>> The relative lack of expandability (there are only two drive bays, for example, and both are already in used by default - one HD, one optical media)
There are 2 SATA drive bays for up to 500 GB internal storage, AND an optical Drive. Further more, you can always add external devices through USB2, Firewire 400 / 800, gigabit Ethernet.
>> NINE FANS! Holy crap Apple, what the HELL were you thinking?! I mean, nine fans. That's NINE moving parts.
This is a Good Thing - distributed cooling. If 1 of 9 fans fails, you are probably OK for a while. It would be much worse when 1 of 1 fan fails.
>> Rather than spend time and energy in a fight over the smaller Apple-based market, they're placing their resources in the much larger Windows arena, where there are greater prospects for growth.
The problem for Adobe is that Mac is actually a major platform for video editing and they are retreating to a smaller market because they don't know how to compete with Apple and Avid.
>> FYI, a Xeon IS a P4. Funnily enough that's why it's called "P4 Xeon".
If you don't know the difference between Xeon and P4, you are not even qualified as a Wintel idiot.
Xeon is a much more expensive server-grade CPU capable of SMP, unlike the crappy old P4. But the dual 2 GHz G5 still beats the dual 3 GHz Xeon Dell, and $1000 cheaper!
>> If Altavec speeds up the benchmark, I'd find it hard to believe that SSE2 wouldn't as well (again, unless you have junk compilers) because they are practically the same thing
No, they are not the same thing at all. There is no evidence that SSE2 can speedup performance by anywhere near a factor of 10 to 13 even using the Intel compiler.
>> Altivec is single-precision, SSE2 is double precision. The latter is invaluable for scientific computations of many types of matrix problems, and being wrong twice as fast is of little use.
Actually, according to the author of the article, Jet3D is 99% double precision, but he was able to reformulate 10 lines of code to take advantage of AltiVec and gained 10 to 13 times in speed. SSE2 may handle double precision, but it's not a true vector processor like AltiVec, and there is absolutely no evidence that it can even double the speed.
It's not fair to compare the 64-bit G5 with even the much more expensive 32-bit Xeon, and simply out of order to the crappy P4 which is not even capable of dual CPU configuration.
The dual 2GHz G5 Mac costs $3000, and a dual 3 GHz Dell is $3000, but the Mac is still 20% faster in SPECfp 2000 and 200% in real app tests.
>> So you could guess that a dual 2.66ghz would get about 499-500MFLOPS which would be a 0% performance advantage to the G5, and the P4 3.2ghz would be even faster...
Except there is no such thing as a dual P4 system, which is why Apple has also tested the dual G5 against the dual 3 GHz Xeon Dell, and the dual G5 is still 20% than the dual Xeon and $1000 cheaper.
It may well be that NASA simply hasn't got a dual Xeon at hand to test. Their main purpose is to test the G5 against G4, so it's not worth to buy a rather expensive Xeon box.
More importantly, Jet3D runs 10x to 13x faster using Altivec in both G4 and G5, and SSE2 actually degrades the performance, so why should they even bother with P4 or Xeon at all.
The dual G5 Power Mac does have 2 independent 1 GHz FSBs, the I/O subsystems are connected to the system controller by 2 bidirectional 16-bit 800 MHz HyperTransport interconnects with a 3.2 GB per second bandwidth, and each of the 2 internal SATA drives is on an independent bus.
>> Why do you need the Enterprise Edition? I subscribed to MSDN and got Visual Studio along with quite a bit more software.
I don't want to get near the thing, but the poor people who develop commercial software for Windows do.
How much do you pay for MSDN? You can become an ADC member for free http://www.apple.com/developer/
It looks that you are just playing with Visual Studio to learn programming, in which case it would be better to do it on the open and elegant Mac OS X rather than the proprietary and clunky Windows.
I have been programming C++ / Java on Windows and Unix (Sun Solaris, HP-UX, SGI Irix ) for a long time, and Mac OS X is better than all of those combined and all tools are free.
The combination of the powerful 64-bit G5 and the rock solid Mac OS X is going to reshape the computing landscape and Apple will rapidly gain market share in the next few years.
With undisputed superiority in both hardware and software, Apple is innovating in ever quickening paces, and MS is just too slow to follow. Longhorn is 2 or 3 years away but offers really nothing more exciting than Jaguar, and will be blown away by Panther later this year.
If you are learning programming skills for the future, forget about Windows and switch to Mac OS X now. Don't just take my word for it, follow the alpha geeks who have done so: James Gosling (Java inventor) and most of his Java team at Sun Microsystems, James Duncan Davidson (author of Apache Tomcat and Apache Ant), Tim Bray (pioneer of XML), Tim Bernes-Lee (inventor of the Web), Tim O'Reilly (geek publisher) and many of the O'Reilly editors, and many Slashdot editors including CmdrTaco himself.
You obviously don't know what you are talking about.
Linux may be used by render farms, but Mac is the platform of choices for Hollywood studios, and the G5 has the power and potential to upseat the Lintel boxes from render farms.
Almost all Linux software is also available on Mac OS X, but the opposite is not true. Apart from the lack of mainstream tools like PhotoShop and MS Office and QuickTime on Linux, Shake (the best movie composition) costs $5000 for Mac OS X but $10000 for Linux and other platforms, 25% Maya sales come from Mac, Final Cut Pro (most popular nonlinear video editing tool) and Logic (best music production) and DVD Studio Pro are all Mac only.
Now that the 64-bit dual 2 GHz G5 Power Mac is 200% faster and $1000 cheaper than the 32-bit dual 3 GHz Xeon Dell, the Mac suddenly becomes a much better platform than Lintel.
"Thanks to the hard work of Adobe's engineers, Photoshop performs twice as fast on Power Mac G5s, when compared to any other system we've seen from Apple," said Greg Gilley, vice president, Graphics Applications Development at Adobe. "The future of Photoshop on the Macintosh platform is being geared around exploiting the power of Mac OS X and tapping the outstanding hardware performance of a new generation of Power Mac G5s."
Luxology
"We are simply blown away with the performance we are seeing out of the chip and the incredibly wide pipes on the motherboard which allows our 3D technology to do more in real time than we ever thought possible," said Brad Peebler, Luxology's president and co-founder.
Pixar
"After running our RenderMan benchmarks, we can now say that the Power Mac G5 is the fastest desktop in the world," said Ed Catmull, Pixar's president.
Macromedia
"The combination of Macromedia products and the new Power Mac G5 from Apple is an ideal platform for developers to create great experiences," said Norm Meyrowitz, Macromedia's president of Macromedia Products.
Digidesign
"Processor power is one of the prime things that makes the magic of digital audio happen. The new Power Mac G5 is going to give our customers just want they want--loads of power and a great OS that really delivers," said Dave Lebolt, Digidesign's general manager and Avid Technology vice president.
Alias|Wavefront
"Alias|Wavefront is extremely pleased with the performance we're seeing from our initial tests of Maya on the Power Mac G5," says Kevin Tureski, general manager, Maya Engineering at Alias|Wavefront. "From dynamics to rendering, we're seeing twice the performance with our application. Our customers will be thrilled with the Power Mac G5."
Wolfram
"The Power Mac G5 is a scientific dream machine," said Wolfram Research co-founder Theodore Gray. "Mathematica Version 5's enhanced support for large-scale numerical linear algebra, linear programming, and PDEs, is a perfect example of what you need a machine as powerful as the Power Mac G5 for: Everyone who uses Mathematica, or should, would do well to look at the Power Mac G5 very seriously."
>> While I have the utmost respect for Dr. Catmull, one must remember a key player in both Pixar and Apple's operations: Steve Jobs.
Steve Jobs created Pixar to make great movies and lots of money, not to help Apple, and virtually all of his wealth comes from the 70% Pixar stock that he owns. The company is run by very smart people like Ed Catmull who make decision in the best interest of Pixar, which is why their own render farm currently uses Lintel machines rather than Macs. But the G5 is going to change the CG landscape, and Pixar knows that from their own benchmarks.
Does your conspiracy theory also apply to all these companies:
Adobe
"Thanks to the hard work of Adobe's engineers, Photoshop performs twice as fast on Power Mac G5s, when compared to any other system we've seen from Apple," said Greg Gilley, vice president, Graphics Applications Development at Adobe. "The future of Photoshop on the Macintosh platform is being geared around exploiting the power of Mac OS X and tapping the outstanding hardware performance of a new generation of Power Mac G5s."
Luxology
"We are simply blown away with the performance we are seeing out of the chip and the incredibly wide pipes on the motherboard which allows our 3D technology to do more in real time than we ever thought possible," said Brad Peebler, Luxology's president and co-founder.
Pixar
"After running our RenderMan benchmarks, we can now say that the Power Mac G5 is the fastest desktop in the world," said Ed Catmull, Pixar's president.
Macromedia
"The combination of Macromedia products and the new Power Mac G5 from Apple is an ideal platform for developers to create great experiences," said Norm Meyrowitz, Macromedia's president of Macromedia Products.
Digidesign
"Processor power is one of the prime things that makes the magic of digital audio happen. The new Power Mac G5 is going to give our customers just want they want--loads of power and a great OS that really delivers," said Dave Lebolt, Digidesign's general manager and Avid Technology vice president.
Alias|Wavefront
"Alias|Wavefront is extremely pleased with the performance we're seeing from our initial tests of Maya on the Power Mac G5," says Kevin Tureski, general manager, Maya Engineering at Alias|Wavefront. "From dynamics to rendering, we're seeing twice the performance with our application. Our customers will be thrilled with the Power Mac G5."
Wolfram
"The Power Mac G5 is a scientific dream machine," said Wolfram Research co-founder Theodore Gray. "Mathematica Version 5's enhanced support for large-scale numerical linear algebra, linear programming, and PDEs, is a perfect example of what you need a machine as powerful as the Power Mac G5 for: Everyone who uses Mathematica, or should, would do well to look at the Power Mac G5 very seriously."
Mac OS X and G5 for 3D Rendering and video editing
on
Dreamworks, Sinbad & Linux
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Well, Pixar president Ed Catmull said at WWDC last week that the dual 2 GHz G5 Power Mac was the fastest desktop computer for RenderMan.
In addition, Final Cut Pro only runs on Mac, Apple sells Shake for $5000 on Mac OS X and $10000 on Linux and other platforms, 25% Maya sales go to Mac OS X. It looks that Mac OS X on G5 is a far better 3D and video solution than Linux, particularly now that the dual G5 Power Mac is cheaper than the dual Xeon Dell.
Dell 1.3 GHz Itanium 2 server for $5999
on
G5 Benchmark Roundup
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
A Dell 1.3 GHz Itanium 2 (Madison) server costs 200% as much as a dual 2 GHz G5 Power Mac.
There were 1900 Itanium 2 servers sold in the last 3 months - an embarrassing figure shared between so many OEMs. According to Intel, there are only 400 native programs for Itanium.
In contrast, there are over 6000 native OS X programs that will run the G5 with no modification, and there should be many 64-bit apps in the next few months. So why should anyone want to pay twice the money for a hot and noisy Dell with less performance, less feature, less style, and much less software than the dual G5 Power Mac?
IBM 32-way Power 4 beats HP 64-way Itanium 2
on
G5 Benchmark Roundup
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Anyone doubting the speed of G5 should take a look at this
In short, the IBM pSeries 690 with 32-way 1.7 GHz IBM Power 4 is 10% faster than the newly released HP 64-way 1.5 GHz Itanium 2 6M Madison, which means the Power 4 is 220% as fast as Madison and much more than the 3 GHz Xeon.
According to IBM, the Power 5 will be 400% faster than Power 4 and is coming next year. It looks that Apple is in good company.
>> If you are paying $3000 for.net you got royally screwed.
That's the official MS price for the Enterprice Edition last time I checked. How much do you pay for it? Student price or free ilegal use doesn't count.
>> I think overall it still trails Microsoft and Borland's offerings.
In what way? To start with, Apple tools work with industry standard Java / C / C++ / Obj C / Obj C++, while MS locks programmers to Windows / VB / C#. More importantly, the Cocoa API is based on the mature and elegant NeXTSTEP that has largely remained stable for a long long time, and is likely to be so for the next 10 years. I don't think anyone can count on MS for maintaining that sort of continuity for Windows. MS has very little vision and tends to fumble and follow rather than lead, which is why Windows programming skills just doen't last. People have wasted years to learn Win16, Win32, MFC,.NET, C#, most of which will be useless when Longhorn is released in 2005 or 2006.
With IB and PB, you can design sleek UI with no programming or messy code being generated like other IDEs, can you do that with other tools?
>> This can only be good news since the one place Apple continues to trail the Windows platform is in compilers/IDEs. Both Project Builder and Codewarrior are behind the curve compared to Visual Studio.
I don't think so. You have also failed to mention Interface Builder which is absolutely the best GUI builder on earth, and don't forget the upcoming Xcode http://www.asia.apple.com/macosx/panther/xcode.htm l
You also get Apple programming tools for free, while MS Visual Studio.NET costs over $3000.
You are obviously missing the whole point of "taking the compiler out of the equation". The Apple results are done by an independent lab with full disclosure using the open source GCC for both x86 and PPC.
You also miss the point that GCC is much more optimized for the long established x86 platform than any other less commonly use CPU architectures such as SPARC or PowerPC and the least for the new born G5.
>> An Itanium II, btw, is 61% faster, running at half the clock speed. Incredible.
The Itanium II costs over $3000 per chip (more than the total cost of a dual 2 GHz Power Mac), consumes 3x more energy (130W vs 40W), and relies on massive on-chip cache to boost its SPEC numbers. In short, your comparison is just pure bullshit.
I hate it when people ask silly questions without reading the first thing about story. Here is the quote to save you from scrolling back to the beginning:
"Joswiak added that in the Intel modifications for the tests, they chose the option that provided higher scores for the Intel machine, not lower. The scores were higher under Linux than under Windows, and in the rate test, the scores were higher with hyperthreading disabled than enabled. He also said they would be happy to do the tests on Windows and with hyperthreading enabled, if people wanted it, as it would only make the G5 look better."
They have used a third party with full disclosure, selected options (SSE2, no hyper threading, Linux instead of Windows) to give higher scores to the Dell. How fair is that?
The whole benchmark industry has been created by the like of Intel and Dell for marketing purpose only. I expect the average/. readers are more sophisticated than just focusing on the manufactured numbers. There are far more important factors to consider, and the G5 is 200 - 700% faster than the Dell in running real-world apps like PhotoShop, Logic, Mathematica, BLAST, HMMer, etc.
Even by Slashdot standard, you are all making an unnecessary huge fuss over something hardly relevant.
The G5 Power Mac has a much greater performance lead (200 - 700%) over the Dell in running real-world apps (such as PhotoShop, Logic, BLAST, HMMer, Quak 3) than in SPEC.
OK, Apple may have used optimized GCC for G5 or disabled Hyper Threading and SSE2, but that's more like leveling the play field rather than cheating, when considering that
(1) GCC is much more heavily optimized for the long established x86 than any other CPU such as PowerPC or SPARC, and the G5 is still a prototype;
(2) HT doesn't always help the performance, and in any case its impact is normally quite small for benchmarks.
(3) SPECfp is purely for measuring the FPU performance which excludes SIMD operations using SSE2 on IA32 or Altivec on G5.
(4) The dual G5 Power Mac is a really great system (dual 1 GHz FSB, dual channel 400 MHz 128-bit DDR memory, 8x AGP, dual channel serial ATA), and Apple has far more leverage than resorting to cheats.
Slashdot Mirror
>> The relative lack of expandability (there are only two drive bays, for example, and both are already in used by default - one HD, one optical media)
There are 2 SATA drive bays for up to 500 GB internal storage, AND an optical Drive. Further more, you can always add external devices through USB2, Firewire 400 / 800, gigabit Ethernet.
>> NINE FANS! Holy crap Apple, what the HELL were you thinking?! I mean, nine fans. That's NINE moving parts.
This is a Good Thing - distributed cooling. If 1 of 9 fans fails, you are probably OK for a while. It would be much worse when 1 of 1 fan fails.
>> Rather than spend time and energy in a fight over the smaller Apple-based market, they're placing their resources in the much larger Windows arena, where there are greater prospects for growth.
The problem for Adobe is that Mac is actually a major platform for video editing and they are retreating to a smaller market because they don't know how to compete with Apple and Avid.
>> FYI, a Xeon IS a P4. Funnily enough that's why it's called "P4 Xeon".
If you don't know the difference between Xeon and P4, you are not even qualified as a Wintel idiot.
Xeon is a much more expensive server-grade CPU capable of SMP, unlike the crappy old P4. But the dual 2 GHz G5 still beats the dual 3 GHz Xeon Dell, and $1000 cheaper!
>> If Altavec speeds up the benchmark, I'd find it hard to believe that SSE2 wouldn't as well (again, unless you have junk compilers) because they are practically the same thing
No, they are not the same thing at all. There is no evidence that SSE2 can speedup performance by anywhere near a factor of 10 to 13 even using the Intel compiler.
>> Altivec is single-precision, SSE2 is double precision. The latter is invaluable for scientific computations of many types of matrix problems, and being wrong twice as fast is of little use.
Actually, according to the author of the article, Jet3D is 99% double precision, but he was able to reformulate 10 lines of code to take advantage of AltiVec and gained 10 to 13 times in speed. SSE2 may handle double precision, but it's not a true vector processor like AltiVec, and there is absolutely no evidence that it can even double the speed.
>> So why didn't they port their code to SSE2?
Probably because it's not worth it. While Altivec speeds up Jet3D by a factor of 10 to 13, there is no evidence that SSE2 can even double the speed.
The debugger may not be the best, but for me there are more important issues, and you can always use gdb for more flexibility.
It's not fair to compare the 64-bit G5 with even the much more expensive 32-bit Xeon, and simply out of order to the crappy P4 which is not even capable of dual CPU configuration.
The dual 2GHz G5 Mac costs $3000, and a dual 3 GHz Dell is $3000, but the Mac is still 20% faster in SPECfp 2000 and 200% in real app tests.
Project Builder and Interface Builder and all Apple programming tools = $0. MS Visual Studio .NET Enterprise > $3000.
>> So you could guess that a dual 2.66ghz would get about 499-500MFLOPS which would be a 0% performance advantage to the G5, and the P4 3.2ghz would be even faster...
Except there is no such thing as a dual P4 system, which is why Apple has also tested the dual G5 against the dual 3 GHz Xeon Dell, and the dual G5 is still 20% than the dual Xeon and $1000 cheaper.
It may well be that NASA simply hasn't got a dual Xeon at hand to test. Their main purpose is to test the G5 against G4, so it's not worth to buy a rather expensive Xeon box.
More importantly, Jet3D runs 10x to 13x faster using Altivec in both G4 and G5, and SSE2 actually degrades the performance, so why should they even bother with P4 or Xeon at all.
The dual G5 Power Mac does have 2 independent 1 GHz FSBs, the I/O subsystems are connected to the system controller by 2 bidirectional 16-bit 800 MHz HyperTransport interconnects with a 3.2 GB per second bandwidth, and each of the 2 internal SATA drives is on an independent bus.
>> Why do you need the Enterprise Edition? I subscribed to MSDN and got Visual Studio along with quite a bit more software.
I don't want to get near the thing, but the poor people who develop commercial software for Windows do.
How much do you pay for MSDN? You can become an ADC member for free http://www.apple.com/developer/
It looks that you are just playing with Visual Studio to learn programming, in which case it would be better to do it on the open and elegant Mac OS X rather than the proprietary and clunky Windows.
I have been programming C++ / Java on Windows and Unix (Sun Solaris, HP-UX, SGI Irix ) for a long time, and Mac OS X is better than all of those combined and all tools are free.
The combination of the powerful 64-bit G5 and the rock solid Mac OS X is going to reshape the computing landscape and Apple will rapidly gain market share in the next few years.
With undisputed superiority in both hardware and software, Apple is innovating in ever quickening paces, and MS is just too slow to follow. Longhorn is 2 or 3 years away but offers really nothing more exciting than Jaguar, and will be blown away by Panther later this year.
If you are learning programming skills for the future, forget about Windows and switch to Mac OS X now. Don't just take my word for it, follow the alpha geeks who have done so: James Gosling (Java inventor) and most of his Java team at Sun Microsystems, James Duncan Davidson (author of Apache Tomcat and Apache Ant), Tim Bray (pioneer of XML), Tim Bernes-Lee (inventor of the Web), Tim O'Reilly (geek publisher) and many of the O'Reilly editors, and many Slashdot editors including CmdrTaco himself.
You obviously don't know what you are talking about.
Linux may be used by render farms, but Mac is the platform of choices for Hollywood studios, and the G5 has the power and potential to upseat the Lintel boxes from render farms.
Almost all Linux software is also available on Mac OS X, but the opposite is not true. Apart from the lack of mainstream tools like PhotoShop and MS Office and QuickTime on Linux, Shake (the best movie composition) costs $5000 for Mac OS X but $10000 for Linux and other platforms, 25% Maya sales come from Mac, Final Cut Pro (most popular nonlinear video editing tool) and Logic (best music production) and DVD Studio Pro are all Mac only.
Now that the 64-bit dual 2 GHz G5 Power Mac is 200% faster and $1000 cheaper than the 32-bit dual 3 GHz Xeon Dell, the Mac suddenly becomes a much better platform than Lintel.
Take a look at this
http://www.luxology.net/company/wwdc03foll owup.aspx
and these:
Adobe
"Thanks to the hard work of Adobe's engineers, Photoshop performs twice as fast on Power Mac G5s, when compared to any other system we've seen from Apple," said Greg Gilley, vice president, Graphics Applications Development at Adobe. "The future of Photoshop on the Macintosh platform is being geared around exploiting the power of Mac OS X and tapping the outstanding hardware performance of a new generation of Power Mac G5s."
Luxology
"We are simply blown away with the performance we are seeing out of the chip and the incredibly wide pipes on the motherboard which allows our 3D technology to do more in real time than we ever thought possible," said Brad Peebler, Luxology's president and co-founder.
Pixar
"After running our RenderMan benchmarks, we can now say that the Power Mac G5 is the fastest desktop in the world," said Ed Catmull, Pixar's president.
Macromedia
"The combination of Macromedia products and the new Power Mac G5 from Apple is an ideal platform for developers to create great experiences," said Norm Meyrowitz, Macromedia's president of Macromedia Products.
Digidesign
"Processor power is one of the prime things that makes the magic of digital audio happen. The new Power Mac G5 is going to give our customers just want they want--loads of power and a great OS that really delivers," said Dave Lebolt, Digidesign's general manager and Avid Technology vice president.
Alias|Wavefront
"Alias|Wavefront is extremely pleased with the performance we're seeing from our initial tests of Maya on the Power Mac G5," says Kevin Tureski, general manager, Maya Engineering at Alias|Wavefront. "From dynamics to rendering, we're seeing twice the performance with our application. Our customers will be thrilled with the Power Mac G5."
Wolfram
"The Power Mac G5 is a scientific dream machine," said Wolfram Research co-founder Theodore Gray. "Mathematica Version 5's enhanced support for large-scale numerical linear algebra, linear programming, and PDEs, is a perfect example of what you need a machine as powerful as the Power Mac G5 for: Everyone who uses Mathematica, or should, would do well to look at the Power Mac G5 very seriously."
>> While I have the utmost respect for Dr. Catmull, one must remember a key player in both Pixar and Apple's operations: Steve Jobs.
Steve Jobs created Pixar to make great movies and lots of money, not to help Apple, and virtually all of his wealth comes from the 70% Pixar stock that he owns. The company is run by very smart people like Ed Catmull who make decision in the best interest of Pixar, which is why their own render farm currently uses Lintel machines rather than Macs. But the G5 is going to change the CG landscape, and Pixar knows that from their own benchmarks.
Does your conspiracy theory also apply to all these companies:
Adobe
"Thanks to the hard work of Adobe's engineers, Photoshop performs twice as fast on Power Mac G5s, when compared to any other system we've seen from Apple," said Greg Gilley, vice president, Graphics Applications Development at Adobe. "The future of Photoshop on the Macintosh platform is being geared around exploiting the power of Mac OS X and tapping the outstanding hardware performance of a new generation of Power Mac G5s."
Luxology
"We are simply blown away with the performance we are seeing out of the chip and the incredibly wide pipes on the motherboard which allows our 3D technology to do more in real time than we ever thought possible," said Brad Peebler, Luxology's president and co-founder.
Pixar
"After running our RenderMan benchmarks, we can now say that the Power Mac G5 is the fastest desktop in the world," said Ed Catmull, Pixar's president.
Macromedia
"The combination of Macromedia products and the new Power Mac G5 from Apple is an ideal platform for developers to create great experiences," said Norm Meyrowitz, Macromedia's president of Macromedia Products.
Digidesign
"Processor power is one of the prime things that makes the magic of digital audio happen. The new Power Mac G5 is going to give our customers just want they want--loads of power and a great OS that really delivers," said Dave Lebolt, Digidesign's general manager and Avid Technology vice president.
Alias|Wavefront
"Alias|Wavefront is extremely pleased with the performance we're seeing from our initial tests of Maya on the Power Mac G5," says Kevin Tureski, general manager, Maya Engineering at Alias|Wavefront. "From dynamics to rendering, we're seeing twice the performance with our application. Our customers will be thrilled with the Power Mac G5."
Wolfram
"The Power Mac G5 is a scientific dream machine," said Wolfram Research co-founder Theodore Gray. "Mathematica Version 5's enhanced support for large-scale numerical linear algebra, linear programming, and PDEs, is a perfect example of what you need a machine as powerful as the Power Mac G5 for: Everyone who uses Mathematica, or should, would do well to look at the Power Mac G5 very seriously."
Well, Pixar president Ed Catmull said at WWDC last week that the dual 2 GHz G5 Power Mac was the fastest desktop computer for RenderMan.
In addition, Final Cut Pro only runs on Mac, Apple sells Shake for $5000 on Mac OS X and $10000 on Linux and other platforms, 25% Maya sales go to Mac OS X. It looks that Mac OS X on G5 is a far better 3D and video solution than Linux, particularly now that the dual G5 Power Mac is cheaper than the dual Xeon Dell.
According to this article:
http://www.computerworld.com/hardwaret opics/hardware/server/story/0,10801,82642,00.html
A Dell 1.3 GHz Itanium 2 (Madison) server costs 200% as much as a dual 2 GHz G5 Power Mac.
There were 1900 Itanium 2 servers sold in the last 3 months - an embarrassing figure shared between so many OEMs. According to Intel, there are only 400 native programs for Itanium.
In contrast, there are over 6000 native OS X programs that will run the G5 with no modification, and there should be many 64-bit apps in the next few months. So why should anyone want to pay twice the money for a hot and noisy Dell with less performance, less feature, less style, and much less software than the dual G5 Power Mac?
Anyone doubting the speed of G5 should take a look at this
http://www.tpc.org/tpcc/results/tpcc_perf_ results.asp?resulttype=noncluster&version=5
In short, the IBM pSeries 690 with 32-way 1.7 GHz IBM Power 4 is 10% faster than the newly released HP 64-way 1.5 GHz Itanium 2 6M Madison, which means the Power 4 is 220% as fast as Madison and much more than the 3 GHz Xeon.
According to IBM, the Power 5 will be 400% faster than Power 4 and is coming next year. It looks that Apple is in good company.
>> If you are paying $3000 for .net you got royally screwed.
.NET, C#, most of which will be useless when Longhorn is released in 2005 or 2006.
That's the official MS price for the Enterprice Edition last time I checked. How much do you pay for it? Student price or free ilegal use doesn't count.
>> I think overall it still trails Microsoft and Borland's offerings.
In what way? To start with, Apple tools work with industry standard Java / C / C++ / Obj C / Obj C++, while MS locks programmers to Windows / VB / C#. More importantly, the Cocoa API is based on the mature and elegant NeXTSTEP that has largely remained stable for a long long time, and is likely to be so for the next 10 years. I don't think anyone can count on MS for maintaining that sort of continuity for Windows. MS has very little vision and tends to fumble and follow rather than lead, which is why Windows programming skills just doen't last. People have wasted years to learn Win16, Win32, MFC,
With IB and PB, you can design sleek UI with no programming or messy code being generated like other IDEs, can you do that with other tools?
>> This can only be good news since the one place Apple continues to trail the Windows platform is in compilers/IDEs. Both Project Builder and Codewarrior are behind the curve compared to Visual Studio.
m l
.NET costs over $3000.
I don't think so. You have also failed to mention Interface Builder which is absolutely the best GUI builder on earth, and don't forget the upcoming Xcode http://www.asia.apple.com/macosx/panther/xcode.ht
You also get Apple programming tools for free, while MS Visual Studio
You are obviously missing the whole point of "taking the compiler out of the equation". The Apple results are done by an independent lab with full disclosure using the open source GCC for both x86 and PPC.
You also miss the point that GCC is much more optimized for the long established x86 platform than any other less commonly use CPU architectures such as SPARC or PowerPC and the least for the new born G5.
>> An Itanium II, btw, is 61% faster, running at half the clock speed. Incredible.
The Itanium II costs over $3000 per chip (more than the total cost of a dual 2 GHz Power Mac), consumes 3x more energy (130W vs 40W), and relies on massive on-chip cache to boost its SPEC numbers. In short, your comparison is just pure bullshit.
I hate it when people ask silly questions without reading the first thing about story. Here is the quote to save you from scrolling back to the beginning: "Joswiak added that in the Intel modifications for the tests, they chose the option that provided higher scores for the Intel machine, not lower. The scores were higher under Linux than under Windows, and in the rate test, the scores were higher with hyperthreading disabled than enabled. He also said they would be happy to do the tests on Windows and with hyperthreading enabled, if people wanted it, as it would only make the G5 look better."
I mean 11% slower in SPECint.
The single 2 GHz G5 is still 21% faster in SPECfp than a 3 GHz P4, but 11% slower, so it's fair to say the P4 is NOT faster than the G5 overall.
They have used a third party with full disclosure, selected options (SSE2, no hyper threading, Linux instead of Windows) to give higher scores to the Dell. How fair is that?
/. readers are more sophisticated than just focusing on the manufactured numbers. There are far more important factors to consider, and the G5 is 200 - 700% faster than the Dell in running real-world apps like PhotoShop, Logic, Mathematica, BLAST, HMMer, etc.
The whole benchmark industry has been created by the like of Intel and Dell for marketing purpose only. I expect the average
Even by Slashdot standard, you are all making an unnecessary huge fuss over something hardly relevant.
The G5 Power Mac has a much greater performance lead (200 - 700%) over the Dell in running real-world apps (such as PhotoShop, Logic, BLAST, HMMer, Quak 3) than in SPEC.
OK, Apple may have used optimized GCC for G5 or disabled Hyper Threading and SSE2, but that's more like leveling the play field rather than cheating, when considering that
(1) GCC is much more heavily optimized for the long established x86 than any other CPU such as PowerPC or SPARC, and the G5 is still a prototype;
(2) HT doesn't always help the performance, and in any case its impact is normally quite small for benchmarks.
(3) SPECfp is purely for measuring the FPU performance which excludes SIMD operations using SSE2 on IA32 or Altivec on G5.
(4) The dual G5 Power Mac is a really great system (dual 1 GHz FSB, dual channel 400 MHz 128-bit DDR memory, 8x AGP, dual channel serial ATA), and Apple has far more leverage than resorting to cheats.