Apple's G5 Speeds Challenged

An anonymous reader was the first of a seemingly infinite stream of people to submit a URL to an argument that makes the case that the G5 isn't quite what Apple wants you to think of it. The evidence? Apple's own press material. Worth a read.

Think Different

[corebreech (469871)]

...and benchmark different too!

Re:Think Different

[by Anonymous Coward]

And ironically, the problem is that they didn't benchmark differently enough: Apple used GCC to compile SPEC on the P4 and Xeon, as well as on the G5.

While this eliminates one variable from the comparison, it also eliminates a hefty percentage from the SPEC numbers one can get with Intel's compiler.

Re:Think Different

[Horny Smurf (590916)]

it's more fair than you might imagine.

gcc produces inferior code on both platforms. Intel's C compiler kicks the shit out of gcc, and likewise metrowerks C and IBM's C compiler kick the shit out of gcc too.

gcc's x86 backend has had a lot more work than the ppc backend.

It would be interesting to see intel's C on x86 vs IBM's C on PPC. Compare chips and compiler writers with one stone :)

Re:Think Different

[Laglorden (87845)]

If they would have just taken Gcc "out of the box" and benchmarked what you said would have been true. But they heavily optimised gcc by adding G5-specific code (from IBM's compiler? I hope IBM hasn't stolen it from someone else ;) and specific "lax" malloc() routines etc...

Re:Think Different

[PhoenixK7 (244984)]

According to the linked article though, Apple used different optimizations on each platform. Personally I'd like to see both platforms with all optimizations on, compiled with GCC. Not that this really means much anyways, and it does _not_ really simulate "real world" application performance because all you're running is the benchmark on a minimal system install.

Of the benchmarks displayed I'd believe the Photoshop and Mathematica ones to some extent. The emagic comparison seems a little fishy though. The composition on the PC didn't look all that complicated, it shouldn't have sputtered and died the way it did.

That said, I'm sure each of the current leading CPUs shows better performance in one area or another. I'm sure things suited for altivec optimization will be way faster on the G5, and things suited for raw integer performance will be faster on the P4.

In any case, we have a rather fast, 64 bit, UNIX-based machine, that exhibits excellent polished design both software and hardware wise. I for one am lusting after a Dual 2 GHz G5 with at least 1 GB of DDR RAM, and I can't wait to see how it performs with Panther.

Re:Think Different

[guinness_duck (231583)]

I think it's fair to say pretty much every single chip maker does whatever they possibly can to skew their results. It's what happens when we let the marketing droids control corporate policy and direction.

I think it's pretty obvious Apple did that here, but I'll still use my Mac's anyway. No, I am not a Mac zealot who thinks that Intel or Gates, or whoever it is that day is the devil. I have a PC too. I enjoy building them. I just use my Mac for most things because I'm more comfortable with it. Bad marketing won't turn me off from a product - because then I'd never buy anything! Which actually might be a good thing....

I'm shocked, shocked,

[Black Parrot (19622)]

...to find that people would use benchmarketing to make a product look better than it is!

Re:I'm shocked, shocked,

[Surak (18578)]

He probably works for nVidia. :)

eh?

[cfscript (654864)]

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.

translation :

i am too stupid to round up.

Standard Pratice

[ebuck (585470)]

I can vouch for those unfortunate enough to have worked in the grocery industry (and have an idea of what that kind of mechandising entail) but this is hardly insightful. It happens on nearly everything that you buy.

When asking the pricing managers (which work for the chain, not an individual store) they replied that there was a study once done, indicating that there is a psychological tendancy to shy away from certain "maker" numbers as being too big. For example, the masses statistically believed that twenty dollars was too much to pay for item x, but for some reason, nineteen ninety-nine was not too much to pay for the same item. Funny thing is that with the same item, eighteen dollars would again be too much, but seventeen ninety-five wouldn't.

Even if the study is flawed or bogus, it is still being taught in the "front-line" marketing schools, (ie. grocery, drug-store, clothing, etc.) , and so I expect we will see nineteen ninety-five for many many years to come.

Apple's benchmarks

[Pendersempai (625351)]

Apple is always a little sketchy when it comes to speed measurements. I can't count how many questionable run-offs Steve Jobs has demonstrated during his keynotes.

They're always a little suspect. I love Apple as much as anyone, but their talk of the megahertz myth and the amazing clock cycle of the G4/G5 and the biased tests they use are starting to sound a little shrill. Apple needs to admit that their machines aren't as fast as the fastest Intel has to offer. They're much cleaner and much more elegant, though, and that's why they're in the market. That's what they should stress, since it actually attracts customers -- rather than THE NEED FOR SPEED.

Different Benchmarks

[YomikoReadman (678084)]

Well, it certainly isn't the first time that a company has used a benchmark to make a product look better than it is, and it certainly won't be the last time. I think what we should all learn from this is as follows. Don't worry about Statistics, Benchmarks, or any Media Hype. Just go to the store, buy whatever kind of computer you want that floats ur boat, Be it a Mac, Linux Box, Windoze Box, or god forbid, a compaq. Set it up, get broadband internet, and read lots of Slashdot and play Starcraft.

Really smart guy

[T40 Dude (668317)]

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.

Mislead people ??? $2999 IS cheaper than $3000.

Does anyone care anymore?

[91degrees (207121)]

I mean computers are so fast that there's very little that I might want to do at a consumer level that makes a difference. Most applications are responsive on my ancient 500MHz Pentium 3.

The only things that really need speed are things like 3d rendering, video compression and compiling large appllications. 3D rendering in games is influenced by the speed of the graphics card a lot more than the speed of the CPU, so we're left with the long slow scenes. Personally, it makes very little difference to me if a rendering a scene or compressing a video takes 30 minutes rather than 40. If I can kill 30 minutes, I can kill another 10 quite easily.

In the past, I'd have been able to tell you whether I was using a 20MHz or a 25Mhz 386 just by using it. I can hardly detect the difference between a 1.5GHz machine and a 3.0GHz machine without using a benchmark.

In the end, it's just numbers.

The Photoshop and Mathematica benchmarks rock

[putaro (235078)]

I watched the video. (http://stream.apple.akadns.net/ - requires QuickTime). Now, I'm sure there's many ways you could tweak the benchmarks and so forth but the Photoshop and Mathematica benchmarks rocked. The G5 was 2x faster than the Xeon.

I used to get involved doing benchmarking back in the good old days of Whetstone when I worked on supercomputers. Every manufacturer had a different nasty tweak to the compilers that were pulled out only when it was time to do benchmarks for a customer. The mantra then as now was: the best benchmark is the app you want to run (since most buyers of supercomputers write their own apps, porting them for a benchmark was a possibility).

The G5's may not be the hottest thing on the planet but they're close enough to get Apple back in the ball game. Nice systems architecture, nice case and the claim is they're quiet as well. Oh, and don't forget you can put in 8GB of RAM. Now even OS X doesn't need to swap :-)

What about the backplane????

[JWW (79176)]

The 1GHz backplane is the real news. No processor benchmark test really takes into account the total real speed of the system when running applications.

The fast backplane will speed up IO, which is a common bottleneck. 1GHz for a PC backplane is huge. The only machine I had seen a 1GHz backplane in so far is a HP-UX server. It cost wayyy more than $2000 or even $3000.

I really believe that with this new chip alliance with IBM Apple will finally be able to put that "the OS is really cool, but PCs are always faster" stuff behind them.

Yesterday was a good day for apple.

Benchmarks...who cares?

[beavis88 (25983)]

Anyone who's followed the computer industry for more than a couple minutes knows that there are lies, damned lies, and benchmarks.

Go use a machine, for tasks you'd typically perform -- that's the only benchmark that matters.

But if you must assign a number to the size of your virtual phallus, by all means, benchmark away...

Single vs. Dual processor

[MarkedMan (523274)]

The author of the article makes the point that most programs use a single processor unless specifically written for using two, so we should downplay the dual processor results. A good point on the surface but examine it more deeply and it has two flaws:

1) This is Apple's Pro machine and many of the users are in the Graphic Arts, Audio and Film industry. The most siginificant programs in these fields do get optimized for the Mac platform.

2) I don't know about you, but it is normal for me to be doing several things at once on my computer. Listening to music, downloading email, munging video, plus about a hundred background tasks. The OS itself balances these separate tasks between the processors, so there is a very real and significant advantage to the dual processor even if the individual programs don't take advantage.

-I have no Sig yet I must scream...

Interesting Article but...

[MarkedMan (523274)]

there is a bit of a bias there. He complains about Apple tweaking its benchmarks. I have no problem with that. Companies should get blasted for running bogus benchmarks. But then he compares Apple's results to Dell's and AMD's without questioning their tweaks.

Perhaps what he meant to say is: "If we are going to use bogus benchmarks, let's compare them to the bogus ones from the competition."

Please feel free to educate yourselves...

[DAQ42 (210845)]

Go read Jon "Hannibal" Stokes article about the world of benchmarking., over on his site, Ars Technica.

http://arstechnica.com/cpu/2q99/benchmarking-1.h tm l

This will give you at least a basis for understanding why benchmarking is used, and what makes or breaks any given set of results. Also, feel free to argue about anything and everything that is said about these benchmarks, since, apparently, everyone of you is in the benchmarking labs day in and day out, testing systems and looking at the results on a scientific level.

I also think benchmark scores are, quite frankly, marketing bullshit. A processor designer can tweak a program and a compiler any number of ways to increase thier scores. The true test would be to use the SPEC benchmark suite with no flags set on the compiles for either platform. That way you are testing just the base processor, with no SIMD instructions, no disabling of the software prefetch algorhythms, no "cheats" as it were. Then test those same systems with every trick in the book thrown in. Then look at the difference. This will probably give you a better picture of the performance you will see in real world activities.

If you have a machine that absulotely sucks donkey when using no "cheats" and then you see this amazing boost in performance when the "cheats" are enabled, you probably are dealing with a highly optimized and specialized instruction set, which can be either very good for specific applications, but absolutely horrible for programmers who don't have access to, or don't bother to research, the abilities of that processor.

These are the benchmarks I'm interested in most. And it'll be at least late September before we see any of that.

Also, while all this is interesting, in an intelllectual sort of way, what about the actual perfomance gains over the current crop of G4's? Why not take a look at the difference between the SPEC scores of the dual 1.42GHz G4 towers, vs. the dual 2GHz G5's? That alone will tell you more about the increase in speed and power that has been delivered. If Apple had been smart, instead of trying to impress and piss off the x86 sparkheads they should have posted those scores as well, to give a real side by side comparrison between the speed and power of the G5 vs the bottlenecked, processor starving, gimp that is the G4. But that would make too much sense, wouldn't it? And you know marketing is all about confusing your consumer into beleiving that the latest and greatest is really what they want, not some old machine from 3 months ago...

This isn't something I find relevent

[JudgeFurious (455868)]

First off, yesterday we have the day when all the Mac fanatics go overboard. Hey, I'm one of them and I went overboard. Enthusiasm goes right over the top and reality slowly slips away inside the Reality Distortion Field of the great and mighty Jobs. Yesterday was for the Mac users

Today we get the backlash and debunking. I honestly don't know if it's completely true or not but I'm inclined to believe it. I've grown accustomed to the idea that benchmarks and anything else like them (side by side tests of any kind) can't be trusted so this seems to fit.

The only thing that really makes any difference to me personally is how much faster the G5 is than the G4 it's replacing. The rest of it I just don't care about.

I use a Mac for a lot of reasons and flat out speed isn't one of them. It has to be fast enough obviously but it doesn't have to be the fastest and never has had to be the fastest.

I use a Mac because I have found it to be very stable and a pleasure to work and game on. If the benchmarks were rigged then it's a shame. They didn't need to do it and it wasn't worth the risk of negative press IMO.

Re:This isn't something I find relevent

[Junks Jerzey (54586)]

The only thing that really makes any difference to me personally is how much faster the G5 is than the G4 it's replacing. The rest of it I just don't care about.

That's the key. Windows PCs have been beyond the point of general sluggishness for a some time now. I'd say they passed that point when the PII (yes, 2) hit 450-500MHz or so. Past that point, especially with the ridiculous speeds available on even the lowest end Dell, speed has lost most of its meaning except to the hardcore hardware fanboys (and people with specialized, professional needs). OS X is heavier duty than Windows, and the sluggishness is still there on the lower end G4 processors. The G5 finally puts Macs in the realm of not caring, just like PCs.

The big difference, though, is that you have to pay quite the premium price to get a Mac in the "plenty fast enough" range, whereas you can go to dell.com and pick *anything*. In short, the G5 is a toy for the rich until the PPC970 starts showing up in the $1300--with LCD screen--iMac. That will probably happen in January, IMO.

(I just priced a "bottom end" 2.2GHz, 256MB Dell at $658 before a $50 rebate. They also have free shipping--normally about $100--every few weeks.)

Who cares, really?

[scottme (584888)]

A. Benchmarking is a black art, and benchmark results more often than not bear little or no relation to reality (i.e. the actual performance you will get, today, running your particular workload). Talk to anyone who does it for a living and they are the first to admit that.

B. Benchmarks are very rarely impartial. Whoever is footing the not inconsiderable bill for a properly-done benchmark will have a result they want to see, and the benchmarkers can do a lot to make sure they do see it.

C. "Perception is reality" is a well-known saying in marketing. It doesn't actually matter whether the perception is correct. If Joe Sixpack believes he has bought the fastest PC in the world, he will be happy. More so since he most likely has nothing on hand to compare it to.

D. The speed this industry moves at, there will be a faster one along in a month or less, so if you really want something faster, wait for it.

E. All this debating about which is faster is more like masturbating. And "Masturbation, although an inherently pointless way to pass time, is at least enjoyable. Comparing PC performance is equally pointless, but rather less fun. The conventional epithet applied to those who engage in the former to excess is equally applicable to those who persist in the latter."

On the Price Comparison and SMP

[bill_mcgonigle (4333)]

I think the author's a little confused about how well SMP works. He writes

Faster on integer single-processor tasks, which is what most people use most of the time.

This might be true for a tight code loop, but nowadays most every large program is written using threads. With Jaguar Apple did a good job of getting the OS using threads, and if you're running a Cocoa app, at least (I'm not sure of the current state of Carbon), the frameworks handle a good deal of threading for you. I don't think Windows XP is much worse in this regard - SMP offers a noticable improvement in system preformance today. It's very important to remember that applications depend on system performance, of which cpu performance is one important component. It's a fallacy to suggest, however, that system A is faster than system B because of a CPU benchmark. (e.g. if the CPU is memory-starved it doesn't matter how fast its clock is oscillating)

With regard to price, if you're after a high-end system, he represents that the high end of the Dell line comes in at $3680, yet rapidly returns to promoting the idea that a $2000 Dell is equivalent. In an effort to configure up an Intel system comparable to the new high-end Apple PowerMac G5, I ran the Dell configurator. It clocks in at $3939:

Dell Precisionâ Workstation 450 Desktop: Intel® Xeonâ Processor, 3.06GHz, 512K Cache
Intel® Xeonâ Processor, 3.06GHz, 512K Cache
512MB,DDR266 SDRAM Memory,ECC (2 DIMMS)
Keyboard: Enhanced Performance, USB (8 Hot Keys)
No Monitor Option
ATI, FIRE GLâ E1,64MB,2 VGA or 1 VGA and 1 DVI,(dual monitor capable)
120GB 7200RPM IDE Hard Drive with DataBurst Cacheâ
1.44MB FDD,Full-size,no-bezel
Microsoft® Windows® XP Professional with Media using NTFS
USB,Logitech,2 button OPTICAL w/ scroll
56K,v.92 data/fax modem,PCI
4X DVD+RW/+R with Roxio® Easy CD Creator and DVD decode
Sound Blaster® Audigy II with onboard 1394
3Yr Parts + Onsite Labor (Next Business Day)
No Installation
1394 Controller Card

and that's with a lesser video card and a smaller, slower IDE hard drive (add $840 for SCSI, a better comparison with Serial-ATA). I don't think I was being unfair in my selection of components. (OK, add $30 for a USB floppy on the Mac if necessary)

This guy certainly has a point about the non-optimized Intel benchmarks, but he reveals his prejudice by not offering a fair price comparison.

best flame ever

[Fishstick (150821)]

I especially liked the hatemail at the end. This was my favorite:

People that go to ivory league schools that live in trailers are a very low population, lets say 1% so since there are 99% of the people living in houses then you can clearly see that people that live in trailers are stupid, when compared to they're counter parts. Or put it this way, any finite number divided by infinity results in a number so small it does not exists. So any people that live in trailers that go to ivory league school you meet in passing are just figments of your imagination. Point is if you like Macintosh use it, if you don't then well don't use it.

Heh. That sure dispels this guy's critique of Apple's benchmarks, eh?

Re:spl=troll

[A_Non_Moose (413034)]

He MAY have valid points but his credibility is zero.

Ummm...this is /. you know.

Are you new here?

(yeah, yeah, pot, kettle, black)

Re:similar info from a different source

[elwinc (663074)]

Tom Yager, on his infoworld blog [infoworld.com] has similar info:

The test results are invalidated by severely lopsided testing conditions. Among them, Apple used a prototype G5 running its special GNU compiler and an unreleased version of OS X. The Dells used shipping hardware, vanilla GNU compilers and Red Hat 9.

... Dell's published results on the SPEC site--regarded as the definitive repository for SPEC results--are best-case. They're far better than the results cited by Veritest in the Apple report. That bit takes no special knowledge to ferret out.

Thank you, Apple, for a fine lesson in how to lie with statistics.

Re:spl=troll

[Mr_Silver (213637)]

His previous essay made sure to bash Apple for copying the original windows GUI for the Mac(!).

If you're talking about this [haxial.com] (section entitled "Apple Copies Ideas From Microsoft") then you'll find that he admits that Microsoft copies stuff from Apple, but that Apple have copied things from Microsoft too. Which wouldn't seem a too unreasonable claim.

If you're going to claim someone is a troll, the least you could do is give us an example which isn't guaranteed to mislead us.

Re:spl=troll

[IamTheRealMike (537420)]

This is what really gets my goat sometimes. Calling him a "known troll" and saying "his credibility" is zero does not address his points.

Are you going to deny that Apple cheated at the benchmarks by disabling various optimizations on the competition? Are you going to deny that most software uses integer math, as one "software coder" clearly did (hint: i write a lot of software, and integer math practically always dominates)?

The guy may, or may not be a troll. However, the sheer amount hate mail, and the level of it, was stunning. What kind of people write stuff like that? Very few of them even attempted to address the guys points, and those that did made a hash job of it (nobody uses int math? wtf?).

The fact is that anybody outside the Mac community, having read that essay, is going to come away with a bad impression of said community. Nobody deserves to get hate mail like that for pointing out the other side of the statistics.

Re:spl=troll

[Coretti (17558)]

The guy may, or may not be a troll. However, the sheer amount hate mail, and the level of it, was stunning. What kind of people write stuff like that? Very few of them even attempted to address the guys points, and those that did made a hash job of it (nobody uses int math? wtf?)

Did you notice how almost all of the hatemail was addressing him in the third person?

He went onto a discussion board somewhere about the post (probably MacNN, probably one of the worst reputation Mac websites in terms of brainpower) and just cherry picked the comments he could take apart easily.

It's not like he actually *got* that hatemail. He didn't even post an email address with the article.

Isn't it funny how you can bend things to make you look favorable - just like Apple may have done?

Re: whatever

[Black Parrot (19622)]

> They're giving us a desktop UNIX running on 64-bit hardware, what else can you ask for? sheesh

Who wants 64-bit for 64-bit's sake? I want fast, cheap computation. I'd be happy with an 8-bit computer if it gave sufficient bang for the buck.

Re: whatever

[pigeon (909)]

Well.. you can have my 8-bit commodore 64 for free.. so the bang for the buck is infinite..

Quite

[turgid (580780)]

And what's more, when you start running programs that use more than 2GB of data, the 64-bit machine is going to beat the pants off the 32-bit one, since the 32-bit machine (i.e. intel) is going to have to resort to slow and hacky solutions such as segments and paging. The intel may me "faster" but only as long as 32-bit are enough for you. The days of 32-bit machines are numbered, just as they were for 16-bit machines when 32-bit machines started to appear.

Re:Quite

[keiferb (267153)]

And what's more, when you start running programs that use more than 2GB of data

Oh, Please. We all know we'll never ever need more than 640k.

Re:Quite

[splanky (598553)]

32 bit memory addressing is 4GB not 2GB.

Re:Quite

[sirket (60694)]

4 GB is for the OS and application TOGETHER. The stock behaviour on Linux and Windows is to give 2 GB to the OS and 2 GB to the application. You can go as high as 3GB to the application Linux, but there are some serious warnings against going even that high.

-sirket

Re:Quite

[Glonoinha (587375)]

Everquest recommends 512M - and by 'recommends' I mean 'does not run with less than.' Well that isn't entirely true, it is possible to play the Everquest slide show at roughly 1 fps on 128M - but that is akin to playing the original SubLogic Flight Simulator on a C=64.

The days of 512M machines on the desktop are coming, and so are the days of 1G gamer desktops. God only knows what Doom III is going to require.

Re:Quite

[Blondie-Wan (559212)]

Damn straight. My Atari 800 XL has 64k of RAM, and it works just fine (well, it used to, anyway... it's inoperative now, but not because of the RAM). You could use a word processor, a spreadsheet, or even some genuinely kickass games like Lode Runner, Centipede and Miner 2049er on it. Therefore, it's obvious no one needs all these obscene amounts of RAM people have in their comps now. 64k was good enough for me then, and it should be just fine for all these spoiled brats now.

Why, I remember how appalled I was when my friend had an Apple IIgs with 1 MB - 1 megabyte!!! - of RAM, a decade or so ago. What kind of hedonist needs that much? Bah.

These damn kids today, with their gigabytes and their FireWire and their "rock 'n' roll" music and the hair and the clothes...

Re:Quite

[Jucius Maximus (229128)]

"Alright, I've been wondering about this for a while. Exactly what kind of programs, and what programs, have a need for more than 2GB of RAM? (I assume that's what you mean by 'data')"

Obviously you have never run CAE/CAM programs. (That being Computer Aided Engineering / Computer Aided Manufacturing.. I-DEAS, Pro Engineer, SolidWorks, Catia, etc.) This is the hard core stuff that Boeing, Ford and Toyota use that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars for one license. At my university, the undergrads get to use it on P4 machines and the grad students get to use it on 64 bit HP-UX workstations.

Even if you use a fairly simple FEA (finite element analysis) on something, for example finding the levels of stress in some objects you have modelled when it is bent in different ways, or modelling the flow of water or air through some pipe bends, this amount of RAM is very desireable. Basically the program builds and solves a bunch of 2000x2000 matrices for you. Even a simple one like the pipe bend took something like 3 hours on a P4/512MB and there was a multi-GB swap file needed. I was in the lab very late that night. That is where super-large amounts of RAM are necessary.

Re:Quite

[Gaijin42 (317411)]

Database applications dont have the database running on the client machine. They have it running on the oracle cluster or mainframe in the back room. The client side wouldn't need 2G of memory. And nobody in their right mind is going to run their DB server off of a client box.

I would say CAD only pays the bills at an engineering or architecture firm, and I think the best CAD packages are currently for PC. While the new apple box certainly opens the door up to porting to Apple, the lag time before Intel comes out with 64 bit proccessors wont be long enough for significant entrenchmant.

Re:whatever

[jgalun (8930)]

Believe it or not, some of us want both a desktop UNIX on 64 bit hardware AND legitimate benchmarks. I don't see why one excuses the other.

Listen, Apple made a good product because they needed to stay in business. They didn't do it out of the good of their hearts. And their good product in no way changes the fact that I don't appreciate being lied to by corporations.

Don't get me wrong, this is not the world's biggest lie or corporate misdeed. I don't put much faith in benchmarks anyway, and I wouldn't make my decision between a Mac or a PC based on them (although for others the specs might be more important). But it's still sleazy. And it's very unfair to act like it's "ungrateful" or "trollish" to demand that Apple set up legitimate benchmarking tests.

Re:whatever

[BWJones (18351)]

I had a desktop UNIX (Solaris) running on my desktop 64-bit hardware (Sun Blade 100) a couple of years ago.

Yeah, me too. But unlike the Mac, I could not run Office, Photoshop, function as a web server, surf the web, compile code, run bioinformatics searches, do molecular modeling and have wonderful text aliasing all at the same time. Now with OS X, I can do all this and network seemlessly with Wintel and UNIX machines while maintaining my sanity by only having one software library to keep up with and have one system on my desk instead of three. Oh, and when I am on the road (like now on the other side of the country), I can take all of this with me by using a Powerbook.

No other company has been able to give me these tools, and for that.....I have to say, "Thank you Apple Computer".

Re:whatever

[nehril (115874)]

this guy may have some points but he is whacked out:

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.


Next crackpot, please.

Re:Benchmarking Across Platforms

[MaestroSartori (146297)]

I was going to mod you down, but...

Apple has deliberately turned off processor features on the other platforms that would have led to their 'fastest in the world' claim being untrue. That's the point of the article. Cross-platform benchmarking IS hard, but deliberately crippling what you benchmark against in order to look better makes it seem that your software/hardware/whatever just isn't as good as what you're comparing it to...

Re:Benchmarking Across Platforms

[rob colonna (72681)]

While the article linked does indeed make it look somewhat shady, it's worth pointing out that a major weakness of his argument is that he implies (credibly) that this lab test commissioned by Apple is not trustworthy, and then compares it with tests by Dell and Intel, which he seems to present as implicitly true. How do we know that's the case? If Apple did indeed gain anything by mucking about with the configurations (and it sounds like they did), who's to say that they did anything more than offset similar mucking about on the other side of the fence?

Re:Benchmarking Across Platforms

[adamofgreyskull (640712)]

The G5 benches were provided by Apple, they optimised it as much as they could.
The Dell/Intel benches were provided by Dell/Intel, they optimised them as much as they could.
However, what he didn't include was benchmarks for a G5 which had been crippled by Dell and Intel..

I usually hate analogies, but sometimes it's my only way of getting my point across:
If Ford tweaks their engines and suspension set up before a test. OK!
If Nissan tweaks their engines and suspension set up before a test. OK!
If Nissan tweaks their engines and suspension set up, and pours sugar in the Ford's "gas" tank before the test. NOT OK!

Re:Benchmarking Across Platforms

[jeffasselin (566598)]

Apple has deliberately turned off processor features on the other platforms that would have led to their 'fastest in the world' claim being untrue. That's the point of the article. Cross-platform benchmarking IS hard, but deliberately crippling what you benchmark against in order to look better makes it seem that your software/hardware/whatever just isn't as good as what you're comparing it to...

OK, I mostly skimmed the article, but he's among other things complaining that they turned off SSE2. May I mention that from what I could gather, the benchmarks used on the Apple platforms had NO Altivec optimisation? With that in mind it seems that disabling SSE2 was simply done to level the field. If there had been Altivec optimisations, then for comparison's sake it would make much better sense to use Altivec and SSE2. Actually, they might have chosen to disable SSE too, but they didn't!

The other feature he's complaining about is the disabling of hyperthreading. From other benchmarks I've seen before, hyperthreading in SMP systems usually results in equal or slower performance, or at most a 10% addition in certain benchmarks. It was probably better to leave it off.

Finally, about the discrepancy between Veritest's/Dell's/Intel's benchmarks, this is to be expected. Veritest compiled the benchmarks with GCC 3.3, and certainly used different compiling options and different testing options than Dell used. Unless you use the same options and methodology on every test, comparing benchmarks is useless.

I'm not saying Veritest and Apple didn't do their best to look good, of course they did! But at least you have to give them credit for going with an independent firm with a full report (where everything is laid out), instead of absurd and evidently fabricated application benchmarks like they've done in the past.

As another poster mentioned, benchmarking is HARD, and harder across platforms, especially on a new CPU platform with no optimizations and no way to use some of the CPU features. When we get a benchmark version that allows for full use of al the features of the 970 (G5) and the x86 CPUs, then we might get a clearer picture. It also doesn't remove the fact that these machines are MUCH, MUCH better than the G4s, or that Apple also promised the processor would scale to at least 3GHz within a year.

Oh of course one of his arguments about his righteousness is "Look at all these Mac fanatics who flame me". He's not much better than them, from what I can see. One fanatic from one camp doesn't make all of them fanatics, and doesn't validate his points one iota (neither does flaming him destroy his points, which is why intelligent rebuttal would be better, but I have the feeling he would most likely not publish that).

Re:Benchmarking Across Platforms

[FrenZon (65408)]

Does anybody have any numbers for any other programs other than Photoshop? At least some fps in Quake 3?

You mean like the G5 Quake3 benchmarks on this page [apple.com]?

Re:Benchmarking Across Platforms

[duffbeer703 (177751)]

I've never used a Mac... but I disagree that it wouldn't meet your needs.

I'm running 1.3Ghz Athlon at home and a 1.2Ghz dell laptop at work. These machines are obsolescent by today's marketing standards.

With the exception of Sim City 4000 (which is a fundamentally slow program) I've never had any kind of chronic performance problem.

The organziation where I work has over 75,000 PCs and about 2,500 servers. 75% of these are 700Mhz or less and about 40% are 350-500Mhz. The only performance problems we run into are network problems... nobody has complained about a slow PC in years.

Re:Flaming

[Sheetrock (152993)]

That is a little wierd, although not wholly surprising. It's kind of a variant of the little man syndrome, where folks who adopt a platform not in the mainstream have to justify themselves either via inflated specs in some obscure area or, failing that, vitriol.

It seems to me that if somebody wanted to use an inferior product, the first thing they'd do is develop a thick skin and at a minimum ignore the criticism being lobbed at their platform of choice. That, or choose to adopt something that seems to work better for the majority so that they don't have to feel left out all the time; obviously when you get to the point of chewing out people who are trying to show you why your choice is flawed it's become a popularity contest for you already (competing, not computing).