Intel Mac Performance Behind Hype

Barry Norton writes "Steve Jobs, at the MacWorld tradeshow, boasted: 'the new iMac [with] Intel processor is two to three times faster than the iMac G5.' MacWorld (the publication) has been putting the iMacs through their paces. The results are a good deal less impressive than Steve's boast, showing an average performance increase of 10 to 25 per cent while performing a series of everyday tasks with software specially designed for the new systems." Ars Technica had another perspective on the new systems earlier this week.

Newsflash!

[daveschroeder]

Company performs benchmarks to show product in best light!

From http://www.apple.com/imac/intelcoreduo.html [apple.com]:

2. Testing conducted by Apple in December 2005 using preproduction 20-inch iMac units with 2GHz Intel Core Duo; all other systems were shipping units. All scores are estimated.SPEC is a registered trademark of the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation (SPEC); see www.spec.org for more information. Benchmarks were compiled using the IBM compiler and a beta version of the Intel compiler for Mac OS.

3. Testing conducted by Apple in December 2005 using preproduction 20-inch iMac units with 2GHz Intel Core Duo; all other systems were shipping units. All of the iMac and iMac G5 systems ran beta Universal version of Modo. All other applications were beta versions.

And since actual application performance has been subjective since the dawn of time, how is this surprising?

I mean, we're talking about a company that said no one wanted flash players until they made one, that no one wanted to watch video on an iPod until they made an iPod that played video, and that said all x86 architecture and CISC processors sucked until they switched to them.

And you know what? All of the above statements had significant elements of truth to them. Apple is doing nothing more than showing its products, accurately insofar as it goes, in the best possible light. Is this the least bit stunning?

Re:Newsflash!

[The evil non-flying]

Apple has been famous for redefining the gravitation constant of the universe whenever the need arised. I think it is because they've become a marketing driven company rather than an engineering based one.

Re:Newsflash!

[Anonymous Coward]

oh come on. Steve said it was really fast, let's not bore people with technical details... Look! Over there, bouncing icons and spinning beach balls!

Re:Newsflash!

[commanderfoxtrot]

And the whole point of the exercise was to ignite discussion and thence branding and sales. Not that x is 20% faster than y.

I think he's succeeded.

Re:Newsflash!

[ltwally]

"and that said ... CISC processors sucked until they switched to them."

None of Intel's desktop, notebook or server cpu's are CISC. They haven't been for several years, now. They are actually RISC-like in nature, with a big fat CISC decoder that transforms those nasty CISC commands into "micro-ops."

Re:Newsflash!

[the_humeister]

That never stopped Apple from publicly bashing the architecture whenver they could.

Re:Newsflash!

[Golias]

That never stopped Apple from publicly bashing the architecture whenver they could.

Actually, the Intel turtle and the smoked bunny ads ended their run years ago. Ever since Jobs came back and re-hired Chat-Day for their adds, it's all been saccharine pop music and pretty colors. Apple hasn't bashed an Intel chip via their marketing since back when the G4 was actually considered a fast chip.

Re:Newsflash!

[eclectic4]

Chiat Day [tbwachiat.com]. The gold standard in advertising...

Re:Newsflash!

[crmartin]

That's pretty much the way CISC has been implemented since the IBM 360. John Cocke started the RISC thing with the IBM 801 because he believed the microcode interpreter loop could be replaced wwith better compilation.

Re:Newsflash!

[bstone]

And the tradeoffs between RISC/CISC can be complex and balance each other out in many ways. For example, on a CISC machine you might have an instruction to move a block of memory where on a RISC machine you might have to loop on load/store instructions. The CISC machine may break the move down internally to pretty much the same loop, but the instruction itself takes less memory. This leads to more instructions in the same cache space and possibly a shorter instruction pipeline needed for CISC. To balanc

Re:Newsflash!

[sadr]

In theory, you're right. There's a lot of factors that go into how efficient a CPU and an instruction set archietecture are.

The ARM, for example, added a subset of their usual instructions (Thumb mode) that used 16-bit ops instead of the usual 32 bit. On a system with slow memory, this turned about to be about 30% faster, even though the number of operations increased.

However, I'm reasonably certain that if you were to design a CISC instruction set today, it would not resemble the x86 ISA. You could cert

Re:Newsflash!

[Guy Harris]

These chips are based on a heavily modified version of the P3, which was based on the Pentium Pro. I believe they're a bit more "traditional" CISC-type processors.

Nope. The Pentium Pro had the micro-op stuff, as do its descendants.

Re:Newsflash!

[Mr. Underbridge]

I mean, we're talking about a company that said no one wanted flash players until they made one, that no one wanted to watch video on an iPod until they made an iPod that played video, and that said all x86 architecture and CISC processors sucked until they switched to them.

It seems your tinfoil is successful in blocking the Reality Distortion Field (TM).

Re:Newsflash!

[Shanep]

CISC processors sucked

Didn't CISC really die with the advent of the Pentium Pro? Hasn't every x86 since then been a shallow CISC interface to a RISC core?

Seems silly to me for anyone to be flying a CISC flag these days when the majority of CISC CPU's in desktops and servers are not really CISC at the core.

So isn't CISC mostly just a legacy?

Re:Newsflash!

[TheNetAvenger]

Didn't CISC really die with the advent of the Pentium Pro? Hasn't every x86 since then been a shallow CISC interface to a RISC core?

Seems silly to me for anyone to be flying a CISC flag these days when the majority of CISC CPU's in desktops and servers are not really CISC at the core.

So isn't CISC mostly just a legacy?


This would be a classic post of missing the point and focusing on the 'wording' used, instead of what the person was meaning...

Let me rephrase it for the myopic... "Apple bashed the x86 archit

Re:Newsflash!

[TheNetAvenger]

Apple bashed x86 because it was CISC. But since it no longer is, Apple's complaints no longer apply, so it's not hypocritical of Apple to use x86.

This is not true, even if you belive this is why Apple bashed the x86 platform.

1) Apple based the x86 platform because it was not their CPU or architecture. (Adobe even had to stand up to Apple, and say, hey Photoshop and Illustrator will run faster on Windows x86 PCs than on Macs)

2) The x86 CPUs are not any more CISC than the PowerPC CPUs are non-CISC. The x86 C

Re:Newsflash!

[afidel]

Actually the CISC frontend is a very GOOD thing as it allows better utilization of cache resources and lowers overall latency due to memory fetching. A pure RISC architecture would fail to perform today because of the disparity between CPU performance and main memory performance. Even socalled RISC chips like the PPC bear little resemblance to earlier RISC chips like MIPS.

Re:Newsflash!

[pkhuong]

"Excuse me? Why would the CISC frontend allow better ultilization of cache resources?"

Because the encoding is more compact. For example, compare adding or loading a 32 bit immediate in x86 to the same in any 32bit "RISC". It's widely known and accepted that CISCy encoding reduces the pressure on the I-cache (yes, not for the L1 I-cache on the P4, since the instructions are stored in a decoded form). There has been research into compressing the instruction stream (huffmann, gzip, ...), but I don't know if it's yielded anything in recent years.

"But assumed that a possible benefit in the CISC frontend exists (apart from more compact code on average, that is) -- what difference does it make in terms of bus accesses when the CISC commands get recoded into CISC instructions anyway? Any optimization which was done by (a) the compiler on the CISC frontend and (b) by the internal OoO scheduler on the uOps kan be done as well on native RISC ops."

That was not the grandparent's point. His point was that while, as we seem to agree, CISC offers a more compact encoding, it doesn't suffer from the encoding's complexity much, since they are decoded back in a RISCy form. In other words, the gp was not saying that decoding gives an edge to CISC, but that it allows one to use a CISC encoding while still enjoying RISC's advantages later in the pipeline. As chips are getting more and more complex, adding more logic to reduce bus pressure (or perform runtime optimisations... *cough* EPIC *cough* ;) seems less and less costly.

Re:Newsflash!

[disappear]

As I said: apart from compact encoding.

In other words, "So, other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you enjoy the show?"

Re:Newsflash!

[Andy Dodd]

Not all companies go for showing the "absolute best case" benchmark. AMD is generally rather conservative with their performance ratings, and it's pretty rare that third-party benchmarks show an Athlon with a given performance rating having significantly different average performance than the "baseline comparison" CPU (One of the older P4s) running at the same clock rate as that performance rating.

A great example of just how conservative AMD is - The Venice core Athlon 64 3200+ has a 2.0 GHz core clock and 512k of L2 cache, using a 90nm process. Its closest dual-core variant (the Manchester core X2 3800+) has the same core clock, L2 cache per core, and manufacturing process. (They also have the same FSB speed, 1 GHz HyperTransport) Yes, that's right, the dual-core variant is only rated 18% higher than its closest single-core counterpart. (This is because currently, on average, a second core usually doesn't net you much benefit because so many CPU-intensive tasks do all the work in a single thread.)

Apple, on the other hand, is notorious for being overly optimistic in their speed comparisons - They always pick the benchmark which will make the competition look as bad as possible, to the point of even failing to use important performance features of the competition's CPU. (For example, back in the P2/P3 era, Apple constantly marketed their systems as being faster than a P2 or P3 with twice the clock speed - While the PPC did in general perform somewhat better per clock cycle than Intel's CPUs, the difference was not anywhere close to what Apple claimed it to be. The benchmark in question used Altivec on the PPC but failed to optimize for Intel whatsoever - No MMX or SSE was used, despite being available.)

To compare it to my previous example, Apple would have called the Athlon 64 X2 3800+ a 6400+ because it had two cores equivalent to the 3200+.

When it comes to inflated/BS benchmarks, Apple is one of the kings.

Re:Newsflash!

[Jezza]

Actually Steve never said that the system was that fast, he was only talking about the chip. He said "the disks are 2 the 3 times as fast" so I don't see why we find it so amazing that the real world performance is lower than the benchmarks. It is always going depend on the application. So an application that spends most of its time waiting for the disk isn't going to see much of a speed up with a faster processor (it'll see a little because it'll move from wait-state to wait-state faster). For a lot of applications this is the norm (described as "disk bound").

What is probably more important (for home users) is actually something Steve side stepped, these new iMac should generate less heat and therefore run more quietly (because the fans won't need to spin as fast/often) for users in a domestic setting this is important.

I think most people who buy Macs (especially iMacs) are not buying it because they think it's the fastest computer around (amazing as it may sound there are other factors in the purchasing decision).

Re:Newsflash!

[Dzimas]

The Apple site repeatedly proclaims "2x faster. Twice as amazing." Of course, perhaps Steve defined X=0.6?

Re:Newsflash!

[Overly Critical Guy]

Sir, I'm going to have to ask you to step out of the car. You're writing calm, rational posts in a Slashdot zone. Please take your emotion from the glove box and wear it on your head while barking "STEVE LIED." I'll let you off with a warning this time.

SIngle Processor Versus Dual processor

[goombah99]

Uh this comparison while meaningful in it's own right is downright silly in the text desrciption.

The core Duo is a dual processor. The G5 in question is a single processor. The applications are not explicitly multi-processor applications. They might be multi-threaded having a Gui thread and a calaculation thread, but unless they are explicitly written for multiple processors the heavy lifting is going to be occurring on a single processor. Thus this comparison is essentially between a single processor P

Re:Newsflash!

[Jeff DeMaagd]

I think people may be missing the fact that the dual core thing might be throwing a wrench into the mix, which could account for all of the discrepencies. There aren't many native apps, and I think the iLife suite isn't multi-processor capable yet, so a benchmarks won't show the benefits of the second core.

Re:Newsflash!

[Stephan Schulz]

I think people may be missing the fact that the dual core thing might be throwing a wrench into the mix,...

Exactly right. The G5 is an excellent processor, and clock for clock should approximately be able to keep up with one core of the CoreDuo. But the new iMac has a much better bus system, and, of course, the second core.

It's no coincidence that Jobs showed the SPECint_rate results that measure throughput, not the more often used plain SPECint that measures time-to-finish of a sequentially run suite of programs. So his claims are not exacly wrong...

I'll probably still wait for the second generation of new laptops before I upgrade from my TiBook.

Re:Newsflash!

[Overly Critical Guy]

Here's the "crap from Jobs" you're talking about:

"Now everything's not going to run 2-3X. You know the disks aren't 2-3X faster, etc., but on the most important benchmarks, 2 to 3 times faster." - Steve Jobs from the keynote

Seems pretty honest to me. Amusingly, it's the sites like Slashdot leaping on the speed claims and obsessing over them, while Jobs himself gave them a real-world context in the keynote speech. Not that such a thing would get mentioned in the article submission...no, no, gotta get all those page hits from people bitching about Steve Jobs "lying." Sigh.

Re:Newsflash!

[Haeleth]

So, where are the important benchmarks that show things actually running 2-3 times faster? RTFA: they performed a wide variety of tests here, and the largest performance increase they measured was 1.84x, which is not "2-3x" by any means. And that was for system startup, hardly an "important" benchmark, given that most people I know with Macs use the suspend feature instead of switching the thing right off every night. And the average speed increase on "important" benchmarks, which I take to mean "things people actually wish were faster", was 1.2-1.5x. That's a good figure. If Steve Jobs had said "it's 50% faster", people would still have been impressed. But that's not what he said.

Look, if you go to the Apple Store right now, what you'll see is a banner that says "The 2x faster iMac". Not "The iMac that's 2x faster on artificial benchmarks, but actually only 1.2-1.5x faster in real life because most tasks are IO-bound". Apple are selling this thing as 2x faster, period - and it isn't. Call it lying, or call it marketing, as you wish, but it still doesn't reflect well on Apple.

Compiler?

[spectrokid]

What compiler does Apple use? As they are starting from scratch, they should be able to optimise for this specific chip without taking backward compatibility into account...

Re:Compiler?

[sgant]

At the moment I think they're using gcc.

Re:Compiler?

[Anonymous Coward]

GCC 4 to be exact. They helped make it.

Re:Compiler?

[laffer1]

Xcode includes 4.0.1 of GCC but apple was using GCC 3.x to compile the kernel in 10.4. Kernel modules are C++, so it wasn't possible to use GCC 4.0 yet. (since GCC 4 tried to be more compliant.. even KDE 3.x didn't compile on it) Apple said they used intel compilers for the testing though I believe on the intel macs and ibm's compiler for the ppc build. I wish they would have used GCC since its more fair in a way. If anything its optimized for the x86 platform more, but its more apples to apples. :)

Only intel zealots would think that an intel chip would be 3 times faster anyway. POWER isn't that bad or Microsoft wouldn't have put them in xbox 360s. Another factor is that the software "optimized" for x86 hasn't been out long. Sure apple's been keeping the old nextstep port alive all these years (it ran on intel and 68k), but making it run and tuning it for the latest pentium chip are two different things.

Re:Compiler?

[Krach42]

Only intel zealots would think that an intel chip would be 3 times faster anyway. POWER isn't that bad or Microsoft wouldn't have put them in xbox 360s. Another factor is that the software "optimized" for x86 hasn't been out long. Sure apple's been keeping the old nextstep port alive all these years (it ran on intel and 68k), but making it run and tuning it for the latest pentium chip are two different things.

It's not. The iMac Intel just has a dual core processor. The actual increase in speed from a G5 to a Core Duo is only about 10~25%, the rest just comes from getting two of them.

So, SURPRISE, comsumer level single-threaded apps only get a 10~25% increase, it's AMAZING.

Re:Compiler?

[Wiz]

Ok, I don't think this is right. I watched part of the keynote the next day and when Jobs was talking about performance he said both chips were using the "best possible compiler" and these were identified as Intel's compiler for x86 and the IBM compiler for the PPC.

Although using Xcode, yes, they use GCC. I think at this point they were trying to get the best number possible. :)

Of course, when the G5 came out they used GCC when comparing it against the Pentium 4 as this was "fair". More likely, it was due t

Re:Compiler?

[QuietLagoon]

What compiler does Apple use?

Objective c language, possibly the gcc compiler [objc.info]

Objective-C is a object oriented superset of C with a Smalltalk style (infix) message syntax. It was originally written by Brad Cox and the StepStone corppration in the early 1980s. In 1988, it was adopted as the development language for NeXTstep and was made a part of the GNU gcc compiler in 1992. It is currently used as the principle programming language for MacOSX (which is based on NeXTstep) and as the language for the GN

Re:Compiler?

[oudzeeman]

Objective C is used for Cocoa applications. The kernel is mostly C. IO Kit Drivers use a subset of c++. All compiled with gcc.

Well, from what I remember from the Keynote

[sgant]

Steve Jobs said that he was talking about the processors being faster...and he specifically said not everything is going to be faster like the hard drives and memory etc etc. Just the processors which is why he showed the SPECmarks or whatever this phantom benchmark that, to my knowledge, isn't a free download from anywhere. Or was I the only one that heard him prefacing the results?

Oh well, let the Mac bashing continue, blood is in the water.

Errr...

[Nazmun]

Um, it's pretty safe to say that even in pure cpu performance the intel processor is NOT 2-3x faster then the G5's overall.

Steve probably just showed just one category of a processor benchmark where intel exceeded it and probably played around a bit more with it to make it look better.

Re:Errr...

[Golias]

Um, it's pretty safe to say that even in pure cpu performance the intel processor is NOT 2-3x faster then the G5's overall.

Um, I think it's pretty safe to say that a dual-core CPU, from Intel or anybody else, is likely to be about 2x faster than the single G5 which the old iMac had.

I think it's also pretty safe to say that a dual-core Intel chip in the new MacBook Pro is going to scream past the single-core G4 (at a vastly slower clock speed) which the old PowerBooks were saddled with.

Anybody who says any different is relying more on religion than math.

Re:Errr...

[wanerious]

Yep. I have an older 1GHz G4 PowerBook and just received the iMac 2.0 GHz dual-core. I compiled Qt 4.1 for both, and *roughly* (I wasn't paying exact attention to the clock) the iMac compiled the entire library (identical configure options) about 7 times faster than the single G4. About what I'd expect. For my shorter jobs it's also about 6-7x faster. The compiler (gcc) utilizes both cores nicely, as I can see with the system load monitor.

Re:Errr...

[CaymanIslandCarpedie]

Anybody who thinks droping two cores on die in place of one will double performance is relying more on 1st grade math than engineering.

Re:Errr...

[Nazmun]

Wow... I got modded troll with responses like this? I thought it would be common sense.

A) I was talking about the G5 in my comparison, the g4 laptops are irrelevant.
b) Dual core != 2x performance, not even close.

Re:Well, from what I remember from the Keynote

[TubeSteak]

http://www.starlink.rl.ac.uk/star/docs/ssn23.htx/ n ode19.html [rl.ac.uk]

While the results from this package should be in broad agreement with manufacturers' SPECmark ratings, they will provide a more realistic performance estimate for Starlink machines. SPECmark ratings tend to indicate the potential that it is possible to realise with a machine rather than the performance that will actually be returned when running `real' applications.

SPECMARK = Systems Performance Evaluation Cooperation Mark

http://www.specbench.or [specbench.org]

Re:Well, from what I remember from the Keynote

[TubeSteak]

SPEC MARK
SPEC = Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation
Formerly System Performance Evaluation Cooperative

http://www.pcmag.com/encyclopedia_term/0,2542,t=SP ECmark&i=51813,00.asp [pcmag.com]

An organization founded in 1988 to establish standard benchmarks for computers. Its first benchmark was a single CPU rating known as the "SPECmark," in which one SPECmark was equivalent in performance to a VAX 11/780. Although SPEC benchmarks continue to rate CPUs, SPEC has a variety of benchmarks to measure graphics subsyste

Re:Well, from what I remember from the Keynote

[TheNetAvenger]

Steve Jobs said that he was talking about the processors being faster...and he specifically said not everything is going to be faster like the hard drives and memory etc etc. Just the processors which is why he showed the SPECmarks or whatever this phantom benchmark that, to my knowledge, isn't a free download from anywhere. Or was I the only one that heard him prefacing the results?

Oh well, let the Mac bashing continue, blood is in the water.

Possibly, but then why does their web site specifically word thin

Re:Well, from what I remember from the Keynote

[ErikZ]

but...but...

Free Kool-aid!

At least that's one thing that never changes...

[TheGuano]

Despite the switch to Intel CPUs, the time honored tradition of "Apple benchmarks" continues :)

Re:At least that's one thing that never changes...

[larkost]

I think that Apple has usually done a pretty good job at being very specific and far about their benchmarks. They are as specific as anyone else's, but they don't usually pull the underhanded tricks that other places have. As examples:

Apple usually has a full Photoshop routine that is fairly complex, and almost always is putting together a movie poster. The construction of the movie poster is very realistic, and exactly duplicates the routine that a graphic artist would follow. They have traditionally made

Re:At least that's one thing that never changes...

[AHumbleOpinion]

I think that Apple has usually done a pretty good job at being very specific and far about their benchmarks.

Like when Apple used old 486 code to test on a Pentium, but used new PPC code on the Mac side?
Like when Apple used an old MMX code to test on a SSE equipped x86 CPU, but used new Altivec code on the Mac side?
Like when Apple's spec results for a particular x86 CPU did not match the official results, Apple used a weaker x86 compiler?

To be fair, this was all in marketing info, not in an engineer

Apples and Oranges

[Anonymous Coward]

Steve Jobs was reporting improvments in CPU benchmarks, but the article refers to application benchmarks.

The CPU is going to be doing different things from those benchmarks in those applications- and may not even be the bottleneck in any given "real world" task.

Now whether Steve should have demonstrated "real world" improvements is up for debate, but all he presented were CPU benchmarks. He made no claim about application performance.

Is this really a surprise?

[Steev]

Lots of people here have run Linux or a Unix variant on very similar hardware. Surely they knew already the kind of performance they would get out of it, since OS X is basically unix under the covers. I don't think this should really be a surprise to many.

Re:Is this really a surprise?

[turgid]

Lots of people here have run Linux or a Unix variant on very similar hardware. Surely they knew already the kind of performance they would get out of it, since OS X is basically unix under the covers. I don't think this should really be a surprise to many.

If only 't were so simple.

Unix-like operating systems (Linux, *BSD, Solaris, AIX, HP/UX etc.) present a common standard interface to the world, however the implementation details behind that interface differs radically amongst those platforms, and even between kernel versions with Linux.

As such, while these OSes may be able to run the same software, they do so with very different performance characteristics.

As a starting point, you should consider the differences between System VR4, Linux 2.4, Linux 2.6 and FreeBSD. There are many good books on the subject.

Re:Is this really a surprise?

[Ardeocalidus]

Mac OS is based on Darwin, which is a specific flavor of Unix. Apple has finely tweaked their operating system for their hardware and this is why you get the great performance on the PowerPC architecture, even though support for x86 is more mainstream.

Linux and Unix flavors are bred for universal comptibility. You have to give up some power to gain some portability.

Re:Is this really a surprise?

[MyDixieWrecked]

actually, OSX's threading performance isn't quite as good as other *nixes. There was a comparison [anandtech.com] between OSX, Linux and a BSD on G5 hardware running mysql and apache, and OSX compared quite poorly compared to the other OSes.

personally, I never liked running OSX as a general, public server because it never really felt quite right. the only thing I've ever used OSX for when it comes to serving is LAN-based fileserving (SMB/AFP).

Re:Is this really a surprise?

[Just Some Guy]

OS X is basically unix under the covers.

...with the exception that I/O Kit and the HFS+ filesystem seem to think a hard drive is a floppy and do their best to set its performance to that level.

I fully understand that my wife's iMac isn't an Xserve, but holy cow, the drive is slow. I'm not exaggerating when I say that the estimate stage of an Amanda backup - that is, basically running "tar --file /dev/null" - takes over an hour to complete on 20GB of content.

For a (not very) quick comparison, here's how long that process takes to run on my home directory on my FreeBSD desktop:

$ find . | wc
52788 60297 3122487
$ du | tail -n1
4270686 .
$ time gtar 2>/dev/null cf /dev/null .
gtar cf /dev/null . 2> /dev/null 0.42s user 1.04s system 89% cpu 1.635 total

On the Mac, though, we see:

$ find . | wc
34346 35311 1997441
$ du | tail -n1
1026640 .
$ time gnutar 2>/dev/null cf /dev/null .
gnutar cf /dev/null . 2> /dev/null 2.27s user 9.41s system 41% cpu 27.874 total

Even though my home directory in the Mac has 35% fewer files and directories to glance at, the tar run takes 17 times longer.

Now, I don't want to be that "a file copy takes 20 minutes!" guy, but this thing really is incredibly slow at certain operations. Just because parts of OS X have a Unix heritage doesn't mean that the whole package has Unix-like performance.

Buy a Mac because you like the OS and applications. We did. If you buy one because you think it's going to dominate all available benchmarks, though, then you're going to be sadly disappointed.

Not this again...

[Darth Maul]

Apparently nobody watched the Keynote, in which Steve himself said that other components (hard disk, memory, etc) were not faster, so the overall experience would not be as fast as the 2-3x numbers he posted. Based on the specInt numbers he shows, sure, it's a 2-3 times improvement, but even he caveated it!

If this were digg I'd call for a "No digg!" right about now.

Re:Not this again...

[Otter]

In fairness -- relative to last week's "iTunes is malware!" nonsense, this one at least has a germ of sense behind it.

Re:Not this again...

[adrianmonk]

Apparently nobody watched the Keynote, in which Steve himself said that other components (hard disk, memory, etc) were not faster, so the overall experience would not be as fast as the 2-3x numbers he posted.

Actually, the memory is a lot faster on the new machines, but you're absolutely right about disk and all that other stuff.

Just so people don't have to fast-forward through the keynote (which is over an hour long), here's what Steve Jobs actually said about iMac Core Duo performance compared to the iMac G5:

And we've got the numbers which speak for themselves, so let's take a look at them. The iMac G5 and the iMac Core Duo. Let's take a look at SPECmarks. SPEC2000, integer performance, the most important benchmark of computer performance: 10.2 on the iMac G5, 32.6 on the iMac Core Duo. 3.2X. And these are using the best compilers on each: IBM's compilers on the G5, and Intel's compilers on the Core Duo. For floating point, 13.0 on the G5, 27.1 on the Core Duo, for 2.1. So, in the most important benchmarks of performance, 2-3X. Now everything's not going to run 2-3X. You know the disks aren't 2-3X faster, etc., but on the most important benchmarks, 2 to 3 times faster.

So, what Jobs is saying is that the SPECint2000 and the SPECfp2000 performance is 2-3 times as fast, and he's also saying that those benchmarks are important, which admittedly is debatable. :-)

For what it's worth, I noticed that lots of the MacWorld tests focused on image processing. That's a useful thing to know about, but aren't most of thoses tasks going to be done using special stuff like Altivec or SSE? If that's the case, they're not really good comparisons of the regular performance of the processors.

And another thing...

[kongjie]

First poster hit the nail on the head, this is the same old story of real-world speed gains versus more "pure" testing.

But what was more significant was his frank acknowledgement that Photoshop operating via Rosetta wasn't going to be usable by professionals. The people jumping on the accusation of hype bandwagon need to take those comments into consideration. It's not often that on a new product rollout something is said that directly translates into "Hey, don't go out and buy this right now."

Single Threaded Benchmarks

[Anonymous Coward]

it should be noted that these are all single-threaded benchmarks so the second core doesn't help that much.
it should be interesting how these machines compare doing more things at once or running multi-threaded tasks.

What will it matter?

[Billosaur]

"Sideshow" Steve Jobs is not above a little showmanship. I mean it's part of his repertoire, being Apple's head man and biggest booster. So he goes out and whips up interest in his products and engages in a little verbal sleight-of-hand. It's not an outright lie:

From MacWorld: Instead, our tests found the new 2.0GHz Core Duo iMac takes rougly 10 to 25 percent less time than the G5 iMac to perform the same native application tasks, albeit with some notable exceptions. (If you'd prefer, that makes the Core

Re:What will it matter?

[masklinn]

Not blazingly faster, but faster nonetheless. And who's really going to notice? Graphic designers and CAD people maybe, but the casual user isn't really going to notice the pickup in speed. So perhaps it's a bit of exaggeration but in the end it isn't hurting anyone.

I think that in the Ars test the tester said the interface on the Core Duo had much more of teh snappy, so the end user would notice that.

There are a lot of nice things about dual core

[happyemoticon]

For one, UI responsiveness and multitasking. I know that if I've got an application soaking up all of 1 processor, I'm not going to cause it to go belly-up by shoving it in the background and surfing the web while some single-threaded app happily churns away on that thread.

<Mac Snobbery>Oh, and that reminds me of the nicest feature of OS X: That pop-ups can't take the focus away from you. I hate hitting spacebar, thinking I'm typing into Notepad, and actually I've agreed to a window that flashed up on my screen for about a half a second and I'm wondering if I just bought viagra.</Mac Snobbery>

So perhaps it's a bit of exaggeration but in the end it isn't hurting anyone.

Right on both counts, and I think these are the reasons:

People who actually will buy a top-of-the-line system because a few extra FLOPS saves them hours and hours of time running photoshop filters are going to see the improvements because by and large, the applications that they use are designed to leverage multiple processors. If they're not, they need to bitch at their vendors, because that's ostensibly why Photoshop costs x-hundred dollars.

People like me, who just want to run World of Warcraft in the foreground and have safari open to look things up on Thottbot as necessary and surf the web during transit, are going to notice the UI responsiveness. Nothing's more annoying than when I can't click on Start for 10 seconds because I'm ripping a CD, or the Java VM is starting up for the first time at the behest of a web application running in the background.

Single-threaded performance is slightly overrated. No task I do, except compilation, gaming, and XSLT transformations, is going to benefit heavily from being twice as fast, even on a single thread. If you stuck a gigabyte of ram into my circa-2001 1GHz P3, set it up next to my office 3.2GHz P4 with HT disabled, and had me take the Pepsi Challenge, I would be hard-pressed to tell the difference in most of the applications I use without getting a stop watch or running Doom 3.

Should have gone with CELL

[zymano]

Nobody has tried a vector desktop computer.

Could have killed all the floating point benchmarks.

Re:Should have gone with CELL

[Llywelyn]

You do realize there is a *reason* no one has tried such, right?

Trolling Mac Fanatics

[SPYvSPY]

Yes, Mac users have a well-deserved reputation for being fanatical (and sometimes even for good reason). But then along comes a story like this one that smears Apple for no particularly good reason and without much of an argument, and you have to ask yourself WTF.

I'm questioning your mod

[acomj]

Your right.

Yet You were moded a troll.

Steve jobs said the processors faster but not the drives and the memory etc, so the whole machine wouldn't be. Its not slower, thats for sure.

Steve Jobs quote about Rosetta performance

[chriss]

Steve Jobs during the keynote at MacExpo when presenting Photoshop running on Rosetta:

While the performance of Photoshop is not gonna be strong enough in Rosetta for a professional that spends hours per day in photoshop, it's gonna be great for most of us who use photoshop occasionally.

Speed is a marketing issue. Real world performance not surprisingly lower.

Well, of course.

[Ardeocalidus]

Of course performance is behind. Mac's PowerPC hrdware was optimized for their code and their hardware. Apple must have time to make these tweaks on the new PC architecture. The G5's were also 64-bit running (at first) around 95% software emulation. Later versions of the OS brought this up to 100%. You see, its not all instant. They are developing on a new platform and need time to perfect their code.

And even though Mac carried on a subversion PC program for a while, they stopped a while ago. As the OS ch

It's an iMac.

[nsayer]

Let's reserve judgement for "Mac Pro" (that is, the pro level desktop machine) when it comes out. There will be no excuses at all if that machine does not kick serious ass.

This is always the case

[hkb]

Benchmarks are always hyped by a company. But the fact is, my 20" iMac is noticeably faster than the dual 2ghz G5 it replaced. Anyone who believes subjective benchmarks anymore is naive.

Re:This is always the case

[level_headed_midwest]

Even quantitative enchmarks are notoriously very poor at giving a definitive answer of "yes, this is faster" that will hold true for everyone's usages unless the two things being benchmarked are not even in the same league, such as if you put my 2.2GHz P4-M up against a new AMD FX-60 or Pentium 955 EE. You more or less have to have butt time with the systems that you want to compare to see what is faster for you. For example, my usage entails keeping lots of office apps open at the same time and I also comp

iMovie results

[KonoWatakushi]

Apparently the iMovie compression/export times were "dramatically slower" on the intel machine. They didn't list the results, stating that it was likely a bug; probably just the lack of Altivec support though. I think the value of Altivec on the PowerPC will only become more apparent over time.

Altivec isn't that great

[Andy Dodd]

It blew away MMX back when it was first released, and was somewhat better than SSE.

It isn't really much better than SSE2 at all.

The issue here is that Apple had years to do hand optimization of key routines for Altivec, they haven't had as much time to optimize for SSE2.

Not iMovie -- iPhoto results

[Van Halen]

Did you read the article? The only non-Rosetta result that was slower was iPhoto (export to files). It came in at a "dramatic" 0.91x as fast as the G5. Well, I wouldn't call that dramatically slower.

Why was it slower? It's probably spending the vast majority of its time writing data to files. And guess what's the bottleneck there? The hard disk. The disk in the new Intel iMac is most likely slower than the disk in the older G5 (non-iSight) iMac. this post at the Ars forum [arstechnica.com] explains why. Apparently o

"Twice as fast" vs. "Two equally fast cores"

[tongodeon]

The Core Duo is about twice as fast because, as Steve said, each core is about as fast as a G5 and there are two of them.

This means that for most tasks which are single-threaded (searching for text in BBEdit) there's going to be a modest or zero speed increase. For those rare tasks that are written to be multithreaded it'll be ~1.8x as fast (thread overhead, bus contention, etc.)

I'm not surprised either by Steve's stated SPEC benchmarks or real world app benchmarks. That's how concurrency works in the real world whether it's on a dual-core Mac running OSX or a dual-core Athlon running Linux.

This is boring

[Tibor the Hun]

Yes, Steve said that processors are faster in 2 specific benchmark tests.
Yes, the marketing on the website is misleading. (2x, 4x)
It's bad enough that Apple and clueless media are taking things out of their context, we don't need /. to do that.

Everyone on slashdot, I presume, knows at least the basics of how to benchmark a CPU, system, process whatever...
We don't process media feeds on IT specs as facts.

PC technology, Mac prices

[Jivha]

Performance apart, it seems that good ol' Apple is charging $1300 for a machine that costs around $900(according to [theinquirer.net] market research firm iSuppli) to them. A markup of around 45% in a ultra-competitive market like PC hardware!

Build cheap, claim big, advertise huge...no wonder the stock market can't get enough of Steve Jobs. I'd envy a man who has the ability to charge above market prices for a near commodity product(a PC) and in the process command a cultish following among the buyers.

Re:PC technology, Mac prices

[BearRanger]

Let's see...the hardware costs about $900. It comes with MacOSX and iLife '06. Apple sells that software for about $200 retail. Plus you get features that aren't available on most PC's, like the built in iSight camera--and the software to run it is an integral part of the OS.

I think the *value* of the Mac package exceeds the budget basement PC you're trying to compare it to. Price out the software for the PC to match the Mac and it won't even be close.

Why 2x faster? Just says it's faster!

[digitaldc]

I don't understand why Jobs would say something false that we know will be quickly tested and analyzed in order to verify that claim?

Wouldn't it have been better for Apple's credibility to just say it is a significant improvement and will be faster than its predecessor?

Public Enemy was right - Don't believe the hype.

Steve vs Apple's website

[dalamar70]

Steve may have prefaced his remarks, but the 2x speed claims are mentioned several times on the Apple website. http://www.apple.com/imac/ [apple.com] In most places they do include a footnote disclaimer or say "up to" 2x, but the boldface text on the intro page clearly says "Rev up your digital life at speeds twice as fast as the previous iMac." There's also a blurb about a "whole new architecture".

"Upto"

[olddotter]

Normally people say "upto" 4 times faster etc. Because it really does depend on the software mix and application. This is going to especially be true of dual core or dual CPU systems.

I for one see no great conspiracy here.

10-20% is still faster

[BigZaphod]

Benchmarks tend to show extremes which are useful for hype. Seeing a 10-20% increase in everyday things doesn't sound too bad to me. Not as much as I'd like to have seen, of course, but it's a good start IMO.

Pro apps

[Belseth]

I'd love to see some tests with Pro Apps like Apeture and Final Cut Pro. The other telling one would be Maya for rendering. Most people don't need their word processor to run faster but higher end graphics software needs speed. The Apple tests seemed to lean on the side of graphics intensive software so I'm curious about those numbers. I did play with Apeture on one. It was a single chip dual core. Opening files and some functions hesitated but we're talking RAW files on a single chip machine. I was pretty impressed and I'm not a Mac person. I'm sure if most of that was Apeture and not the machine but it's pretty amazing either way. There definately seems to be an overall speed increase no matter who tests them. These are transitional machines and they are selling basically for what current Macs of a similar speed do. I have to believe once they settle in and the chips are better supported they will be much faster. One of the biggest benefits no one hardly talks about is hardware multitasking. I think if you started a shot rendering say in Maya then started working on a model in Modo you'd find little or no slow down if Maya was set to single node. Normally the apps would be stepping on each other. I haven't had a chance to try running multiple apps since I haven't had a chance to build out a dual chip PC system but there's a definate benefit over software multitasking. I'd give the new Mac a year to settle in before debating speed too seriously. Remember the debacle with the P4s when they came out? They cost a fortune and inspite of denials at the time turned out to be much slower because the apps weren't taking advantage of the P4 architecture. Apple switched to a whole new chipset. Having them come out faster is impressive on it's own. Even the apps that are called native I'm sure need refinements. Most of these aren't going to be optimized for dual chips. Non pro apps normally either don't take advantage or don't take full advantage. With dual core the new standard that will change.

"Not So Much Faster" Jibes w/ Previous Apple Spin

[Shuh]

It took Intel until now to come up with something a little more powerful than a G5 that runs cooler than a G5. And they had to go dual-core and next-generation 65-nanometer to do it. This does not reflect well on the x86 architecture. But now that Steve is committed to x86, he seems to have resorted to citing the old tried-and-true PC-fan-boy benchmark, SPEC. Steve really was right about the G5 being faster before. If Intel's latest and greatest dual-core is only 10-15% faster than the single-core G5,

SPEC benchmark hypocrisy

[vijayiyer]

Interesting how all the WinTel fans used to use SPEC benchmarks to bash Macs and the PowerPC processor. Now, in some ironic twist of fate, the same people are using the fact that SPECmarks are fairly useless to say that Apple is lying. The bottom line is that the benchmarks are useless except for people doing specialized tasks. The amount of work you can get done in a day has not changed much unless you do serious rendering work, finite element work, or something similarly CPU intensive.

Thoughts on future models

[feranick]

So the MacIntels using the Core Duo, seem to be faster than the G5, but not by much (at least in real life). From the keynote we learnt that MacBook Pros are also faster than PowerBooks G4. I wonder, in real life, how faster will the successors of the iBooks G4 be, since they will most likely use the Core Solo? I am really curious, since the iBooks G4 uses chips that are not significantly different from the Powerbooks G4. Will the Core Solo be up to the job?

Pro apps on MacBook Pro vs. PowerBook?

[jocknerd]

I'm waiting for a comparison on apps like Photoshop on a MacBook Pro using Rosetta versus running natively on a PowerBook G4. If the MacBook Pro runs Photoshop faster in Rosetta than the G4 can run it, I'll be super impressed and definitely be placing my order.

Dual Cores with MMX Vs Altivec

[wilburpb]

What's interesting about the article is that a lot of the operations should be taking advantage of Altivec on the PPC and whatever the heck intel uses (MMMXXX?) on the Core Duo. The fact that the intel chip was even slightly faster than the almighty altivec on tasks that should be optimized for it bodes exceptionally well.

How much does the extra core help here? Someone needs to fire up CHUD, turn off one of the procs and re-run the benchmarks.

Xcode compiling seem to be rather good...

[shawnce]

From a email [apple.com] to the xcode-users list...

In our tests, a large C++ project finishes a full clean build slightly (a matter of seconds) sooner on a Quad Tower than it does on a Core Duo iMac. So the 2-core Intel is only slightly slower than the 4-core Quad for full builds.

Warning: every project is different, and the dynamics of disk and cache speed and latency, processor saturation, process threading, and system memory will affect your results significantly. But we are very pleased with the IDE and compiler performance on the Intel chip.

...also from a blog entry [gusmueller.com]...

gcc is certainly faster. Subversion compiled in 5 minutes, 16 seconds on my dual 2.7 g5 with 1.5 gigs of ram. It compiles in 4:32 on the 1.83ghz intel mac with 1 gig of ram. Which makes me happy.

MacWorld article one of the worst I've read...

[w4rl5ck]

... for some time.

Really, be serious. They take a dual core - which is much like 2 seperate CPUs - and throw a bunch of non-optimized, single-threaded applications at it.

*NO WONDER* that the CPU does not perform 2-3 times as fast as the PowerPC; one of the two cores can't on his own. Steve never told us that applications will be 2-3 times faster. He just showed some flops. If people still can't understand a benchmark *phew*

In fact, the 10-20% increase in spead is exactly the gain that one would expect who knows that MacOS X usually takes 10-20% system load when doing any transfer task (like memory-to-disk and stuff); so it seems to me that this is what happened with those programs.

Also, the article does not give any suspicions why the architecture performes so bad, no background information about the hardware at all (like, jikes, completly different motherboard architecture, different bus system).

In short: from the technical aspect, bad article.

PLEASE, guys, next time, throw in some common sense and benchmark at least one real multiprocessor optimized program, i.e. Cinema4D rendering.

G4/5 don't suck afterall?

[Johnny Mnemonic]

Wait, I don't get it. Are we making fun of Apple because now it appears that G4/5 CPUs are actually about the same as Intel?

Isn't this what Mac lovers have been saying for the past 10 years, but were laughed out of the room?

Does Intel automatically start sucking, because Apple moves to the the CPU? Does PPC get magically better?

Maybe those Macs that were "1/2 as fast and twice as expensive" for the last few years weren't really so slow or so expensive after all--meaning who's the fool?

Re:G4/5 don't suck afterall?

[WhiteWolf666]

No, sorry.

I'm an Apple fan. I'm a Mac fan. This is being typed on my Powerbook G4.

Yes, the G4s suck. The G5s are significantly better, but not vastly so. The Athlon 64s still waxed the G5s performance wise: http://pcworld.about.com/magazine/2111p026id112749 .htm [about.com]

Not to mention that the G5s run significantly hotter, and you can get an Athlon 64 in a notebook format. Apple still doesn't have a 64-bit notebook.

These dual-core iMacs smoke equivalent G5 iMacs if you are discussing multi-threaded applications. I a

Putting words in Steve's mouth?

[fbg111]

Barry Norton writes "Steve Jobs, at the MacWorld tradeshow, boasted: 'the new iMac [with] Intel processor is two to three times faster than the iMac G5.'

No, that's not what he said, stop twisting his words to set up a straw man you can then revel in knocking down. If you watch Jobs' full keynote presentation [edgesuite.net] you'll see that he specifically compares only processor benchmarks, not system benchmarks. He even made the disclaimer: "Now everything's not gonna run 2 to 3 X faster, you know the disks aren't 2 to 3 X, etc., but on the most important benchmarks, [the Core Duo] is 2 to 3 times faster [than the G5]."

Re:Figures.....

[CatOne]

Obviously, Slashdot is not prepared for the speed of your fingers. Had it been running on a new Mac with a core duo, it could have kept up you would have had first post. Drat!

Re:Yet More Anti-Apple FUD

[argent]

There wouldn't be complaints about the performance if Steve hadn't made a big deal about the performance. Twice as fast as the iMac G5, four times as fast as the Powermac G4. And that actually doesn't sound like an outrageous claim, since it's replacing a single CPU with two CPUs, and OSX has a history of making good use of dual-CPU systems, so it's reasonable to believe it could really be that amazing.

And, well, it doesn't really meet those expectations.

People don't react well when their expectations aren'

Re:Yet More Anti-Apple FUD

[WhiteWolf666]

Similarly, importing 100 photos into iPhoto 6 took 35 percent less time on the Intel-based iMac, and exporting from iPhoto to a QuickTime movie took 25 percent less time. But exporting iPhoto images to a Web page took only 8 percent less time. And exporting those images to files actually took 9 percent more time on the Intel-based Macs.

Few of these tasks are processor bound. They are either bus, network, or harddisk bound.

Furthermore, I'd be curious as to the ability of these new iMacs to do two of these th

Re:SHOCKED

[aztracker1]

You seem to have forgotted the obligatory smiley.. ;)

Time to INVALIDATE the discussion with a quote

[Overly Critical Guy]

From Steve's keynote:

And we've got the numbers which speak for themselves, so let's take a look at them. The iMac G5 and the iMac Core Duo. Let's take a look at SPECmarks. SPEC2000, integer performance, the most important benchmark of computer performance: 10.2 on the iMac G5, 32.6 on the iMac Core Duo. 3.2X. And these are using the best compilers on each: IBM's compilers on the G5, and Intel's compilers on the Core Duo. For floating point, 13.0 on the G5, 27.1 on the Core Duo, for 2.1. So, in the most impo

Re:Comparing single core G5 to dual core x86. WTF?

[level_headed_midwest]

I understand that it is not really a fair fight, but they are directly comparing chips available in that specific model, and to the best of my knowledge, the dual-core G5s did not make it into the iMacs. If Apple wanted to see what chips were the fastest bar none, yeah, then they would put a dual-core G5 vs. a Core Duo.