Apple Hardware VP Defends Benchmarks

Greg Joswiak, vice president of hardware product marketing at Apple, in a phone interview today, defended Apple's performance claims for its upcoming Power Mac G5, after they came under fire in the wake of yesterday's announcement. Read on for the details.

Joswiak went over the points in turn, but first said that they set out from the beginning to do a fair and even comparison, which is why they used an independent lab and provided full disclosure of the methods used in the tests, which would be "a silly way to do things" if Apple were intending to be deceptive.

He said Veritest used gcc for both platforms, instead of Intel's compiler, simply because the benchmarks measure two things at the same time: compiler, and hardware. To test the hardware alone, you must normalize the compiler out of the equation -- using the same version and similar settings -- and, if anything, Joswiak said, gcc has been available on the Intel platform for a lot longer and is more optimized for Intel than for PowerPC.

He conceded readily that the Dell numbers would be higher with the Intel compiler, but that the Apple numbers could be higher with a different compiler too.

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.

In the G5 modifications, they were made because shipping systems will have those options available. For example, memory read bypass was turned on, for even though it is not on by default in the tested prototypes, it will be on by default for the shipping systems. Software-based prefetching was turned off and a high-performance malloc was used because those options will be available on the shipping systems (Joswiak did not know whether this malloc, which is faster but less memory efficient, will be the default in the shipping systems).

As to not using SSE2, Joswiak said they enabled the correct flags for it, as documented on the gcc web site, so that SSE2 was enabled (the Veritest report lists the options used for each test, which appears to include the appropriate flags).

Who cares?

Really?

If you want OSX, you'll need to get the PPC.

If you want Windows, you'll get the x86.

If you want Linux, you can pick up 10 [slashdot.org] and build yourself a cluster for the price of one of these new machines.

Curious

This is the first time I think _I_ have seen slashdot with an article they wrote compltely on their own.

Did you recieve a phone call directly or something(Apple calling Slashdot)? If so did they act really aggressive wanting to make sure people don't become anti-G5 before it is even shipped?

Not too important you might say, but interests me.

Re:Curious

Eh, we do this sometimes, when it is appropriate. In this case, I have a PR contact at Apple who asked me last week if I wanted to talk to someone about WWDC, and we set up a call last weekend, for this afternoon. It just happened to coincide with the benchmark discussion, which Greg was eager to set straight (he had read the arguments and already compiled his responses :-). We also talked a bit about some other topics, but nothing of interest that you haven't read elsewhere.

Re:Curious

we do this sometimes, when it is appropriate. In this case, I have a PR contact at Apple who asked me last week if I wanted to talk to someone about WWDC

You know, I always thought that this would be a good idea for Slashdot. I mean, you guys must have some pretty interesting contacts by now, use some of them to do a "news" article or two on your own. I'd still keep the old Slashdot question/answer interview around because they are interesting and good for the people who don't have time to do a traditional interview.

Re:Curious

And why exactly is someone from /. *qualified* on this subject?

I hate to break it to you but many of the print reporters have very few qualifications to be covering the news but they are doing it anyways. Sure a Slashdot "professional" interview won't be extremely professional but I'm sure most people don't want it to be. I, for one, think I would enjoy a more "geek-on-the-street" kind of interview and I think that a Slashdot interview would provide that.

I may be wrong but it's at least worth a shot. It seems to have worked out pretty well in this story we are commenting on.

Re:Curious

(he had read the arguments and already compiled his responses :-)

Cheater! Dirty cheater, I say!!

What, did he use GCC to compile them?! Filth!!! DIE!

Re:Who cares?

The people who care are the zealots who don't understand, "Use the best tool for the job."

This means 3 things:

• Use a tool that is made for the task.
  
• Use a tool that you are comfortable with.
  
• The other tools don't suck.
  

People just have a hard time dealing with this whole "choice" thing.

Re:Who cares?

Personally I think the speed of the G5 and the validity of the benchmarks are both valid questions.

Does either of those questions alone determine whether you should get a G5 based system or not? No, but that doesn't mean the question isn't worth discussing.

I'm curious how fast the G5 is at certain kinds of tasks. Not because it helps me make a purchasing decision, but because I'm a geek and I'm interested in that kind of thing. This being slashdot, I'm sure I'm not the only one. Does superior floating point performance mean "better for photoshop"? Maybe not, but I'm more intersted in FP performance that PS performance.

I thought the original article was worth a read. I thought some of the comments are interesting. I thought this follow up was interesting. People like me are the ones who care. People who just want to know what kind of computer to buy, well yes, they are totally missing the point.

Re:Who cares?

The thing I wonder is what the purpose of this kind of company-sponsored benchmark is supposed to prove? Especially in a case like this where the results of the benchmark do not point to a clear winner (what with the questions surrounding the tests).

Apple may be a hardware company, but it isn't the hardware that is attracting customers. It's the software, stupid. If anything, Apple should be talking up the benefits of the OS and the "Apple System" (where everything works seamlessly) rather than the raw speed of the processor and leaving the benchmarking to review sites.

Apple's core competence is in making systems that are easy to set up and easy to administer and easy to use. It has never been in making "the fastest machine".

Re:Who cares?

>Apple's core competence is in making systems that are easy to set up and easy to administer and easy to use.

And that's not only thanks to the software, but also due to the great integration of software and hardware.

This integration ("it just works") is why people buy Apple. And therefore it's really hardware and software that attract customers (ey, and don't tell me I didn't buy my 17" PowerBook just for the software, I could have gotten an iBook if I only wanted to run OS X!)

Re:Who cares?

you know this and I know this but many trolls don't know this. I think Apple just got tired of hearing how PCs are faster and what not. Personally I was blown away by the keynote. Also, for anyone wondering I'm using the developer preview now and if the release of Panther is anything like the preview, holy crap. It is nice. There are a ton of tiny improvements here and there that really make it nice, even nicer than Jaguar. These are little things that weren't mentioned in the keynote.

Re:Who cares?

I just got a 450MHz G4 Cube (pre-owned, obviously).

I have used high-end workstation-class machines, both RISC and CISC, multi-GHz Intel machines, and Macs back to System 6. This Cube is without a doubt the best computer I have ever owned or used.

That having been said, I have seen Apple make some prety serious hardware and customer service mistakes. I would buy another Mac in a heartbeat, but I would wait for these systems to ship for at least six months before buying one of them. Wait until you can check Mac help forums. Find out what the problems are, if any. You don't want to spend $3000 on a computer, and have the paint chip off.

Re:Who cares?

There are 3 kinds of lies - lies, damned lies, and benchmarks.

I think Apple will have validity (in the performance arena) when AMD or Intel start publishing benchmarks against APPLE's systems.

Why won't Apple just use the AIX C compiler?

Let's face it: in their own way, Apple is being quite fair. Everybody in the free software community uses gcc, and publishing SPEC scores on x86 gcc is valid and useful.

However, IBM probably has C compilers for the POWER architecture that produce far more optimized code than gcc. Why hasn't Apple licensed and ported this technology?

Apple needn't resell such a C compiler, but critical system binaries (i.e. the kernel) could be recompiled for much better performance. Granted also that IBM is unlikely to support Objective C anytime soon, so such a compiler is only marginally useful.

However, Apple positively wastes these POWER chips without a vendor-optimized C compiler.

Re:Why won't Apple just use the AIX C compiler?

Apple's pulling off a miracle every day of the week by staying competitive and often moving ahead of the pack when it has such a small market share. When Apple has 10% of the market, they'll likely have the money to support such a project. But then again, why not just pour the same effort into gcc PPC optimizations? You get the same result (more hardware sales due to faster software) and you get kudos for contributing code.

Re:Why won't Apple just use the AIX C compiler?

If you had any brains you would have read the many refutations of the OSX on x86 idea and given up on this sad excuse for a business plan.

Most of the market wants to get their work done and doesn't care if it's x86, ppc, or some other chip that powers their computers. With Apple's unlimited client server licensing they're a cheaper solution for standard file and print servers than Windows. That's not as cheap as Linux but the hardware price difference very quickly gets swallowed up by Windows CAL costs. For small companies in the 10-100 employee range who don't want to have a full-time administrator Apple has a compelling enterprise product.

Re:Why won't Apple just use the AIX C compiler?

I'm writing a final proposal for a network redesign. I'm going to recommend that if they need to add a server in future it be a Mac OS X server box and swap out their current file and print box to handle the new application service they adopt. Why? Because their chief IT guy is also their chief accountant and their current IT consultants have been using fixed IP assignment instead of DHCP so that he needed to call them every time they had to install a machine. If you want to migrate a company like this off of Windows file and print, which makes more sense to you? Exactly.

You can't say hire a linux support person because their salary will be more than made up by the money you save on licensing and hardware over Mac. It just isn't. Even if you could get the chief accountant into a Linux class to take on an OS, is it really a wise use of his time and talents? No.

Macs are about as user friendly to administer as you can get and with 10.3 giving Active Directory integration with a dead simple GUI interface, it's a good choice for companies like this.

Photoshop WAS compiled with the AIX compiler!

I don't know if they still do, but for a while at the beginning of the PowerPC era Adobe was using the AIX compiler to generate its PowerPC binaries for Photoshop.

Admittedly, this was when the PowerPC was pretty new, and the choices were the IBM/AIX compiler which was robust and produced fast code but required an AIX box in addition to a Power Mac, or the nacent Metrowerks CodeWarrior compiler which run natively on the Power Mac, but generated poorly optimized code.

If I recall my history timeline correctly, after CodeWarrior came

• the Apple MPW "MrC" compiler (better code than CodeWarrior 1.0, but with a wacky command-line "IDE"), then
• gcc for PowerPC (cruddy code back then), then
• the Motorola PowerPC compiler (better code than Apple's compiler, with NO IDE - it plugged into the CodeWarrior or MPW IDE).
• Then Motorola inexplicably stopped selling their compiler.
• Later Motorola bought Metrowerks.
• Somewhere along the line, gcc learned to generate better PowerPC code.
• Eventually, Apple pretty much shelved their "MrC" compiler, and settled on using gcc for Mac OS X
• Monday, Apple released their "Xcode" environment -- still using gcc, I believe.

Apple's MPW tools are still available (free) here [apple.com] for Mac OS 7/8/9. The new Mac OS X tools including Xcode are available here [apple.com].

As a side note, it's really nice to see Apple giving away a full development suite for free, and continuing to put development time and effort into improving it.

-Mark

Actually, gcc is not so bad

It is quite difficult to produce better code than gcc, and my tests on powerpc (granted, those were a few years back using xlc on RS6000 with AIX 4) showed that xlc produced code of about the same quality -- sometimes worse, sometimes better.

The gcc "Haifa" scheduler was donated by IBM Haifa, by the way, so I think it's not surprising that gcc produces good code on powerpc.

On Intel it's quite the same, except that gcc does not vectorize code. From what I have seen, however, icc's vectorizer is not very useful either. I recently tested ogg-vorbis (which is a plain C floating point intensive benchmark) with icc 7 and gcc 3.3 and the gcc version was actually faster than the icc version (on my Athlon XP, target CPU pentium3) despite icc having vectorized several loops.

So all this "vendor-optimized C compiler" stuff is really besides the point. No C compiler will ever be able to match the quality of hand optimized assembler code, and the most important code (ffmpeg MPEG-2 decoder and MPEG-4 codec) has already been hand-optimized. You might be able to squeeze anoter 5 percent out of your code by using a vendor C compiler with insane optimizer settings, but what good is that if the end user is only going to use gcc anyway. I know I am, so I find the numbers for gcc actually more useful for comparison purposes than some vendor C compiler comparison.

Also, we don't want to encourage vendors to produce super vendor optimizing compilers, we want them to optimize gcc (so that everyone benefits, not just their users). So the more benchmarks are done using gcc, the better!

Re:Actually, gcc is not so bad

Interesting, when I took a course in Optimizing Compilers last year the concensus was that GCC is pretty awful when it comes to optimizations. Even general non-architecture dependent optimizations. The lecturers reason behind it was twofold.

First most research on compilers are being done at big corprorations. IBM being the single largest as I understood it. Naturally they put their optimizations in their own compilers first, the rest of the world have to implement them from their papers. (If they are lucky and the algorithms are not patented.)

Second if you were to put a good optimization in GCC it wouldn't take long before all other compilers had that optimization as well. GCC is OSS afterall.

We did comparisons between GCC and SunCC on UltraSPARC. SunCC minimal optimizations (O1) beat GCC with maximum optimizations (O4).

I'm just finished a course on vectorizing/parallelising compilers. There the situation is that even the best commercial compilers are pretty much equivalent to junk. Implementing the vector algorithms is a lot harder though. Even compared to complex SSA-form optimizations.

Re:Actually, gcc is not so bad

On the research level gcc is not as bleeding edge as other compilers. So if you run example code that shows the merits of a particular optimization, gcc may look not so good. But in practice, it's quite good.

My experiences with UltraSPARC are also a few years old, but gcc was faster and produced better code than Sun CC back then. You have to make sure to set -march=ultrasparc, of course. And I'm not sure about UltraSPARC but normally gcc -O4 does not do more than -O3, which basically is -O2 with function inlining. You can also get some boost with profile based optimization with gcc.

In summary, gcc produces very good code, but you might have to use some little known options for it. For example, gcc on Athlon XP and Pentium >= 3 may gain significant floating point performance with -mfpmath=sse,387 (I got >10% speed-up on lame, gcc's code was even faster than icc's with vectorizer). Another option worth knowing is -malign-double and the regparm attribute.

Another thing you have to keep in mind is: recent optimization advances normally are not big breakthroughs but small incremental advances. Many of them only help in a handful of special cases. gcc 3 has many more optimizations than gcc 2.95.3 and they were so proud of it that they said "much faster code on x86", and then there was whining and gnashing of teeth when most software was unaffected or even slower.

The only platform where I really would prefer the vendor cc is HP-UX on PA-RISC. The HP CC consistently produced 10-30% faster code than gcc (although that may have changed, I haven't used gcc > 2.7 on HP-UX).

Re:Who cares?

This is what makes me dislike benchmarks, they're treated too much like sports (everything has to be fair). We're talking about computers here. We should use the optimized version, of everything. Compile with the Intel compiler, compile with the ibm compiler, I don't care which one wins 'on even ground' I want to see what can go the fastest, period. If the G5 wins with gcc, but if you use inte's compiler and the P4 completely blows it away (or the other way around) then I want to know that, as opposed to thinking something else because 'the benchmark had to be fair'

Re:Who cares?

I'm sick and tired of people saying this crap about "use the right tool for the right job". It's like a geek mantra or something. I'm a geek but I don't subscribe to this theory that a computer or software or a programming language is a regular tool to be confused with a hammer or something.

Computers, software, and programming languages are tools, I'll give you that. But they are not single purpose tools like a hammer or screwdriver. A computer can do a multitude of tasks. It's malleable and can do just about anything. Since programming languages drive the computer they also fall into the same category. No matter what computer or what programming language, you have a all powerful system (well, as far as any electronic piece of equipment can be).

Picking the "right tool for the right job" when you're talking computers isn't like deciding whether to use a pair of pliers or axe to cut down a tree. It's like having a box of super tools and each one can do just about anything. Which one do you pick? Well, that answer isn't so easy when just about any of them can do the same tasks just maybe in a different fashion.

I also believe because of the flexibility of computers and specifically programming languages that it is in fact possible to create a more perfect language than anything currently existing. There is no perfect programming language, but there could be.

Sorry if that came out confusing. This only just now hit me. I'll have to organise my thoughts as I think about this some more.

Re:Who cares?

I think the key lies in your second-to-last paragraph: "There is no perfect programming language." Yes, exactly -- and moreover, some languages are more nearly perfect (not that I think any existing language is anywhere near perfect) than others, and how close a given language comes to perfection very often depends on the task you're trying to accomplish.

I used to write image-processing software. I wrote it in C, because writing it in a higher-level language would have been absurd. These days, I write database and Web interfaces, and I use the "P" languages (PHP, Perl, and Python) because writing it in C, while certainly possible, would be a huge pain in the ass. I like all of these languages, but it's indisputable that each of them is the right tool for some tasks but not for others.

The same is true of computers in general -- processors, architectures, OS's, etc. It would be great if you could set up one system that was clearly better than all others, or even equally good, for all tasks you might want to use it for. But you can't. The difference might not be quite as dramatic as that between pliers and an axe, but it's real.

I'm very happy with my iBook. It does many things I want to do very very well, and everything else I want to do at least passably. But I'm well aware of its limitations, and chafe at them fairly often. And this would be true of any system -- laptop, desktop, handheld, whatever -- I could possibly buy. I chose it because overall it offered the best fit for what I want to do. If my requirements change, well, then, so will my computer.

Re:Who cares?... Geeks do!

I'm becomming really dissapointed with what seems to be the majority of posts on /. (and especially in this thread). I was anticipating a lot of /.ers going on and on about how sweet the tech specs are on the PowerMac G5 hardware. It shouldn't matter what religion you are (M$, Sun, *NIX, Mac, IdogAppleToSoundSmart...), the hardware freeking rocks! Just like my attitude towards BeOS - I don't necessarily care whether the thing will gain 82% market share, its just cool shit.

Re:Who cares?... Geeks do!

The weakest point of Mac systems for many years has been slow bus speeds. Nobody's challenging the bus speeds and they're much, much faster. If you had a bus this fast on the G4 systems, they would dramatically improve their real-world performance.

RAM capacity is also not under challenge. So, for 23999 I can get a system that would permit up to 8GB of ram on the system.

Just those two unchallenged figures make this much more than just another boring speed bump hardware upgrade.

If they're providing the actual compiler flags they used and the flags used disprove one of the doubter's claims (no SSE2 use) then maybe Apple is *not* just making stuff up?

Re:Who cares?

For some people, e.g. physicists who do numerical "experiments", the benchmarks are crucial, or, at least, a large factor when considering which machine to buy.

Sure, one could buy 10 Linare boxes and Beowulf them together, but if you're a lone physicist with relatively little funding--Beowulf clusters take lots of time, money, and space to feed and maintain--you might care about being able to run floating-point intensive jobs quickly while being able to use MS Word or PowerPoint or some such.

In fact, I already know one astrophysicist who will be getting a G5 in the fall when her new research grant begins. She also happens to be one of the 3 physicists I managed to convince to switch to Mac and get a PowerBook.

Re:Who cares?

Most of the physicists I knew run *nix for their simulations, use LaTeX (not word) to do word processing and DTP, and use pdf files for presentations.

Not a flame, just a note on how things were when I knew physicists. Now I'm stuck with bio types :) Maybe things have changed and physicists are moving toward macs; I don't claim expertise in this area.

Honesty

At least everything that they did seemed to be amply documented.
I found that to be refresing especially in light of all the recent benchmark tests that have not been so forthright with all their methods and procedures.

Re:Honesty

What about the new 3.2's?

You mean the new chips from Intel that were announced the same day as the G5s?

Shit, some people you can never please.

Re:Honesty

That's the dangers of making a comment like "fastest PC on earth"......it's a claim that one has to be VERY careful about making.

Considering that you couldn't get either system yesterday (G5 or 3.2GHz Xeon (I hate it when slashdotters write 'zeon')), I see the whole thing as moot.

It's marketing, folks, not the bible. Greg backed up the test parameters with his data. I think the world would be a less stressful place if Windows went away, but I'm not stressing over a minute saved over a week of Photoshop work.

We spend more time thinking about what to do next in Photoshop than could possibly be saved by a faster processor/architecture/whatever.

That being said, I'll continue to buy Macs because the extra up front cost is well worth the knowledge that one company (and a rather well-run one these days) is responsible and capable enough to develop and market botht he hardware and the OS. They do a rather good job of it for a small premium.

Put another way: If I lose an hour a month because of a hardware vendor who refers me to an OS vendor to resolve a problem, I've lost an hour. I can't get that time back. If my Mac emits smoke and kernel panics at the same time, I know I can get resolution to both problems by calling Apple.

Re:Honesty

If my Mac emits smoke and kernel panics at the same time, I know I can get resolution to both problems by calling Apple.

I imagine that in that case, there is really only one problem to be solved. :)

Re:Honesty

Look at their numbers they are comparing the G5 to the P4 3.0 and Xeon 3.06. What about the new 3.2's?

How dare Apple! But then they only had the G5 2GHz. Maybe they should wait for the 3GHz, then the comparison will be fairer?

The fact that everyone is nitpicking these benchmarks shows how close the performance is. And with such a huge "megahertz" disparity between the Xeon and the G5 shows how much power the G5 has to offer.

Re:Honesty

You've obviously never worked in a data center where cooling and power are a premium. In a room full of hundreds of Intel crap, you start to consider things like power consumption and heat dissipation. This is a fact: The higher the clock the more power and heat.

We started holding our data center manager accountable for his own electric bill. After that, efficiency (lower clocks to do the same work) started to take on a whole new meaning.

This particular criterion also got us to get the MS-weenies to shut up and we started to implement more Linux systems.

Re:Honesty

If I shit in a bucket and carefully label and document everything does that make it a bucket of gold?

No. It makes it a container containing homo sapien fecal matter, deposited on June 24 at 16:21 after a lunch of onion rings and a Rodeo cheesburger from the Burger King establishment.

And to top it off, you now have to deal with a shit in a bucket.

Apple: innovation or catch up?

Here is a really good editorial in the Apple situation:

http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=3877 [osnews.com]

the article is analyzing if the recent announcements from Apple were innovation or simple catch up.

Re:Apple: innovation or catch up?

While I appreciate the opinions and arguments of the author, I am dismayed by the constant references back to the BeBox. Yes the BeBox and Amiga (similar case) were excellent platforms when they were introduced. Yes, each had quite revolutionary ideas. Unfortunately, neither caught on. Both were targeted at geeks - a niche market with questionable budgets, based on the "$1k is TOO much to pay for a box" posts.

Apple does not invent everything, although historically they tried! Apple is clever at evaluating technologies, combining them into their existing product, and making the results available to the mass audience. I agree that many of the individual accomplishments are unremarkable, packaging all these into a new release is impressive. And doing this three times (10.0, 10.1, and 10.2) in about three years is amazing for any product. Doing this with an operating system is unparalled*.

Take a step back and evaluate Apple's announcement in the broader industry context. You may not be amazed, but I think you'll be impressed.

.

* I suggested that Apple's OS release schedule was unparalled based on the number of features being introduced. This isn't an achievement driven entirely by the programmars in Cupertino. With the Mach / BSD underpinnings, open source software can be easily ported over to the new machine (see: fink, apt-get, etc.). In many cases (e.g. Safari, ProjectBuilder, etc.), Apple is applying a flashly UI on top of standard source. The result is a relatively small number of programmers producing a large number of features. Compare this to Microsoft which uses entirely custom code and where you need a large number of programmers to get a small number of features. Compare this to the Linux model where you need a large number of programmers (as most are part-time), to get a moderate number of features. Solaris and other commercial Unixes also have this advantage, but neither has been quite as driven; I don't understand why this is so.

If this analysis is correct, OS X should have an impressive feature and Microsoft will need to change their OS development model. Linux / BSD, if they can avoid fragmentation, will continue to provide much of the R&D that the other OSes rely on.

Re:Apple: innovation or catch up?

OSNews is run by a former BeOS developer who is married to a former BeOS developer. EVERYTHING will relate back to the BeBox--you begin to learn that.

Re:Apple: innovation or catch up?

I don't think anyone's really arguing that most of Apple's improvements weren't catch up. Heck, when Steve Jobs was on stage he was saying how everything they added was "the latest PC standard". How could it not be catching up if it's already a standard on the PC?

The reason the Mac users are happy about all this is because we already knew we were way behind, and we've been begging Apple to catch up!

Even considering all the benchmarks, which may or may not be accurate, the simple fact remains that this Mac is much faster than the previous Mac. Which is good news for Mac users. And presumably the crowd at the keynote was full of Mac users.

Re:Benchmarks

But what was even more inpressive than the spec scores was watching the powermac squash the dual xeon in several applications from 3D video rendering, to photo editing, to audio processing, to mathematical calculations.

I'm a science guy, and for the calculations and simulations done here at the physics dept. where I work, the IBM power4 kills just about everything else. And when I saw the powermac calculate fractals with mathematica faster than the xeon box by more than a factor of 2, I was very excited (although a little cautiously) to see we will soon get power4 performance for well under $20,000

Re:I love Apple

Fuck those $750 PCs, I'm getting me a $3000 Mac.

Q: You know what a $750 dual 3gHz Xeon PC is called?

A: "Stolen Goods"

Really, the point for Mac users is not so much whether or not the G5 wipes the floor with the Pentium, but whether or not the long period of performance stagnation is coming to an end, and whether or not top-end Mac performance will once again be reasonably comparable to top-end PC performance. And it looks like the answer to both questions is YES! (FINALLY!!!)

Everyone should benchmark with GCC

If everyone benchmarked with open source compilers, there would be none of the shady benchmark-specific optimizations you'd expect to see in proprietary compilers. Everything would be above the table.

And that's not to mention the benefits for OSS compilers. Imagine the kind of resources and funding processor companies would dump into open source compiler projects if they were going to be the basis for their benchmark scores instead of their closed source proprietary compilers.

Re:Everyone should benchmark with GCC

And that's not to mention the benefits for OSS compilers. Imagine the kind of resources and funding processor companies would dump into open source compiler projects if they were going to be the basis for their benchmark scores instead of their closed source proprietary compilers.

"So, Bob's been looking at those Intel diagrams for quite some time now."

"Yeah, I wonder if it's anything to do with his new assistants and Porsche."

Even the OSS community has a price. ;)

gcc a constant, that is naive

All this talk of gcc removing a variable is naive at best, misinformation if the speaker is knowledgable on the subject. Gcc is not a constant, the quality of it's code optimization varies from platform to platform. To be more specific, gcc is used by Apple to build MacOS X and Apple has been improving gcc PPC code generation. Apple provides gcc to Mac developers. Apple is also IBM's partner in the development of the PPC970. Gcc is the developer optimized compiler for the chip in many ways and is more comparable to Intel's compiler in this respect.

If everyone benchmarked with open source compilers, there would be none of the shady benchmark-specific optimizations you'd expect to see in proprietary compilers. Everything would be above the table.


No. Benchmarks would become less realistic. There is nothing wrong with proprietary compilers. If they use proprietary techniques not available to gcc, so what. The only consideration is whether the compiler is available to other developers. The Intel compiler is available under Windows and Linux so it would be completely fair to try it and gcc and pick the faster of the two.

Re:Everyone should benchmark with GCC

Sure, nothing else but using the same compiler will factor out the compiler when comparing hardware platforms. But who cares? Actual raw hardware speed is not what users care about at all. The actually speed that people are going to get out of the whole platform in real life is what people care about.

Nonsense (to quote someone else in this discussion ;-).

The tests were designed to show raw hardware performance in the most fair way possible. It was NOT designed to show that the G5 is faster in real-world use. SPEC *sucks* for that, and is not designed for that. Using it in the real world, with real apps, is how you test real-world use. And Apple did that, too, though I am sure it is not the final word on the subject: for that, we wait until the machines get out into the real world.

Separate compiler from hardware?

Why on earth would you want to separate the software from the hardware? This isn't a IBM vs Intel comparison. This is an Apple vs Dell comparison. Apple is selling a platform, not a bunch of PCB boards. I sure as heck won't use GCC to compile SAS or Oracle just before I put up a mission-critical database server...

Re:Separate compiler from hardware?

No, in this case, it actually is an IBM vs. Intel comparison. The spec benchmarks only test the performance of the processor.

However, the IMPORTANT benchmarks are the ones that test the whole system. The stuff up on stage during the keynote is the proof of that, I think. The architecture of the G5 gives it a big win. Getting data to the processor is almost as important as having a fast processor itself.

Re:Separate compiler from hardware?

Okay, you're right that the SPEC benchmarks test both the compiler and the processor. But if the compiler is the same, you're testing just the processor, right?

The important thing is to test the processors on an even playing field, as much as anything could possibly exist.

Apple using GCC is the fairest way to test, for both systems. I'm sure that a specific IBM compiler would ALSO make the PPC970 look good, as much as an Intel compiler would make the Xeon looks good. But that's like testing cars by putting me in one and Schumacher in another. It doesn't really matter how good the car is I'm driving, Schumacher is going to wipe the floor with me, and you'd then conclude that the car Schumacher was driving was better? Probably not. It's not a fair test. For results that are even close to scientific, you have to eliminate as many variables as possible, including the compiler.

But..but..but...

He's a Corporate Drone(tm) justifying Marketing Speak and Glossy Lit numbers.

Doesn't everyone realize that this is a black and white issue?

Corporate Drones == Lies
Populist Raving == Truth

Always always always. Doesn't matter what the numbers mean. They threw in that one graph with the single processor machine slower than the Intel just to throw off the hounds. But it didn't work.

Removed one of the processors for the SPEC CPU 200

I hadn't looked through the detailed report before - one interesting thing was that they physically removed one of the processors for at least one test (SPEC CPU 2000). I seem to remember some people claiming some of the spec tests were unfair when run on a DP system... well there you go.

It really seems like they tried to do a pretty even evaluation. And again, if the benchmarks were so off then why was the performance on the G5 apps so good? And that was without G5 tuning most likely.

Re:Removed one of the processors for the SPEC CPU

It really seems like they tried to do a pretty even evaluation. And again, if the benchmarks were so off then why was the performance on the G5 apps so good? And that was without G5 tuning most likely.

Oh, yeah. Steve probably said "hey, vendors, come on over and do a little demo. Yeah, it'll be a duel, but don't worry about recompiling for the G5 (which is supposed to be trivial). We'll just see what happens."

Look -- they spent every last minute they could optimizing the builds they used for the demo - don't doubt it for a minute. On the other hand, every last minute probably wasn't all that long, and the demos did kick ass.

But let's call an Apple an Apple. This was a DEMO. Smoke and mirrors were involved. But I drank the cool-aid; I believe it's faster. Dunno how much, but I don't really care. Mostly I'm just happy it kicks the crap outta the systems they're shipping now.

Re:Removed one of the processors for the SPEC CPU

Oh, yeah. Steve probably said "hey, vendors, come on over and do a little demo. Yeah, it'll be a duel, but don't worry about recompiling for the G5 (which is supposed to be trivial). We'll just see what happens."

Look -- they spent every last minute they could optimizing the builds they used for the demo - don't doubt it for a minute. On the other hand, every last minute probably wasn't all that long, and the demos did kick ass.

Actually, my favorite was the Mathematica guy who commented (IIRC) "We tried to come up with an example to show how being able to use more than 4GB of memory was helpful, but we couldn't come up with an example that didn't crash the Xeon"

Re:Removed one of the processors for the SPEC CPU

Actually, my favorite was the Mathematica guy who commented (IIRC) "We tried to come up with an example to show how being able to use more than 4GB of memory was helpful, but we couldn't come up with an example that didn't crash the Xeon"

I think he mistook "The Xeon" with "our buggy intel implementation"

Re:Removed one of the processors for the SPEC CPU

Actually, I just watched the video again. He actually said:

We wanted to find a test that used 6GB of memory, but we couldn't find one that didn't destroy the Xeon. It would have been thrashing about for a week.

G4 story icon

/. had better get with it! We're talking about G5s now and the G4 chip icon is still up in the story post.

The G4 is so last month.

Compiler's should be included

It's incorrect to normalize the compiler out when performing CPU benchmarks. Instead of measuring 2 different CPUs with the same compiler, they should be using the fastest compiler for each platform. The compiler is integral to CPU design- I could make a teraflops VLIW CPU that does 1000 floating point multiply-adds per instructions, but it would be useless if I gave it a compiler that wasn't designed for it.

So, the correct SPEC results for the 3GHz Intel CPU (from the www.spec.org website) should be 1200 SPECInt and 1229 SPECFp, vs. 800 SPECInt and 840 SPECFp for the PowerPC 970.

The Intel CPU wins (by a lot!)

Re:Compiler's should be included

That's putting a lot of the benchmark on programmers' shoulders, don't you think? This isn't a test of how good a compiler you can write, this is a test of how well the processor performs.

This is the same when you do any sort of scientific test. Eliminate all variables except the ones that you're testing for. We're trying to test processors and processors only. All you get from the SPEC numbers where you use Intel's compiler on Intel and GCC on PPC970 is an indication that the GCC compiler is inferior. You can't draw any reasonable conclusion from the test at all.

Does this mean..

that all software vendors have to be honest now, or just Apple?

regarding the malloc....

If the 'high performance' malloc that was used is not thread safe (as it seems from reading about this issue) I strongly doubt it will be the default in the shipping system...

Personally I don't care very much about synthetic benchmarks, day-to-day apps are a much better test: OTOH if it comes out that this 'tweaked' malloc library was used for PhotoShop (with, say, side effects of making PS taking up 2 gigs of RAM and it crashing every 2 hours) then my feelings of this would change...

Other Benchmarks?

Unfortunately the more egregious benchmark was the Quake benchmark. I'd have liked to have heard about that one. Th

Further I notice he didn't mention the problem of not doing comparisions to AMD.

While I can understand his reasoning, the fact is that most software on the PC runs under VC or Intel's compiler. It doesn't run under gcc. The benchmark might be a fair Linux/OSX comparison but implies something about Windows/OSX that is incorrect.

I'd also like to see the tests done under Mathematica and Photoshop discussed more. Apple's had a history with photoshop so there is prima facie reasons to distrust it. But the Mathematica test, which seemed the most exciting to me, is what I'd really like to see.

Realistically though the tools for Apple, including graphics drivers, are all very beta. So we should see improvements with time. And realistically benchmarks are typically kind of deceiving as an indicator of real world performance.

So any word on these other questions?

PS - I love OSX and would love to make a Mac my primary machine. If only Project Builder was up to the task so I could abandon Visual Studio. But I am excited about the G5, but I think Apple's "questionable" tactics have brought a lot of unfavorable press that more honesty would have avoided. Personally I think being within 10% - 15% of the top end PC would have been fine.

Re:Other Benchmarks?

Unfortunately the more egregious benchmark was the Quake benchmark.

Are you talking about this one, [apple.com] where Apple posts 337fps at 1024x768/32bpp for the G5 and 275fps for a P4? I asked about that on another forum, [xlr8yourmac.com] noting that Tom's Hardware gets over 400fps [tomshardware.com] from a P4/3GHz, and one respondent noted that

1. Tom's was using Q3A 1.16 instead of 1.32 (PunkBuster code is thought to be a little slower)
2. Tom's used set s_initsound 0 to disable sound while Apple noted default settings, which would imply sound was left on.
3. Tom's used demo_001 while Apple used demo_4

So I guess it's up to you to decide in the end if the benchmark was fair or no. I don't know enough about the details of Q3A to say whether the differences above are enough to justify a 30% decrease in framerate. It is worth pointing out that Apple's G5 matched Tom's reported framerates for the fastest Athlon XP.

Re:Other Benchmarks?

The Apple Quake 3 benchmarks disabled hardware acceleration. They were solely testing the CPU, or trying to at least. The guy from... oh, damn, what's that guy's name, the guy who did the OpenGL demo yesterday. He did the same thing. They did all the rendering they could in the CPU.

That's why the numbers were low compared to other tests that used accelerated graphics.

More Data Good

Okay, if he asserts that redoing the test WITH hyperthreading, and on Windows, will only slow down the Intel scores, then DO IT.

I think that Apple should benchmark every case, especially the ones that the Wintel boosters are whining about, and post ALL the results. It certainly can't hurt if the G5 wins them all anyway. And even if it does not, it will bolster the argument that Apple's trying to be a straight shooter with these tests, which will help their credibility. Which is important, because that's at least as much at stake here, as the arguably temporary "bragging rights" of being the fastest.

off topic comment on your sig...

> Vote, you fools!

Are you _sure_ those are the people you want voting?

Honesty

It seems to me that this rep from Apple, unless I am very naive, is being very candid and honest with us. It seems that, by showing us the complete specs on the benchmarking, they are doing what they claim to be doing. Thinking differently, and giving us (for 3 grand) an honestly faster machine. I appreciate the prompt frank response from Apple on this controversy. I am typing this on a PC, simply because I could build it myself for less money than I could buy a nice Apple. Ah, the life of a poor student...

Re:Honesty

Apple's response while prompt, was not frank. If it were frankly honest, Apple would have to admit that their brand new G5 would be slower than Dell's computer from last quarter under certain conditions.

This is unfortunately the problem with *all* benchmarks. Almost any two competitive systems can be measured to be faster than one another under certain conditions.

The point of Apple's benchmarks were to show that "in the general case", the G5 would be faster than an Intel workstation. The general case assumes either a) using photoshop, or b) using applications compiled with GCC.

Are either of these a large stretch? Well (b) might be, and a comparison with MSVC++ and/or ICC would be nice, but then Apple would probably just counter that with IBM's optimised G5 compiler.

If you want an honest benchmark, have Apple's system tweaked by Apple, Dell's system tweaked by Dell, and who gives a damn which complier is used? I'm a user, not a CPU. I don't care about the theoretical capacity of each computer, especially if the theory is tested using inefficient compliers.

Well then, frankly, you shouldn't be paying attention to SPEC benchmarks, you should be looking at the informal timed application benchmarks. These are more "user-centric" and "whole-system" measurements.

The point many on Slashdot are making is that SPEC benchmarks *are fundamentally* theoretical CPU capacity measurements, not intended for users.

Let Apple and Dell pick their own compliers, or even write their own compliers just for this test.

The amount of man hours that goes into an optimising compiler is arguably more than goes into an operating system kernel. It's a rough business, and usually why people tweak existing compilers to perform better on benchmarks such as SPEC.

Impressive turnaround speed

There have been a few things that I haven't seen Apple pull out of the hat in the last few years:

• a revolution in hardware platform (not since G4 launch);
• SPEC benchmark results;
• a fast response to potentially damaging remarks

Okay, so Apple needs the G5 to succeed in order to survive. Motorola just aren't sending out the chip upgrades fast enough. They (Motorola) have enough other problems in their wide range of markets that they're in that not having to worry about CPU competition is probably a good thing as far as they're concerned.

The fact that the (almost) top person at Apple has made this clarification shows how much importance they're putting against these claims. Given that nobody else has had a chance to verify yet, and people are making wild speculations based off of paper and a lack of understanding, it's probably just as well that they're putting a positive spin on things.

Maybe the documents should have been clearer, showing why these configuration decisions were taken.

The "we had to use GCC" argument is a little strange though; is there any other good compiler available for the PPC at the moment? if so, I'd like to know; I use macs myself! :)

Perhaps a case of ineffective thoroughness?

I have to say, this puts things in an interesting light.

Does a company, in trying to be fair as it seems in this case, get penalized for choosing the best optimization and not testing with the worst optimizations(as per their views)?

In looking at other sites like Tom's Hardware and Anantech, I think the answer is simple: Show all of the results, both the good and the bad. That way, it removes the spectre of doubt in peoples' minds that fairness wasn't present during testing.

Personally, I don't have the funds to get a G5 based system. It just isn't in the budget. But then again, the only reason I would buy a G5 system over an x86(Opteron or P4) would be to run Mac OSX. :)

I'm guessing that tests will be conducted by various groups over the next few days to either validate or invalidate the tests. Sounds alike like that whole MS/cost analysis/web server speed fiasco all over again.

Despite the tests, for Mac users who wish to stick with Mac OS X, the G5s are as fast as they come.

Amazing how people trust some no-named net person

He made so many errors in his "debunking" yet so many people took it for gospel.

Like, the switch -mfpmath=sse when used in a P4 *does* use SSE2, but this guy thought just cause the switch flag says sse that it must be SSE only.

Then someone else (can't find the post, on usenet, under the mac advocacy group) pointed out that Dell's SPEC tests also disabled hyperthreading [specbench.org].

Then, based on this person's web page who no one even knows who he is, they start drawing conclusions that if Apple faked these (based on his flawed analysis), that they also must have faked those Adobe, Mathmatica, and other demos -- despite the execs for those companies being on stage also confirming the results.

Gotta love the net...

As for me, I don't know what to believe. I'm just going to patiently wait until some reputable sites spend a lot of time and do an in depth analysis and their own benchmarks, like Tom's Hardware for example. Then I may start drawing my own conclusions.

As for me, all I want is to be able to encode mpeg video at something greater than real time. Show me *that* benchmark please!

Waiting for the ultimate benchmark

I'm gonna be modded as a troll on this one, but I gotta do it, because it will happen to me :)

::bangs head on keyboard for giving moderator ideas::

::Slashdot story: Tom's Hardware benchmarks the G5, and compares it to dual Xeons, dual Opterons, and (I guess), the P4::

Me: "Woohoo...I'll finally found out which is better" ::clicks link::

"Page 1: We have tested all these systems, and you will soon see our results." ::scroll down through ads, click next::

"Page 2: These tables show the systems we have tested on" ::scroll down, next::

"Page 3: Tables, cont.." ::yells out profanities, looks on table of contents, chooses "benchmark results"::

"Page 45: And now, let us take a look how the G5 stands against the current x86 and AMD64 processors" ::AAAAAAAAHHHHHH...can't stand it anymore, clicks on conclusion::

"Page 666: And thus, we conclude that the G5 is better in some ways and worse in others" ::NOOOOOOO...Now I'll never know!!!::

Re:Amazing how people trust some no-named net pers

As for me, all I want is to be able to encode mpeg video at something greater than real time. Show me *that* benchmark please.

Man are you way behind the times. I can do that even with my dual 1Ghz G4.

compilers do matter

I appreciate the idea of using the same compiler to look at just the effect of the difference in processor, but the fact is, when buying a computer, you worry about how fast you applications run, which is a function of both the chip and the compiler.

I use the Intel compilers on all the x86 boxes (including Athlons) I run on, because they give me the best performance on my application code (a computational fluid dynamics code). When evaluating a machine, the only thing that matters to me is how fast it runs my code. I will use whatever compilers give me the best performance (while still giving the right answer).

For people not doing high-performance computing, none of this matters. Nor, for that matter, does any chip from the last year or so -- they are all fast enough. But when looking for the fastest platform to run your specialized codes on, everything must be taken into account.

An interesting benchmark I'd like to see if for Intel and Apple to agree on some codes/benchmarks, and then they should be free to trick out machines however they seem fit, and run the codes at the maximum speed (without outright cheating, and still making sure they get the right answer), and submit those numbers for comparison. In the end though, it is whatever code you run personally, and how that performs that matters the most.

I guess my take is this...

If my car has 200HP at 6,800RPM on the sticker, I usually donâ(TM)t take the stickers word for it, but trust that I would get around those numbers on average.

There are those people who want to know if those numbers are EXACT 101% of the time, so they go bust out their dynamometer and begin writing complaint letters when their engine only hits 195HP.

I think benchmarks these days are no longer a science that they used to be. There are far, far, FAR too many hardware and software variables to do an accurate cross-platform analysis and comparison.

I mean, is it really logical to compare Apples (har har har) to Oranges? I mean, most all applications that will be running on the G5 will be optimized for the G5. So does it matter how a 'comparable' application will run on x86? No, because the x86 Application might have a few more optimizations which would make the comparison pointless.

These days people should take benchmarks with a grain of salt. Just another selling point they'll put on the big list of bulleted marketing jargon on the back of the box to try and rope in first time buyers who are turned on by big acronyms and high-tech sounding words.

So yeah, I think people just need to cool their heels and take this for what it is, just marketing propaganda. Does QuantiSpeed really make your CDs burn faster? [enusbaum.com] No. Does the P4 make âthe internetâ(TM) faster? [intel.com] No. Just take it for what it is and let it go.

Benchmarking

The Apple guy is both correct and wrong.

Correct in the sense that he wasn't necessarily being unfair. I don't think Apple was raelly cooking the books here. OTOH benchamarking is quite difficult.

No, it would not be fair to compare intel compilers to gcc compilers. But what about, say, another non-hardware tied compiler? Look at it this way - 3dmark scores on graphics cards. Theoretically it should give a good impression on thier relative hardware - but we all know that it doesn't necessarily. It may do something bad on one system, great on another, one system may cheat and have special code to work better with that particular test.

Same here. Ideally you would find many benchmarks, not just gcc, but both with all optimizations on, with all off, both with the best compilers, worst compilers, and middle of the road. You also need memory intensive, processor intensive, grpahics intensive, floating point, integer, and many others to get the full idea and compare it to what you need to do with the computer. For many of the crowd that worries over this stuff overclocking can become an issue also.

This is why benchmarking is as much art as science. I care about all those numbers - I have code compiled specifically for my athlon-mp's, some generic, and some optimized for p4's for the consumer tasks. On our computation cluster we use specialised compilers. I care how it runs on all of it for real world use. But no hardware manufacturer does those extensive of a tests - they pick the best of the ones they can claim "fair" on usually.

And lastly, in the end, who cares? Unless you are regularly running 4 hour jobs from a console it is irrelevent. It is more important that you are productive with the interface and that is personal choice. Few consumer tasks (and even programming tasks) require that power - and the stuff that does is generally handled by specialised hardware. Then if they have the fastests today they won't tomorrow.

...but is gcc equal across architectures?

Is there good reason to believe that the same compiler will produce relatively as well-performing of code for one chip it supports as it does for another? I don't think so.

In this case, performance will in part be a function of how mature and optimized the generation of code for the advantages of that particular chip is.

Because there is no guaruntee at all of fairness by using gcc for both processors, except of course if we had the expert opinion of someone intimately familiar with gcc's code generation for both processors, using gcc for both processors would seem to be little more than a marketing tactic to give the appearance of fairness and credibility.

It seems to me that a better test is to take the best compiler widely available for each chip, and then run your tests with the produced code. Now, this isn't necessarily real world application testing, but that isn't what we are necessarily looking for here.

How well the processor performs with code generated by the best generally available compiler, is, apart from extraordinary measures, the best prediction we have of how generally the processors will compare for any given well-written, production quality code.

Re:...but is gcc equal across architectures?

It's not equal, but his point was if anything this would hurt the G5 and not help it. Most folks tuning gcc have access to Intel hardware. It's sucked on Alpha and Sparc for quite some time just because people don't have that hardware access. Hard to optimize for things you can't see. The P4 has been out for a while, the G5 hasn't even shipped yet. I'm sure gcc hurt Apple more than it hurt the P4.

This situation needs to be abstracted a little

As someone submitted in the last story, hyperthreading and those other options does not always mean a performance increase in every situation. I am glad to see that Apple responded to clear up the confusion. I had suspected something like this was really the case when the trolls came out looking to bash [slashdot.org].

What seems to be missing in all of this is the big picture. Whether or not the G5 is 1.2% faster or slower than the Xeon/P4/Opteron is not a uniform answer. Different apps are going to perform differently on different platforms. Not only that, but there are a million possible variations of benchmarks that could make both sides the winner. Like Greg said in the interview, if Apple was looking to cheat they wouldn't have hired an independent company and provided full disclosure.

Processor speed notwithstanding, most Mac users are so because of Apple's OS not their hardware. Windows would slow me down much more than 6 extra cycles of processor speed. For my circumstances, the fact that Apple now has hardware fast enough that it can even attempt to make the 'fastest' claim is far more important.

Of courser the Dell benchmarks.....

.....can be trusted 100%. Only Apple would exaggerate for marketing purposes.

I have this theory. A 2Ghz twin G5 system is really fast. And if you have some money to spend and you want a really fast system and you'd like to run OSX then you could do worse than buy one.

Joswiak

Every time I hear the name "Joswiak", I keep thinking the guy is some hybrid between Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak -- some kind of mutant creature straight out of the R&D Labs at Apple. :^)

Parity by using gcc

He gives the illusion of parity by using the same compiler on both platforms. But the back ends to these compilers are different pieces of code written by different people. There is no parity.

But he didn't refute the most damning claim!

Somehow this shifty Apple exec ignored the boldest claim of the bunch:

Misleading Prices

Both Apple and Dell are guilty of using misleading prices. For example, Apple gives the price of the low-end G5 as "$1999", and the high-end G5 as "$2999". In other words, they have subtracted $1 from a $3000 computer to make it seem cheaper, which is absolutely ridiculous. This demonstrates that both Apple and Dell are willing to mislead people when stating their prices.

What do you have to say now mister Joswiak if that is in fact your real name?

Re:But he didn't refute the most damning claim!

this is the funniest claim i've seen in a while. not only does apple do this, so does dell, and so does virtually every consumer-oriented company on the planet. gas companies shave a TENTH of a PENNY off gas prices to make them seem cheaper.

a department store (was it macy's?) started this practice. the funny part is that the aim wasn't really to fool consumers into thinking it was less expensive. alas, the real purpose was to force cashiers to open the register, since the customer was almost always going to be due some change.

It's money that matters.

The "status quo" crowd that jumped all over Apple this morning for the "fake" benchmarks and "dishonest" wording will still find lots of reasons and ways to disparage the fruit company, simply because Apple isn't doing what they want - building the best, fastest, and most cutting-edge computers for $400.00.

Forget about Serial ATA - (Apple is the first top-tier manufacturer to make this interface stardard across their high-end machines.)
Forget about the new motherboard featuring HyperTransport, PCI-X, and the IBM-fabbed 1GHz northbridge chip. Oh, and 802.11G, USB 2.0, FireWire 400 and 800, and Bluetooth, too.
Forget about the imagination and creativity that goes into making a project like this go from concept to reality in eighteen months.

Why support a company like that? Bunch of dirty liars - there's no way a 2GHz chip could be faster than my Intel/AMD/whatever86!

Maybe it's not ultimately faster (although Greg's comments seem to indicate that the playing field was pretty equal). I don't buy "fast". I buy well-integrated tools that help me get work done, and in turn, bill clients. So I (still) use a Mac.

Jeez - to hear people around here, you'd think that innovation, style, performance, and the courage to move forward agressively and definitively with new technologies doesn't come at a price.

What other comapny would develop all these technologies to hardware and software maturity as part of a new hardware platform, then bring it all to market with system software already written (by the same vendor, I might add) to take advantage of new hardware features?

Those things DO come at a price. The price begins at $1999.00 for the 1.6GHz G5, or $799.00 for an eMac.

As long as there are people who just want to get work done on their computers without hiring an IT department or worrying about who is responsible for which component of the system, Apple will still be around.

I bill around eight hours a day with my Macintosh - the $400.00 price premium over PC hardware at the time I bought my G4/800 simply isn't an issue - over the lifetime of the machine, I'll probably bill at least two hundred times that amount for work made possible by its existence.

That $400.00 up-front cost means that I don't have to spend my time - my extremely expensive and finite time - having to deal with at least two vendors just to get a system with competitive hardware, a competitive OS, and support for them both. If your time isn't valuable, by all means cheap out and build your oft-touted (and perfectly capable) PC from parts you buy at Frys. $400.00 means nothing to professionals - it's cheap support insurance.

I hope Apple sells a TON of these machines - because they're practically the only personal computer company willing to take the initiative and responsibility for supporting hardware and operating system on equal terms.

Perhaps if Apple stressed the cost of ownership point to more people, they'd have higher sales. Our small business has nearly thirty Macs. I'm the lone IT person, spending an entire hour a week on supporting a bunch of artists and their Macs. What similarly-sized Windows-based business can make that claim?

Re:It's money that matters.

Hell, most of the trolls on slashdot want it for free, or it's crap.

For example:
Troll: "If I had a way to download a MP3 for a very small payment, I wouldn't steal them from KaZaA anymore"

www.emusic.com, the Apple Itunes Music Store...

Troll: "Emusic won't let me mirror the whole site, so I won't use it! Itunes doesn't use OGG, so I won't use it! So I'll still use KaZaA"

Troll: "When they make OS X that runs on Intel/AMD hardware, then I'll buy it!"

But you didn't buy your Windows XP either...

Troll: "Software should be Free!"

Same shit, different pile.

Reasonable claims - IBM's Power4 vs Intel

Apples claims seem quite reasonable to me. Why? Look at the other reported SPEC scores for Power4+ (the G5/970 is based directly on IBM's Power4+ processor core). Right now the Power4 ranks well on both SPECint2000 and SPECfp2000. See the SPECfp2000 [ideasinternational.com] and SPECint2000 [ideasinternational.com] benchmark report summaries.

SPECfp: The Power4+ at 1.7 Ghz has the highest SPECfp score (1699 @ 1.7Ghz); higher than Itanium (1431 @ 1Ghz), the most recent Alpha (1482 @ 1.15Ghz), and the Pentium 4 (1229 @ 3.0Ghz).

SPECint: As far as SPECint, the Power4 is not in the lead (1113 @ 1.7Ghz), but is still respectable when compared to Pentium4's (1200 @ 3.0Ghz).

The G5/970 should do similarly or better than the G5/970 (since the G5/970 is running at 2.0Ghz vs Power4+ 1.7Ghz). One caveat is that the G5/970 has a smaller on-chip second-level cache (512kB vs 1.5MB), which will hurt its performance on some codes.

Certainly Apple's test uses a drastically different compiler than the reported SPEC results. This results in absolute numbers that are lower, but Apple's relative comparison is still reasonable, IMHO. I think it is safe to claim that Apple has really closed the gap in processor speed and now has processors with comparable performance to the fastest chips money can buy. About damn time. :)

Vindication? Or more fuel for the fire?

While surprising and most certainly refreshing to see that apple is serious about their claims, serious enough to publicly rebuke the claims almost certainly first brought to the big light by /.'s earlier article, this may only be leading into a circle of prooving and disprooving.

I believe it would be best for apple to answer with a full fury of tests to truly show the full range of operating prowness of the G5's vs the P4's, etc.... at least initialy, and to from there LEAVE IT ALONE. Cause no matter how many tests they do, no matter how much proof ... there will always be people out there ready to bring flames over nothing.... For instance this guys claims that FP isn't all that important, and that int tests are basicly all that matters for the majority of users.

He and others will stick too their guns even if they have only a couple benchmarks to cite as being supirior (kinda like the G4's and their altivec/photoshop optimizations of yester-year).

Apple needs to make sure that they have a clean image of being flatly open on their claims, and then to move on without being bogged down in an obvious quagmire of platform evangalism. The truth is, their strongest advantage remains the OS and not their hardware's direct horse-power. Of course the G5 along with all the goodies they come with are incredibly great, but this isn't apple's mainstay... it's simply another selling point.

If they become entrapped in having to proove themselves through benchmarking every new release, it won't be long before their entire image would have to live up to being ahead at all costs.... and guess what... they ARE going to fall behind again.... and then they'll leap ahead again.... and then they'll fall behind... etc.... And every down cycle will be worse, since the specs will be much more associated with their image.

keep your strong point in innovation apple, and if youve got the great hardware... great.... but don't get stuck in the mind-less mhz/spec race that has stagnated computer innovation for the love of ego's.

just my 2 cents.... I develop ASP, and love win 2k adv srv, ill never use anything but unix/linux for my networking gear, and OSX keeps me damn happy when i want to do anything not mind-numbing. Cisco IOS is arcane but makes me feel good. I am biased towards all platforms.

But G5's lost in SPECint_base2000!

So many people are slamming Apple for posting biased benchmarks. Yet, I found it very interesting that Apple posted one benchmark which showed the G5 being the slowest machine: the SPECin_base2000, single processor [apple.com] mark. For someone posting completely untrue and biased benchmarks, showing a last place finish shows that not everything was biased in favor of the G5.

Is the PowerMac G5 the "world's fastest personal computer"? Probably not, but it may be the first 64-bit personal computer to ship to the masses (ie. bought in a store like CompUSA). I wonder if AMD will move up the Opteron release now or if Intel will drop the price on their Itanium. If so, then people who want 64-bit x86-compat CPU's should thank Apple for bringing them their CPU's faster. =)

Anthony

Amazing, this hatred

I use a 667MHz Powerbook with a G4 that is nowhere near as fast as modern P4's and the PPC 970, but I love this machine and I love this OS. I also have a Dell laptop with a 2GHz P4 and WinXP and an old 450MHz K6-2 that runs Debian. I use all of them but mostly prefer this Mac and OSX.

What mostly surprises me is that so many people feel this desperate burning need to flame computers that are not the same as the ones they have, and operating systems they do not use. Is there a genuine need to diss the PPC 970, when it seems that it is truly -at the very least- in the same performance area as Intels modern CPU's? Why? No one is forcing you, as a x86 Linux, *BSD or Windows user to buy a Mac. Yet you feel the need, now that the CPU is in the same region performance wise to complain about the prices. And again, no one is forcing you to pay those prices or to buy a Mac if you prefer x86 machines.

The x86 machines I have, in one case -the Dell laptop- outperforms my Mac by a healthy margin, yet I find the Dell to have pretty poor workmanship and although I actually find WindowsXP the best Windows version I have ever used, and quite stable to boot, I don't like the way the OS seems to lack a sense of continuity.

I paid more for this Mac than I would ever have paid for a PC laptop of the same performance, but the look, feel and feeling of "good design" is what made me buy this Mac. I don't regret that money at all.

Would I diss x86 if it were slower and more pricy than a similar PPC? No. There are the advantages of larger choice and lower prices that still count and shouldn't be laughed at.

Each to his own.

But envy seems to be a common sin here.

Counterpoint: I switched before switching was cool

I used a DOS machine from '85-'91 and thought it was pretty hot shit. When I started college in the fall of '91, the school [drexel.edu] required incoming students to have access to a Mac.

Since my existing computer was then almost six years old and showing its age, my parents opted to loosen the purse strings and buy me a Macintosh LC. Within fifteen minutes of getting it out of the box and up and running, I knew I was gonna be a Mac user for life (sorry, Apple-haters, but there was no consumption of Kool-Aid involved). Not long after that I got my first look at Windows 3.1, and I couldn't believe what a half-assed Mac knockoff it was. Microsoft has made great strides with Windows over the years, but they still can't touch the synergy between hardware and software that Apple achieves. That synergy means much more to me than raw speed, and I'm more than happy to pay for it.

Therein is the basis for the holy wars, IMHO: The Mac people don't understand why the Windows users are eating dogfood when they could be having filet mignon, and the Windows people don't understand why anyone would choose to pay more for a computer that they perceive as working the pretty much the same as a much cheaper Windows box.

These days, I make my living as a system integrator. I support Windows and Macs, but specialize in Macs-- slightly difficult because my Mac clients seldom need me. I own several Macs and a couple PCs, but my main machines are a G4 and an iBook-- after a long day dealing with Windows (which "just stops working" from time to time), it's damned nice to come home and use my Macs (which "just work"). In my experience, more often than not, people who have really used both OSes for an appreciable amount of time prefer the Mac.

~Philly

Opteron = Workstation/Server

People like you have not fully grasped what Apple have just released:

a 64bit desktop computer for general use.

Certainly at $3000 the dual 2Ghz is pricey, but look at what you can do with it. This computer can work with video, audio and bitmaps NOW and it doesn't take Joe average weeks to figure out.

Only an idiot would use a shotgun to kill a fly, or a semi-trailer to bring home the groceries, but both have their place and purpose. I'm sick of idiots claiming you can create a Linux cluster to get the same power at the same price, but then not mentioning the applications they will run and more significantly their price.

Reality is MacOSX works, it works well on a G4 and even better on a G5. I'll bet no-one in your neighbourhood will buy a NEW Opteron workstation, but a few will buy a G5 Apple.

The less you know about computers and computing, the more appealing Apple's Products become.

There is something for everyone, BSD Unix for geeks, and a great interface for the rest. If only they cost a tad less!

The truth is out there if you believe

The truth is whether a company brings out SPEC marks made under fair configurations or faked configurations, there will always be those who will accept the figures at face value, those who will contest them no matter what and those who really counldn't care less. I am in the third category, if you're curious ;)

Everyone buys a piece of hardware for different reason, some for design, some for brand, some out of faith, some because they have the money and even some because of an application. If you are choosing for the last reason then the question should be whether it is fast enough for you, and does it in they you want.

I would recommend everyone to buy the computer that meets their usage requirements and not for some theoretical and utopic bunch of values that don't really mean much in the real world, unless you are only wanting to gloat over something totally subjective.

As a final word, sometimes the slowest factor in getting a job done, is not necessarily the computer, but the user taking their time, because the application has been so badly implemented, to be difficult to use and understandable.

Computers have the potential to the make the most complicated of applications accessible to a layman of the subject.

You use it because of the OS

Look, don't we all know by now that people use Macs because of the OS, not because of the speed?

As I see it, even if Apple fudged the numbers a bit (like what manufacturer hasn't), these new G5s are still the first time Apple can justifiably say that they are "comparable" (whatever that mean, and, like I care!) to Windows machines.

Frankly, I am not a computer guru (by any stretch of the imagination), but don't you all find it pretty lame that Apple needs a 64 bit processor to come close to the speeds of a 32 bit Pentium?

Still, I have a slow-assed 733 mhz G4 on my desk because I prefer OS X and because I prefer not to have MS's DRM and oppresive licening on my computer.

For running a webserver, NFS, Samba or whatever, I buy an x86 box and run Linux, because it is just cost-effective.

-A

My turn to bitch!

I seems that some people just like to bitch.
I know I do, and that's why I'm writing this.

I can't figure out why so many people post to threads like this and
bash Apple, while saying that they would never buy a machine from them
anyway. What's the point in that? Would the industry be better off if Apple
didn't exist? Would you finally be happy if everyone went out of business
except for Dell, only selling boxes pre-loaded with Linux, for $299?
If that was true, Lindows should be ./'s favorite vendor.

And those that say that they could build a machine themselves for way
less than a Mac, if Apple had a build it yourself, parts in a bag option for
$500 less, then people would still bitch that for that price, it should come
fully assembled.

Although yes, I am a "Mac guy" (but I've got Windows, Linux, Solaris, IRIX,
NeXT and a few other boxes on my home network), regardless of my
prejudice for the platform, you have to acknowledge what a beautiful
$3000 machine the G5 is. Clean inside and out, plenty, plenty fast for
the years that you'll have it in service, arguably a better OS than any
Linux variant and absolutely better planned out and cleanly feature
rich (and economical) than any Windows release. I was doing some
admin work on Win 2000 server today, what a disorganized, steaming
plie that thing is. Some say it's superior, I think it might be the absolutely
worst collection of software ever crammed into one box. Pheeeewwww!

But I digress. I have come here to praise the Power Mac G5....

One of my favorite things about the G5 (and I know that non-Mac users
think than Apple just makes pretty boxes), is indeed, the pretty box.

J. Ive did such a restrained design. So clean and minimal.
There's a guy with rare discipline and insight.

The new design language, aluminum and circular hole accents, also
seen in the iSight and hints of it in the line of new aluminum PowerBooks,
in my opinion is the best we've seen in the 2nd Jobs era at Apple.

I liked the clean white, crystal and chrome designs of the G4 iMac and the
iPod but this new design language is going to make for some other very
exciting products. The new display line will be beautiful, wrapped in a
thin sheath of aluminum. Will a future iPod have the look of a large-ish
Zippo lighter? What would an all-aluminum G5 iMac look like?

I'm just glad that Apple's still here, still thinking different, and still making
insanely great products.

Dell? HPQ? Gateway? Lindows? Sony? (Well, Sony's trying).
The parts bin at Frys? That little shop in the strip mall that sells cases and
motherboards? For the most part, all of that is commodity crap. Even if
you throw on your free homemade Linux on it, it's half-assed at best,
even after hours of effort.

Apple is the only computer company left that's doing anything that really matters.
Like it or not.

Here is the demo that sold me...

Apple G5 running Mac OS X:

###(My little bench mark bar graph)###

Dell Intel Xeon running Mac OS X

#

Mac OS X runs infinitely faster on the G5 than the Dell Intel XEON. Focus on that.

The G5 blows the G4 outta the water, so I really don't care how it performs to the Intel XEON.

Processor speeds aren't going to make people 'switch'. It's the User Experience / WTF can I do with this computer now? (Meaning does it run the apps I need it to run?)

I think it was Panther that stole the show for Apple, not the G5. That is an awesome OS, just the fast user switching alone sells it for me.

Compilers make a big difference but Apple was fair

This seems reasonable of Apple now. There are many applications compiled on Windows that don't use Intel's optimizing compiler. Indeed that's the norm, since most Windows developers use Microsoft's compilers that ship with Visual Studio and other x86 environments like Linux are dominated by gcc development. You have to buy Intel's compiler separately and add it to your development environment in most circumstances and it ain't cheap despite the obvious benefit getting better x86 optimized apps released has for Intel. The biggest difference AFAIK is Intel's good work in optimizing for their SIMD style instructions like SSE2, where their compiler does a much better job at parallelizing multiple serial operations into a single SSE op. The difference this makes to some code when comparing Intel's compiler to Microsoft's compiler on the same CPU can be dramatic, even 2X or more on specific benchmarks.

All in all I think this was a fair test of these CPUs, it was a level playing field. OTOH we know Intel can do much better with their compiler, but only some developers use their compiler. It would be interesting to see just how much of a benefit Apple could squeeze out of non gcc compilers, probably not as much as Intel, perhaps not anything, it depends on the work they or IBM et.al. have done on their compilers. You just know if it was to Apples advantage they'd have compiled with their best compiler and dont teh comparrison with those numbers vs Intel's so this situation has been contrived to an extent.

With Intel charging what they do for their compiler developers can be reluctant to pay extra for it, I expect almost everyone (on Windows) would use it if it were free. I know I would, but I can get by without it. I don't really have much sympathy for Intel here, they make billions of chipe, make significant performance claims based on their own compiler, yet charge for it to the point where many developers simply stick with Microsoft's compiler that they've already spend a fair bit on. Now Intel is upset that Apple used gcc, well more people might use Intel's compiler if it were easier to aquire, and clearly it would benefit Intel. If they want to run there business where everything is a profit center and they don't have to be smart enough to evaluate obvious but intangible benefits that's their business, but this is part of the price you pay for charging an arm and a leg for your compiler when you should be in the hardware business and giving your compiler away to help your customer gain the benefit of faster code from the applications they purchase. In the meantime specbench numbers for Intel are simply bogus for many applications.

The Xeon isn't the competition

The G5 will be available on September 1st. The Athlon64 will be available in the same month. With both processors purported to bring 64 bit to the desktop, it would seem the Athlon 64 would be more appropriate to compete with rather than the Xeon.

I sure took notice of Apple's benchmarks...

Why? because almost all the software I run on a daily basis is compiled with gcc. I am really surprised that the slashdot crowd suddenly is crying out that gcc sucks as if none of them use it.

As far as I am concerned if a dual G5 can outperform a dual Xeon under Linux using gcc then that is more "real-world" than Intel's spec results.

Real-World Performance

Regardless of this hype about the SPECint and SPECfp score, I'm much more interested in real-world performance -- specifically the Photoshop tests given closer to the bottom of the page. It's real application support that counts.

I'm the head of a mid-sized consulting company that deals almost exclusively with digital media and digital arts firms. We have a few G5s on order, and because we're a solutions provider, we'll probably get them pretty early. I'm going to wait and see exactly how fast they are, not just in Photoshop, but also in Final Cut Pro -- which in my experience has a history of outrunning similar applications on faster hardware. It's going to be real-world performance that matters. Not SPECfp scores. And we won't know the real-world performance until people start getting their hands on some production units. End of story.

Compiler NOT constant

Several other posters have noted that GCC/970 is really not the same compiler as GCC/Xeon. Sure there may be a bit of code in common between the versions, but the job of a compiler is to produce object code... and by definition, the object code for 970 is different from that for Xeon.

What matters to a purchaser is "How much performance can *I* get out of this machine". If I am performing CPU-intensive scientific calculation that require the fastest CPU I can find (at least for a given number of kilodollars), I'll almost certainly spring a few hundred extra for the compiler that produces the fasted object code on that platform (if needed, there's nothing ruling out GCC automatically because it's free).

It happens that for a Xeon or P4 (or Opteron, for that matter), the compiler that produces the fastest object code is ICC. Intel has done an amazingly good job with their compiler.

Now, sure, I *could* get a similarly optimized 970 compiler for comparison.... if one existed, that is. It looks like right now, GCC is the best you can get on a 970. It doesn't do a buyer any good to know that IN PRINCIPLE a more optimized compiler could be written.

All that said, the 970 looks like a very respectable chip. And Apple is selling their new machines at a very competitive price; and Macs have extremely friendly and stable OSs. All that means that it is probably well worth buying a PowerMac even if it will crunch big computations a few percent slower than a more expensive Xeon. But still... the "GCC is the common element stuff is pretty darn bogus."

The truth will be out soon

I don't see why people are even debating this so early on. Come August, when home and commercial users get their hands on these systems, I'm sure we'll see more than enough benchmarks: Photoshop, 3d animation programs, Quake and other games from so many sources our heads will be spinning. We can then all witness which system comes out on top overall.

More on benchmarking

The 30th International Symposium on Computer Architecture had an interesting panel discussion on benchmarking in industry and academia, with people like John Hennessy, Dave Patterson and Gurinder Sohi on stage. The conclusions: most benchmarking in industry, especially SPEC, is a pack of lies. And benchmark results published by academic researchers aren't much better. So, not really much point in losing a lot of sleep at least over their SPEC numbers.

This is really simple

Apple has been lagging behind the PCs for years in the performance field. This made Apple's user base frustrated, angry and/or anxious.

With the G5, Apple seems to be at an equivalent performance level with the PCs. With equivalent, I mean comparable, that is not extraordinarily faster or slower.

The message from these benchmarks are clearly targetet at their user base to turn their frustration / anxiety to exhilaration.

The Mac faithfuls will believe the message, even if the supporting evidence seems rather dubious, and deflect any rebuttal as coming from jalous / incompetents / trolls.

The rest of the crowd will not take Apple's words for granted and will wait for independant benchmarks when the G5 will be available, showing (my guess) that it is a very good CPU indeed, but certainly not significantly faster or slower than the best x86 offerings.

But Apple does not really care for the rest of the crowd. They passed the message to their base, it has strengthend their confidence and that is what mattered.

As usual, Apple handles this big fuss in style

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.

May I suggest...

A real benchmark. Something that will bring ANY processor to it's knee's and provide a true performance test.

Get one of the physics guys to take some code and compile it on both platforms. We'll run the machines in a native mode. Use whatever compiler you want (although a standard compiler like gcc would be best) with all the optimization turned on for effect. Then crunch a big multi-gigabyte raw data files, like those generated by modern particle accelerators. Finally, feed the data into visualization utilities and display it.

Unfortunately, I'm no longer at a nuclear physics facility with access to this kind of data; otherwise, I'd do it myself. My 400Mhz P2 (linux box) used to take ~23 hours to make a first pass on a 2GB "raw" data file (which only represented 90 minutes of data btw). This will give you a real world feel for raw compute power and visualization power. If there is a significant difference, it should be obvious.

Benchmark the user experience

Forget the debate over if restricitng GCC is fair, let's think about what we are trying to measure!

What it comes down to is the speed of the system, not the chip. The 1000+hp dragster is a useless vehicle to me because I don't need to go in a straight line at over 200 mph. What I do need is to be able to accelerate in traffic, handle corners, etc.

To me, a computer is a system. So I don't really care if the G5 is cranking out power I will never need. I feel like the G4 and the P3 are plenty powerful chips if the OS is built to be efficient and the supporting components to the system are configured correctly.

These days, my biggest reason to upgrade to a new computer is desire for faster system components. I wish my P3 had firewire (might go buy a card), I wish my PowerBook G4 (400mhz mind you) had BlueTooth (not 1600 extra mhz).

Benchmark the user experience, give a review that is more like Automobile or Road and Track. Tell us the zero to sixty and then move on the how the G5 handles in the turns. Tell us if the wind noise is less than a Xeon. Tell me if it has power windows. But don't spend 90% of your marketing materials telling me about the engine, that is only 10% of my buying criteria.

You just gotta TRY OS X!

DELL on XEON, SPEC, and hyperthreading

DELL's own comments on SPEC benchmarks and turning off hyperthreading for best results:

http://www.dell.com/us/en/biz/topics/power_ps3q0 2- khalid.htm

On KneeJerking

I've read through most of the streams on this topic over at Ars, here and Geek â"most of it consisting of shrill whining over Intelâ(TM)s compiler not being used. Iâ(TM)ve looked at all the views, read the study -and from what Iâ(TM)ve CAREFULLY read, the testing methodology was fair.

I feel those shouting the loudest -scanned, rather than read the report.

Typical of the 'outrage':
http://news.com.com/2100-1042_3-102063 1.html

"It wasn't really a fair test," said Gartner analyst Martin Reynolds, who said that the Dell machines are capable of producing scores 30 percent to 40 percent higher than those produced under Apple's methodology [using the Intel compiler]...â

-Well DUH! I guess we then should have expected Intel to trot out a hand-coded/Spec optimized version of their compiler for the G5 too! Idiocy.

âoe...In response, an Apple representative said it wanted to compare hardware performance, so it made sense to use the same compiler on the Mac and the Dell. The SPEC benchmark tests measure the performance of the hardware and the compiler. âoe

-Lets get real here! NOT normalizing the compilers on each systems is nutso â"even to me (which isnâ(TM)t saying much.)

âoe...Joswiak said that the Power Mac settings were representative of how the final machines will ship, even though a few settings did differ from the way current prototypes are configured. As for the Intel-based PCs, he noted that some of the settings that have been criticized were chosen because they actually improved the performance.â

DUH again! Even I saw that! Hey people, the methodology rationale was even explained in the study! Read it!

The bottom line of most of the PC-lumpenproletariat out there seem to be: âoehey dude, ya needed to use the Intel compiler because the Specmarks are, like, soo-ooo much higher on the Dell. As for the G5, use whatever â"it sucks anyway.â

Another big moan out there was that the Dellâ(TM)s Hyperthreading was turned off. They donâ(TM)t seem to realize is (according to DELL) is that, re SpecMark, this was to Dellâ(TM)s advantage!!!!
http://www.dell.com/us/en/esg/topic s/power_ps3q02- khalid.htm

(...As was the fact that the Dellâ(TM)s were packing 512 MB more RAM than the G5! (Which NOONE seemes to have noticed. btw.) ...declarative boobs.

âoe...Peter Glaskowsky, editor-in-chief of Microprocessor Report, ... also noted that Intel's chips perform disproportionately well on SPEC's tests because Intel has optimized its compiler for such tests.â

Damn right they do! To put it mildly.
Iâ(TM)ve read scads of articles on the various, ahem, Spec-specific âoptimizationsâ(TM) theyâ(TM)ve built into their compiler. Great too if youâ(TM)re comparing one Intel product against another â"but other than that, itâ(TM)s just marketing fluff, IHMO.

"...Jobs on Monday also showed demonstrations in which the new Power Macs outperformed the Dell by greater than 2-to-1 ratios on several programs...Reynolds says he has no reason to contest those claims. âoe...the application benchmarks look quite credible," Reynolds said.

Those usage tests may also be more important than synthetic benchmarks, he said. "The SPEC benchmarks aren't that relevant anymore. People now are looking for things like multimedia (performance) and content management."

Agreed. I also think there is just too much marketing driven Spec-chicanery going on out there for them to be considered meaningful benchmarks -if they ever were.

Anyway, the telling of the tale will be on actual boxed applications.
And although I may be surprised, I would place big bets (right now) that the G5 system -especially running Altivec-aware, 64bit recompiled applications, -will run (multiple) circles around the best MP PC versions

THIS THING IS SWEET

I'm at WWDC right now and posting this comment from Safari running on a G5. I don't care what any of the benchmarks say -- this machine screams from a user's point-of-view.

No matter what I throw at it, I can't get either one of the CPUs above 50%.

Re:yeah right

I would't jump to fast to say that apple wouldnt prove themselves just based on a /. discussion. The slashdot crowd is the cream of the crop when it comes to nerds and our preferences influence the purchases of not just our homes but spouses, parents, signifigant others and most importantly many of our jobs.
The earlier discussion on the tests blew up at 1000+ comments and after a careful read (of both the article _and_ the discussion) even i, a confessed mac zealot, was wondering how true the tests were. having joswiak (i love that name) immediately come out and justify apples claims is as big of a PR move as spending a few undred thousand on advertising while costing less and telling us more.

just my 2c but i dont recall nvida immediately coming out to diprove any claims of cheating and thats why there are numerous nvida jokes in the origianl thread.

and by the way

looking at the posts, the "apple cheated" story has garnered 1400+ posts. meanwhile the original "apple comes out with new shit" _only_ prompted 1100+ posts. if it was that big of a deal im sure it was time well spent for apple.

Re:Even if Apple is faster

Wait wait wait.

First it's "They're too slow and too expensive."

Now it's "They're blazingly fast, but still too expensive"? Have you SEEN the $799 G4 eMacs?

Re:Even if Apple is faster

Yeah, but you can roll your own dual 3.06GHz Xeon for WAY less than $4,000 (or $3000 for that matter).
2xCPUs would cost around $1400
Motherboard $300

'Cos everyone knows all you need is a motherboard and processors. Didn't you work in IT at a company I used to work for? You're the one who took the RAM out of my computer and said you'd be "right back", aren't you?

Excercise for you:

Add the cost of Bluetooth, PCI-X, 802.11G, Gigabit ethernet, SATA hard drives and controllers, DVD-R drive, power supply, all the other hardware stuff I've forgotten, plus iTunes, iDVD, iMovie, and the ten or so other bundled applications on the G5s, a Unix-based operating system with superior usability, and one year of free warranty and support for ALL of that stuff.

How much does your dual Xeon cost now?

Re:Even if Apple is faster

Humm... you must have missed the part of the keynote where they priced a similarly equipped dual 3.06GHZ Xeon system from Dell and found it cost about $1,000 more than a dual G5 PowerMac. You can check the Dell web site yourself. Don't forget that the G5 has superior point-to point-bus, hypertransport and much faster memory access that the Dell system as well. The spec mark won't show you that.

Pricing on the lower end models are not as aggressive, but for what you get, it's still reasonable.

Re:Even if Apple is faster

Apple did.
Apple 2x2 G5: $3000
Dell (2x3.06 Xenon): $4000

Mac speed in "real world" application tests, about 2x as fast as the Dell.

Dell = $4000/work unit
Mac G5 = $1500/work unit

The Mac G5 is a much better value on cost on a price/performance basis.

Or were you thinking of something else?

Re:Even if Apple is faster

Even if Apple is faster than Wintel, the Price:Performance ratio is horrible for Apple hardware and software.

I think this is the one time where Apple hardware hasn't been "horribly" priced. A 64bit dual-2Ghz workstation with SATA HDD, DVD-R, PCI-X, a 1 GHz FSB and a max of 8GB of DDR-RAM for under $3000.

As for software, that comment is just pure ignorance. 50% of the stuff they make is free, and the other software is all competitively priced. What software from Apple is overpriced?

Re:Even if Apple is faster

As for software, that comment is just pure ignorance. 50% of the stuff they make is free, and the other software is all competitively priced. What software from Apple is overpriced?

Overpriced is not the right word. More like Underpriced.

I urge anyone to compare the featureset of Final Cut Pro 4 ($899) vs. similar solutions in the PC world. Avid Xpress DV doesn't even stack up, and with all the plugins and tools, you'll end up spending far more to equal twice the price of the Apple G5 hardware.

It really amuses me when people talk about 10.x updates as if they are service packs. Someone yesterday mentioned this saying "Microsoft doesn't charge us for SP.x upgrades", which was really comedic. Windows ServicePacks just fix broken stuff, and sometimes even break more. With OSX 10.x updates you get brand new features all the time.

I wish people really understood how this shit worked.

Re:Real world test

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."

Re:And it sounds quite unconvincing

As far as compilers go:

Apple has CodeWarrier, which is better than their native GCC by about a magnitude of 20. Had they used that, their code would have been as good if not faster then the VC++ stuff.

He's actually right about the compiler hurting them. =p