks.
The Crazy Finn
The Mac also has better hardware and OS integration, which does help.
Using the Altivec Units, you get an IPC of 8 per CPU, so 15 GFLOPS is a quite legitimate theoretical max.
The Crazy Finn
The Athlon XP is SLOWER clock for clock than the T-Bird. It's the price payed for the extra MHz(Longer pipeline, usual story). The Athlon XP is faster for general Apps than a dual G4, for FPU heavy or optimised SIMD apps, the Dual G4 is king. Clock for clock, the G4 is fastest, followed by Athlon, then P4.
The Crazy Finn
Yeah, you will get a system with DVD-RW for sub $3K, the only catch is it's from Apple (iMac 800, Powermac 933, in Monitor.)
The Crazy Finn
The current one does not interleave. I do believe the previous ones (From Sawtooth, Mystic and Yikes) does do interleaving (Although I'm not sure of anything post 9600)
The Crazy Finn
Ever hear of an RS/6000??? yeah, IBM's killer box, runs on PowerPC's...and they regularly count uptimes in years. As to no mission critical servers on CISC chips, that's BS as well. Plenty of small to mid-range servers based on x86.
The Crazy Finn
Debunker of Myths
Yeah, 150fps from a cripple video card. If you want GF3 performance, put a GF3 in it. I Guarantee a GF3 and a Soundcard in a dual 1Gig G4 will get a lot more than 150fps. The Crazy Finn
Nope. The Max is 3x512Mb DIMMS, good luck putting the 4th DIMM in a 3 DIMM Slot Machine, as all the QuickSilver G4's are 3 slot. Now you might be able to put 4 512's into an old Sawtooth and have it work.
I suggest you read the specs yourself Mr. Partridge.
The Crazy Finn
Ummm....NO. What a longer pipeline does is allow you to run a higher clock speed. The P4 explicitly gave up IPC (Instructions per clock) and took a big hit for pipeline stalls (What happens when the speculative execution unit guesses wrong) in order to hit 1.5 GHz and above. The Athlon XP does this as well, but it's a much smaller hit than the P4, due to a shorter Pipeline (About 10-12 stage IIRC). In fact the Current G4 (PPC7450)made the same trade off, to get to 800+MHz, but it still only has a 7 stage pipeline, vs a ~10stage one for the Athlon and 20 stage pieline for the P4. The IPC on the G4 is higher than any current x86 processor, this gives the G4 about a 130% advantage over a similarly clocked Athlon, or a 150% advanyage over a P4. The G4's big advantage is Altivec. The G4's Altivec Unit is so much faster than the P4's SSE unit it's not funny, the G4's are also FPU monsters. This is where the big performance for Graphics and DV work comes from, otherwise, the Macs are still a bit slower than a top end PC overall, but since the G4 is the fastest thing out there in its target market, it doesn't matter.
The Crazy Finn
(Note that performance margins are guesstimates based on Benchmarks and relative IPC)
Hmmm, that looks about identical to the iMac, not the G4 tower. And how much is the equivalent iMac.......$1799 (OK, you give up graphics performance(GF2MX32Mb) and it has only 256Mb RAM but you get a 15" flat panel, fair trade.
As to the difference between a Dell and a Mac:That Dell ATA/100 drive is only 5400RPM, I highly suspect that DeskStar 75GXP in the Mac is going to be faster than the low-end Maxtor or Western Digital drives Dell uses in the 4400, even with the slower interface (Just add an ATA133 Raid Card from Sonnet for more speed). And your single P4 2GHz ain't gonna run rings around dual 1GHz P3's, let alone G4's. Not to mention the Mac has 64Bit PCI, and GigE which the Dell doesn't offer. The Mac also comes with Video editing software and DVD authoring software, which are extra on the Dell, both offer Office.
At the slot, true (My Bad), but Apple uses a 133MHz variant of PCI between the North and South Bridges instead of a custom proprietary bus like Intel, AMD and Via use. The only difference is speed, otherwise its vanilla PCI 2.1.
64Bit PCI cards are quite easy to find in the Mac world, where it has been standard for 3 years, since the Blue&White G3. The PC world is still stuck in the 32Bit world. (Find me a box at Best Buy or Future Shop with 64Bit PCI)
Apple has a distinct point about the Bridge chip, what they are referring to is the South Bridge or the P4 equivalent, whereas Apple puts this on the North Bridge along with the GigE controller.
Oh, the 215MB/s throughput is real-world, not maximum theoretical, which is 266MB/s. Their bus interconnect is 133MHz, which is in shouting range of a PC's.
Don't forget, the 'Average Consumer' is going to buy an iMac and use FireWire or USB for their limited expansion needs (Burners, harddrives, etc.) How many consumers ever add anything internal to their PC, beyond a faster burner and modem.
This is a Pro Box, and is a righteous Photoshop and DV system.
The Crazy Finn
Ever heard of Bungie?? or Ambrosia Software(The shareware era id of the Mac world).
Yeah, there's a wait, but Macs get 90% of the PC hits out there, and a few of their own titles. And we get less buggy versions, usually with updated graphics.
As to Performance, that's a GeForce 4MX, not a GeForce4, it ain't going to be faster than the previous gen uber-card, if you want GeForce3 speed, get one, they're available for the Mac too. Also, that PC system has a DSP doing all the sound processing, the Mac uses it's CPU, you pick up 20-30% framerate by putting a proper Soundcard in the Mac (Come on Apple, put a Sound DSP on the damned thing, and support for 5.1 systems).
The Crazy Finn
Actually, this is a speedbump, the MB is the same as the earlier Quicksilvers, the only real difference is the CPU Speed, Graphics options and HDD size. And the PCI bus is a Big step, it's 64Bitx133MHZ at the slot, vs the 32Bitx33MHz at the slot of most PC's (The actual bus on PC's is usually 64Bitx66MHz max capability)
The Crazy Finn
It's also the fact that a moderately upgrade 6 year old Mac is quite useable, and runs modern software quite well.
For example, my 8500/150 will take a gig of RAM, can be upgraded to a G4 500, has AV in/out onboard.
I use it regularily, as it is, with 150MHz 604 and 96Mb of RAM, running OS 9.1, It's worth about $300 US.
Old Macs are much more usable than old PC's, in fact there's quite a Low End Mac underground out there, and several online stores that specialize in old Macs, like Other World Computing and CPUsed.
And to the Pricing of the new G4's, spec a Dell 1GHzDP system with a DVD-R, 64Bit 133MHz PCI, Firewire and a Geforce4MX....and watch it be significantly more expensive. G4 towers aren't expensive PC's, they're inexpensive Workstations, whle other market. Spec them against an HP Kayak or Sun Blade 1000 and look at the cost difference, quite Amazing eh?
The Crazy Finn