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OS X Businesses Operating Systems Apple Hardware

Comparative G5/G4 Tests 102

Posted by timothy from the and-statistics dept.
rocketjam writes "Barefeats.com has posted test results comparing a 2GHz G5 MP, 1.8GHz G5, 1.6GHz G5 and G4 MP's at 1.4GHz, 1.25GHz and 1GHz. They use Photoshop, Cinebench 2003 and a Bryce 5 render for tests. Bottom line is the G5 2GHz MP has the best bang for your buck, but you might think twice about trading in that dual processor G4 for a solo G5...the G4s hold their own quite well. They also say tests in Panther yielded significant increases in the G5 scores."
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Comparative G5/G4 Tests More

Comparative G5/G4 Tests

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  • Hmm. Not much of a review. (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Seems more like promotional material for Apple. Consider their analysis of performance improvement when discussing OX X 10.3:

    We ran Xbench 1.1 on a G5 1.8GHz with 10.3 beta build 7B49. Compared to 10.2.7 "Jaguar"....
    ....CPU score increased 40%
    ....Thread score increased 44%
    ....Memory score increased 38%

    Hmm. I guess that Apple users aren't too discriminating when it comes to stats or methodological testing descriptions in a review! (Perhaps, though, with Anandtech and Tom's Hardware, we're jus

    • Re:Hmm. Not much of a review. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by BigBir3d ( 454486 ) on Tuesday September 02, 2003 @09:28AM (#6849652) Journal
      BareFeats is meant to give a quick initial impression of what is going on. Some of his tests are supposedly done in a store with display model machines.

      In general though, testing procedures for Macs is nothing like it is for PC's. Too bad Anandtech and others wouldn't put some focus on Mac's from time to time. *shrug*

    • Re:Hmm. Not much of a review. (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Alan Partridge ( 516639 ) on Tuesday September 02, 2003 @11:05AM (#6850345) Journal
      Barefeats is a "real world" benchmarking site. No benchmarking is TRULY scientific, and Rob at Barefeats hardly pretends to be. Still, the benchmarks that he posts give a good general indication of the performance you can expect.

      The G5 is NOT going to excel at Altivec optimised code, the G4 will remain the Altivec champ until IBM puts the kind of Altivec resources onto the 970 that Moto put onto the 745x series. For most other stuff, the G5 will wipe the floor with the G3 and G4 chips.

      • Re:Hmm. Not much of a review. (Score:5, Informative)

        by Toraz Chryx ( 467835 ) <jamesboswell@btopenworld.com> on Tuesday September 02, 2003 @12:18PM (#6850940) Homepage
        g{The G5 is NOT going to excel at Altivec optimised code, the G4 will remain the Altivec champ until IBM puts the kind of Altivec resources onto the 970 that Moto put onto the 745x series}g

        That's not strictly true, the problem is that altivec that's optimal for the 745x chips is worst case for the 970, since best case on the 745x makes heavy use of the vec_dst (prefetch) instruction, which is handled serially on the 970 and hence stalls the Altivec hardware.

        also the G5 is a lot less likely to run into bandwidth bottlenecks with altivec code on large datasets.
        • The vec-dst issue is one problem, but just review the G4e article at arstechnica and have a look at the G4e's Altivec execution unit design - it's a generation ahead of that in the PPC 970 (which is approximate in execution resources to the Altivec unit of the MPC 7400 - albeit running at 2-4 times the 7410's clock rate!)
          • Having listened in to a few programmers discussing that, it seems that it's pretty much only RC5 that actually manages to make full use of the Altivec unit in the 745x series chips anyway, and the benches I've seen that _haven't_ been littered with vec_dst show that the 970 scales in a fairly linear fashion over the G4 as far as altivec code codes (except it also maintains that scaling on larger datasets, since its got a fast memory subsystem, rather than a slow memory subsystem with a fast L3)
        • This doesn't quite sound right. While the Altivec unit is closer in nature to the old G4 rather than the G4e it also has the significant bandwidth benefits of the G5 that the G4s were massively limited by.

          If you read Hannibal's appendium to his 970 articles he points out that the Altivec looks better than he initially thought. This isn't to say there isn't room for improvement. But to say that the G4 is the Altivec champ seems somewhat incorrect.

          Hannibal's Followup [arstechnica.com]

          It is true that with G4 altive

      • Re:Hmm. Not much of a review. (Score:5, Informative)

        by Llywelyn ( 531070 ) on Tuesday September 02, 2003 @04:29PM (#6853272) Homepage
        "The G5 is NOT going to excel at Altivec optimised code, the G4 will remain the Altivec champ until IBM puts the kind of Altivec resources onto the 970 that Moto put onto the 745x series. "

        Another poster has already mentioned the execution sterilization that occurs thanks to optimizations that worked quite well in the G4 (vec_dst et al), but there is another point on this issue that needs to be mentioned.

        Even if the G5 performs slightly slower than the G4e with AltiVec enhanced code on an individual, it has the potential to be much much faster overall simply due to the architecture. One of the main problems with AltiVec on the G4e currently is that many of the apps that take advantage of it are /bandwidth limited/. The architecture that the G5 is based on is radically faster when it comes to things like loading from main memory or making optimal use of both processors.

    • re: hmmm. (Score:5, Funny)

      by Gizzmonic ( 412910 ) on Tuesday September 02, 2003 @11:35AM (#6850578) Homepage Journal
      (Perhaps, though, with Anandtech and Tom's Hardware, we're just spoiled.)

      Did you just imply that Anandtech and Tom's hardware are valid places to go to learn about PC hardware? LMAO. For the uninitiated, here's a quick rundown of every Tom's hardware and anandtech page.

      Motherboard X just came in. It's Company X's newest board, poised to grab the speed crown from Company's Y. Can it do it? Read on! (click banner ad.)

      Next Page: Here is a blue line that represents motherboard X. You can see that it barely outdistances Y in this key test, as shown by the shorter line. But what about this other test? (click through for more huge banner ads.)

      (click through for more huge banner ads.)

      (click through for more huge banner ads.)

      (click through for more huge banner ads.)

      (click through for more huge banner ads.)

      Conclusion: Boy, Motherboard X sure is fast! I can't wait to get my hands on one again, and I'll surely pay a premium for such speed. There may be banner ad for a company selling this motherboard RIGHT ON THIS VERY PAGE! I know what I'd do, if I wanted to be l33t, and you want to be l33t, don't you?

      (click through for more huge banner ads.)
      Next week: Will the red line finally beat the blue line in our extensive test suite?

  • Not hard to do (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Hythlodaeus ( 411441 ) on Tuesday September 02, 2003 @08:57AM (#6849432)
    It's not a very difficult feat to get more performance per dollar than the G4 - it was already abyssmal in that regard. When the G4 was introduced the prices made sense, but they just kept on charging the moon while G4 improved only marginally compared to the P4 improving by leaps and bounds.

    • Re:Not hard to do (Score:5, Interesting)

      by capmilk ( 604826 ) on Tuesday September 02, 2003 @11:57AM (#6850782)
      Nowadays a dual 1.25 GHz G4 starts at 1600 Eur in Europe. (That's roughly the same in US$.) A single G5 starts at 1800 Eur. Since I am about to replace my G4/400, there a couple of things I thought about:
      The G4 is cheaper.
      The G4 does multiprocessing for the price.
      The G4 is able to boot OS 9. The G5 isn't.
      The G4 is compatible with my low voltage PCI cards. The G5 isn't.
      The G4 is available today. The G5 isn't.
      The G4 ist a pleasure to look at. The G5 isn't.

      Why on earth should I choose a G5 over a dual G4?

      • Re:Not hard to do (Score:4, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 02, 2003 @12:25PM (#6850994)
        Why on earth should I choose a G5 over a dual G4?

        The G5 is faster.

        The G5 accommodates four times the RAM (roughly), and the RAM is considerably faster.

        The G5 has AGP 8x.

        The G5 has USB 2.0.

        The G5 has FireWire 800. (The last generation G4 did, but the generation currently being sold by Apple is next-to-last and so does not.)

        The G5 has Airport Extreme. (Ditto.)

        The G5 has Bluetooth. (Ditto.)

        The G5 has internal serial ATA.

        The G5 has digital audio I/O.

        The G5 is considerably quieter.

        If none of that stuff matters to you, get the G4. If it matters, get the G5. This isn't a clear-cut case of "G5 better than G4 in every way." But neither is it even remotely a case of "no reason to buy G5."
        • You can grate cheese with the G5, but not the G4... :^)

          (I suppose you could grate cheese with the fan on the back of the G4, but that would get messy real quick!)
          • I suppose you could grate cheese with the fan on the back of the G4, but that would get messy real quick

            And grinding a hunk of cheese against the front of a G5 isn't going to get messy? There's all kinds of fans and shit behind that apparent cheese-grater front, and you know that they'll be picking up bits of half shredded cheese and spraying it all over the RAM and the heat sink and melting all over everything.

            Nooo, grating cheese on a G5 would be much messier than grating cheese on a G4.

          • Sure you can. Open the case of a Mirror Door, and most of the metal on the inside is cheese grater-like. Sliced up a finger removing a hard drive when we first got the box in.
          • That joke is both old and inaccurate. To grate cheese, you need a piece of metal with a bunch of raised holes. The face of the G5 does not resemble a cheese grater. It's flat. You would have more luck shredding your cheese with the heatsink from your P4.

            I think it looks a lot more like an unrolled surface from a micro-screen electric razor.

        • PCI-X (one other thing) (Score:4, Informative)

          by Llywelyn ( 531070 ) on Tuesday September 02, 2003 @04:32PM (#6853312) Homepage
          The G5 supports PCI-X.

        • Re:Not hard to do (Score:3, Insightful)

          by Anonymous Coward
          You forgot yet another one.

          It doesn't run OS 9, however it does run Classic, and from a security standpoint OS 9 is a problem, and most Mac viruses are written for OS 9.

          Unless you have a specific application that you must be running in OS 9 and that is unable to run in Classic mode on OS X, or specific legacy hardware that is not supported in OS X (or by the new G5) From a long term viability standpoint the G5 will be a better alternative.

          (unless of course you must run VPC 6.1 or earlier on the mac which

        • Re:Not hard to do (Score:2, Insightful)

          by HTH NE1 ( 675604 )
          The G4 has twice as many internal storage bays.

          Though I'd love to have digital audio I/O, for video editing more internal drive bays is winning out. And that I have a sizeable investment in non-serial ATA drives and the video data upon them.

          Add to that that I still can't find any external Firewire drive enclosures with large (>137 GB, >128 GiB) drive support (existence so far is only rumored, not substantiated).
          • Well, FW enclosures do support large drives as this drive shows from Western Digital. So I would assume that some where there is a enclosure that does the same. This is a link to the 250 GB FW/USB drive from Western Digital. I want one ;)
            http://www.westerndigital.com/en/products/comb o250 gbse.asp

          • Re:Not hard to do (Score:3, Informative)

            by gklinger ( 571901 )
            Perhaps I'm missing something here. If you're talking about buying a Firewire enclosure and dropping in a > 137GB drive and having it work, I can assure you such a feat is possible. Just make sure you get a case with an Oxford 911 FireWire Bridge [lowendmac.com]. I have used a variety of different cases with that chipset and a variety of different hard disks and I've yet to find one that didn't work. I have a Kingwin KM-H31-C1-01 [kingwin.com] that works flawlessly and it looks great too. It's aluminum so it matches the Powerbooks ni
            • Maybe it's just the manufacturers that don't realize that this is an issue for the end user. Packaging and websites seem to leave out whether or not the full capacity of large drives is supported. Even the cited Kingwin enclosure's website is silent on the point.

              Seems the only way to be sure is to get an enclosure that already contains a large drive, buy from a place that accepts returns, or trust the experiences of strangers. And I'm having to resort to the lattermost.

          • Re:Not hard to do (Score:2, Interesting)

            by oggmonster ( 701561 )
            Umm... I am writing this on a machine booted from a 180GB drive sitting in an external case. It is currently connected to my PowerBook with Firewire 400 but the case also supports Firewire 800 and USB 2. All the better to connect to my Dual G5 when it ships.
      • The G4 is compatible with my low voltage PCI cards. The G5 isn't.

        Can you please provide your reference for this claim? I find this quite hard to believe. Maybe you meant 'high' and not 'low'?
        • Sorry, I *did* mean 'high'. Here's some information I found:

          "5 V keyed or signalling cards do not work in the Power Mac G5 computer". Basically, many existing PCI cards will not fit the PCI connectors of the Power Macintosh G5. You will have to buy an external PCI chassis if you want to use these cards (and the DC30 series cards) with a G5. According to Apple, this applies to all G5 computers; according to other sources, it applies only to the 1.8 and 2 GHz, while the 1.6 GHz has no limitations in acceptin
          • Sorry, I *did* mean 'high'. Here's some information I found:

            Yeah, it looks like their PCI-X slots are 3.3V only. Not a big surprise. Still, I'm looking at my Big Pile O PCI Cards and very few of them are keyed for 5V only. The ones that are 5V-only aren't the kind of thing that I would put into a $2K machine (do I really want to put a RealTek 10BaseT card in there? Or a Mylex DAC960 UltraWide RAID? Ugh!). YMMV.
            • The ones that are 5V-only aren't the kind of thing that I would put into a $2K machine

              I really want to keep my miroMotion DC30plus frame grabber. That thing once cost a fortune... *sigh*

      • Re:Not hard to do (Score:2, Insightful)

        by Pope ( 17780 )
        Well, you could just updgrade the processor on your current G4 and wait until the next revision of G5 comes out.
      • Where do you get this price? On apple store the dual G5 costs 3246 while the dual g4 is 3625. The G5 seems less expensive. A good reason to buy one I think.

    • Re:Not hard to do (Score:1, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Translation: I'm too poor / shortsighted to buy a mac, but I'll whine about it!

  • bryce render test??? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by tolldog ( 1571 ) on Tuesday September 02, 2003 @09:10AM (#6849517) Homepage Journal
    Why didn't they use a real 3d package and do render tests in Maya.

    And I find it hard to believe that a 20 second render test will show much insight into a machines speed.

    Why not go with a more realistic scene render that would take a couple hours??
    • Testing using a specific program is iffy at best. With many programs writen for the PC (or the other way around) the mac version is a poor copy.

      Photoshop is one example. The code is optimized for the mac. My friends P4 2.8ghz is only a little faster than my G4 733. Apple took advantage of this for years and had test results based on photoshop.

      Complex software is not a good way to test different platorms because the code and therefor performance is different.
      • Maya was originially written for Irix [alias.com] not Windows.

        I would imagine the code base for Maya (if it hasn't changed significantly since 1.x) was easier to move to Linux and OS X than the initial Windows port.

      • Old Myth (Score:5, Informative)

        by Llywelyn ( 531070 ) on Tuesday September 02, 2003 @04:13PM (#6853074) Homepage
        ". The code is optimized for the mac. My friends P4 2.8ghz is only a little faster than my G4 733. Apple took advantage of this for years and had test results based on photoshop."

        Your working with outdated information--by about 7 years.

        The code is optimized for both platforms very heavily. A large portion of Photoshop's userbase is on Wintel machines and they were also paid (by Intel) awhile back to optimize their filters for Intel processors. Presumably they care about performance and keep both versions highly optimized. Saying that it is "more highly" optimized for the Mac is a fallacy--it hasn't even had more time to become optimized for the Mac, due to processor changes. The optimizations for the G3 and G4 are /somewhat/ different than those for prior PowerPC processors and the optimizations that took place for the G4 (such as using vec_dst in the AltiVec optimized portions of the code) actually work against the G5.

        I also heard a rumor, though I am not sure that it is true, that Photoshop would offload its interface to the graphics card for display on its own and that, with the introduction of QE, Photoshop was effectively rendering its display elements twice. This may be completely unsubstantiated though :-)

        While in general your point is good--that apps which are highly optimized for one platform are not necessarily highly optimized for another--Photoshop is a bad example.
  • That article was about as strong as the average /.ers arm. I'm all about the new hardware, but it must be a REAL slow news day when dribble like that get's posted.

  • What about Panther gains for the G4s? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Equuleus42 ( 723 ) on Tuesday September 02, 2003 @09:33AM (#6849692) Homepage
    The article says there are pretty hefty performance gains from upgrading to Panther on a G5, but unless we know how much Panther benefits a G4 as well, it is hard to say what plan of action is best. You can get a Powermac G4 Dual 1.25 GHz for $1599 (went to store.apple.com, clicked on single 1.25 model, and added a second processor), and it looks like it gives you performance that equals or rivals the single G5s (based on the benchmarks given, with all systems running Jaguar)... I think it may be best to wait until Panther arrives before making any purchasing decisions based on these kinds of benchmarks.
    • I don't know if they'll actually ship that machine.

      But MacWarehouse, as of last week, had about 20 of them left at under $1,700. My company bought one for me. It's a great machine, and the bang per buck is unbeatable.

      I'm getting a G5 for my home, but that's because I do heavy video editing and effects, which should benefit a LOT from the faster system.

      But for most things the dual G4's still a great system, especially at that price.

      D

      • Re:What about Panther gains for the G4s? (Score:4, Insightful)

        by dthable ( 163749 ) on Tuesday September 02, 2003 @10:26AM (#6850074) Journal
        I'm getting a G5 for my home, but that's because I do heavy video editing and effects, which should benefit a LOT from the faster system.

        I'd be more excited about the increased memory capacity. Last time I did any clip manipulation on my Powerbook, the swap time was my real killer.
      • I'm getting a G5 for my home, but that's because I do heavy video editing and effects, which should benefit a LOT from the faster system.

        And you're not concerned with the 50% reduction in internal drive bays as compared to the G4? I already have 650 GB shoehorned into my Blue & White G3 for video (upgraded to a G4 processor), and that's not counting the boot drive. The G5 only has two hard drive bays and one optical drive bay compared to the four and two in the G4.
        • This is true, and a Bad Thing, and I make no excuses for it at all.

          At the same time, it's either take the speed increases and live with the lower drive count, or don't take the speed increases. And remember, FireWire 800 should finally be fast enough for video editing, especially on a separate bus from the output device.

          I could get whatever case I wanted if I switched to the PC world, but then I would have to deal with tiresome Windows problems, and I wouldn't get to use Final Cut Pro, still the best vid
      • They still build and ship G4s. I got a custom-built tower (basically took the low-end 1.25 Ghz model and added dual processors, without any other changes) just a week ago.
    • that would be interesting to know.

      a few rumor sites and mailing lists have reported (hrmmm) that in their personal unofficial tests they thought 10.3 beta was showing the biggest speed increases in CRT iMacs and the older G4 and G3 machines. granted they did not have G5s to test on, but they loaded their beta versions of 10.3 on everything from zippy G4 towers to laptops to CRT iMacs and said they felt the iMacs speed increase felt the greatest. i am curious to try it in my G4 tower (400mghz with a recentl

  • caveats about these tests (Score:5, Informative)

    by hype7 ( 239530 ) <u3295110&anu,edu,au> on Tuesday September 02, 2003 @09:34AM (#6849694) Journal
    there's a lot of performance to be sucked out of the G5s yet.

    A lot of programs are yet to be at all tweaked for the G5s. There are a couple of new processor functions (hardware square root for instance) that may bring big gains. Also, there are old functions from the G4 that slow down the G5. Check out Apple's G5 performance primer [apple.com]. I read that the changes are enough to make the guy who made the mac rc5 engine want to re-write it for the G5 (no simple tweaks). He was hoping to get by with just some minor tinkering, but the chip does require a lot more than that to take advantage of it's potential.

    Let me take another example; regarding CineBench.
    http://www.postforum.com/forums/read.php?f=6&i=874 58&t=87424 [postforum.com]

    In that post, a guy called Richard from the Maxon development labs says this:
    "OK, some news directly from the MAXON development lab:


    Of course all the following numbers are not final, no promise at all !!!!!!!

    This is based on the information we have right, now, there is still a of of work to do and we still have to wait for a new compiler...

    With the current CineBench a single G5 1.8GHz scores at about 188, the optimized version will maybe score at about 238...

    A hypothetical single G5 2.0GHz could score at about 210 on the old CB, optimized could be 265...

    A dual G5 2.0 could maybe score at about 480 with the optimized version of CB....

    Depending on the new compilers and our findings (thanks a lot to Apple for being extremely helpful and cooperative) we might even crack the 500 score for the dual G5 2GHz...

    Again, no promise and of course no release date ;)

    Cheers, Richard"


    This compares to a 1.8ghz G5 score that I've seen of 188. Which means they're aiming to get a fair bit out of optimisation for the chip. Just as a means of further comparison...
    http://www.imashination.com/bench.h tml

    You'll see the top score these people have recorded is for a dual Xeon 2.4ghz - with a score of 502. If the G5s make it up to over 500, that says a lot about the chip.

    Finally, you've also got to include a mention of the compilers. Whilst some optimisation has been made to GCC, the GCC guys rejected a whole heap of improvements for the G5 because they were too platform specific. There's a good thread over at Ars Technica [infopop.net] that discusses some pretty big gains when using the IBM XLC compiler. Other Mac-specific compilers should yield some pretty awesome gains too.

    So, in summary - take these scores with a grain of salt. They're just the beginning.

    -- james
    • What's the price comparison between the G5 and dual Xeon?

      Okay, I'm not going to be lazy. I went to Dell.com and configured a 2.4ghz Dual Xeon with Windows XP, 512mb RAM, a DVD drive and a modem. This is roughly the same configuration offered by the G5.

      Price is $2,801.

      So the Mac is about $200 more than a system with about the same performance once the Mac is optimized.

      It's not going to convince me to use Windows (ugh!), but it's not as good as we were hoping either.

      D
      • I have a Dual G4, thought I was getting ripped off, 5 months later and they announce the G5's as G4 crushers. Glad to know that it isnt true. I would of really felt bad if the the Single G5 CPU's crushed the dual 1.42ghz. Quickest drop in price I've had on computer hardware in some time. Also my first Apple purchase. DOH!

        BTW, Tiger Direct [tigerdirect.com] has Dual 2.4ghz Xeons for 1600 bux.

      • Re:caveats about these tests (Score:4, Insightful)

        by Equuleus42 ( 723 ) on Tuesday September 02, 2003 @11:35AM (#6850575) Homepage
        The G5 has a DVD-R drive, which appears to account for that $200 price difference... Moral of the story: Get what you want, and be happy. :^)

      • Re:caveats about these tests (Score:5, Interesting)

        by King Babar ( 19862 ) on Tuesday September 02, 2003 @03:15PM (#6852554) Homepage
        Okay, I'm not going to be lazy. I went to Dell.com and configured a 2.4ghz Dual Xeon with Windows XP, 512mb RAM, a DVD drive and a modem. This is roughly the same configuration offered by the G5.

        Price is $2,801.

        So the Mac is about $200 more than a system with about the same performance once the Mac is optimized.

        OK, so I am even less lazy, and I disbelieve. I did what you said you did, and my dual-Xeon Precision 650 with a USB mouse, USB keyboard, dual-monitor DVI capable video card 120 GB IDE drive (largest IDE drive there; Serial ATA is not an option and the SCSI drive prices gave me the giggles) and DVD-RW/CD-ROM 48X (hope it's writable) drive and no Dell support (to equal the Apple G5) would cost me a total of $3054.10.

        Now, I was too lazy to find out if the Dell had gigE ethernet like the Mac, but this is a closer comparison *IF* you are right about the fact that an optimized dual 2 GHz G5 is only equivalent to a 2.4 GHz dual Xeon. If it actually turns out to be anywhere close to a 3.0 GHz dual Xeon, we can stop having this conversation right now, since that box starts at over $4000. Myself, I'm guessing the truth is somewhere in between.

        So that makes the G5 about the same performance as a Dell that might run anwhere between $0 and $500 more. "Priced very attractively" is how I would have to put this. Likely not attractively enough to get *many* Windows shops to switch (based on hardware cost and software legacy alone anyway), but attractive enough to keep market share and probably then some.

      • Okay, I'm not going to be lazy. I went to Dell.com and configured a 2.4ghz Dual Xeon with Windows XP, 512mb RAM, a DVD drive and a modem. This is roughly the same configuration offered by the G5.

        Great, except Apple's real-world app tests show the dual G5 spanking Dell's dual 3.06GHz Xeon rig, which when comparably configured (at the time, though it probably hasn't gotten much cheaper since) cost $3772. [slashdot.org] So how is your dual 2.4GHz Xeon going to be "about the same performance" when the faster dual 3.06 Xeo
        • See the original article; it was saying that the new dual G5s would get a cinebench score of 500, about the same as the current score of the 2.4ghz models.

          We'll just have to wait and see for something more real-worldish.

          D

  • Comparing Apples and... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by gklinger ( 571901 ) on Tuesday September 02, 2003 @09:44AM (#6849767)
    That was brief. Not much information beyond what's mentioned here (serves me right for reading the actual article before posting). At any rate, I wonder why they didn't include a single CPU G4 as a baseline? Comparing dual and single CPU machines produces skewed results.

    It looks like the Dual G5 2GHz has the best bang for the buck.

    Yeah, it's a big bang but it's also a heck of a lot of bucks and I'm not yet convinced it's worth it. Of course, if (or more likely, when) Apple discontinues the G4-based Powermacs, we won't have a choice.

  • This is nothing new... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by VoyagerRadio ( 669156 ) <harold.johnson@gmail.com> on Tuesday September 02, 2003 @11:04AM (#6850326) Journal
    Whenever a new generation of Mac systems comes out, the faster of the oldest systems beats the slowest of the newer systems. The G4's don't need to be traded in for quite some time.

  • real world benchmark (Score:3, Funny)

    by dotgpb ( 161780 ) on Tuesday September 02, 2003 @11:33AM (#6850555)
    I just want to know if the dual 2GHz is actually fast enough to play a decent sized city in SimCity 4 running at 1920x1200.

    • Re:real world benchmark (Score:3, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Nope. Alas, no amount of hardware oomph can make up for shitty, shitty programming.

  • Sure, the G5 is cool... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Goo.cc ( 687626 ) * on Tuesday September 02, 2003 @12:22PM (#6850967)
    but will it make the Internet faster, like Intel's P4 does?
    • No, because it's only got 64bits, whereas my Internet has 12Mbits, so it will probably make it slower. ;-)
    • Sorry, it was the Pentium 3 that "turbocharged your internet experience." The Pentium 4 does something with blue guys, or something.
      • Sorry, it was the Pentium 3 that "turbocharged your internet experience." The Pentium 4 does something with blue guys, or something.

        I thought the blue guys had something to with wearing gay butterfly outfits and invading New York. Wasn't that some new scenario proposed by the Dept. of Homeland Defense?

        -T

  • I think the tests bode quite well... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by ZackSchil ( 560462 ) on Tuesday September 02, 2003 @02:37PM (#6852216)
    ...for the G5. Adobe Photoshop has been specially coded to take every possible advantage of the G4's architecture. I wouldn't be surprised if the program held back information and bits of commands in order to keep the standard 133MHz bus clear and chugging along with data as fast as possible. Just imagine the sort of speeds we'll get when Adobe really unleashes the beast and allows the program to entirely saturate two 1GHz busses with information and optimizes the code for the G5.

    Pile that all on top of the speed increases seen under Mac OS 10.3 and you'll get a box that absolutely screams for Photoshop work (let alone anything else). With the tests performed today at bare feats, we can see that the G5 can beat the G4 at it's own game, let's see what the G5's game looks like.

  • non-optimised software (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Ffakr ( 468921 ) on Tuesday September 02, 2003 @02:46PM (#6852304) Homepage
    I mailed the barefeats guy but haven't heard back yet...

    The photoshop tests indicate version 7.0, while Adobe has posted some optimised libraries and plugins for 7.0.1 that supposedly speed up some functions considerably.

    I haven't heard back as to whether the author actually used 7.0.[0] or the slightly optimised 7.0.1.

    so far, I'm pretty happy with the reported G5 performance considering how different the architecture is to the G4.
    Apple's in a very odd position for a Computer Company right now. Instead of releasing increasingly bloated software that runs ever slower, requiring ever faster hardware... their hardware is getting faster and the software is speeding up. i'm running Panther now and it is noticeably faster at many tasks. :-) The same seems to be the case for the G5 in general... it's only going to get faster.
    • You are right about Apple being in an odd position at the moment, But it's only odd compaired to everyone else. They've been in this position for some time. The original PPC conversion from 68k was very similar. You had a very fast CPU in your box, but everything was getting emulated/interpreted on the fly and it was still faster than it was before, over the next 2 years things continued to improve. Again this happened with Dual proccessors, first nothing then photoshop, then some system level stuff in OS9.
    • Yeah, there's something screwy with the MP-aware Photoshop 7.0 test. It shows that the dual 2 GHz G5 is only 17% faster than the dual 1.42 G4. The dual G5 has a clockspeed advantage of 40% alone, not to mention an FSB that is 8x faster than the pokey 167 Mhz bus on the G4. There is no way in heck that the G5 can post scores that are only 17% faster than the G4. Maybe it was tested without using the optimized G5 plug-in, but the result is certainly very odd. I hope the barefeats guy gives some clarificati

  • Are Benchmarks Premature? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by crispy1083 ( 636320 ) on Tuesday September 02, 2003 @02:50PM (#6852347)
    Might it be too soon to really determine how fast the G5 is? I imagine there's a lot of room for optimizing the code of a lot of applications for the PPC 970. Also, IBMs newest XL compilers are said to make a big difference in a lot of cases. Maybe the true speed of the new PowerMac isn't quite apparent yet?

    • Somewhat (Score:3, Informative)

      by Llywelyn ( 531070 )
      Yes, if we want to compare a Pentium4 Xeon or a Opteron, and even in comparisons such as this, we have to take the results with a (largish) grain of salt and realize that the PowerMac G5 *will* perform better in these tests given time for further optimizations--using xlc/xlf (which /preliminary/ reports show for the Jet3D benchmark will raise the score for a single 2 GHz G5 to around three times that of 2.66 GHz P4), recompiling in 64-bit, a system which is better optimized to take advantage of the processo

  • More?! (Score:3, Insightful)

    by agent dero ( 680753 ) on Tuesday September 02, 2003 @06:30PM (#6854335) Homepage
    How many more benchmarks are going to be necessary for people to start believing that this _is_ a great, viable, and priceworthy computer?

    1Ghz FSU, dual 2Ghz 64-bit CPUs, 8GB RAM, serial-ata drives

    All that for less than a UltraSPARC server, and you _still_ (!) need "proof" or validation???

    This is getting ridiculous
    • You forget, any and all benchmarks can be defeated by the x86 war-cry:

      "OMG! $2500 for 2GHz? WTF i can maek a 2GHz P4 for liek $250 d00d. ur messed up if u pay that much. Apple sucks LOL"

      Sad but true.
  • On the initial G5 vs. G4 comparison page at

    http://www.barefeats.com/g5sum.html

    the dual 1.42 GHz G4 posted a time of 35 seconds while the dual 2.0 GHz G5 posted a time of 29 seconds. Barefeats EMPHATICALLY states the results are for Photoshop 7.01 without the G5 plug-in

    On the recent comparison page, we see the exact same times (35 seconds vs. 29 seconds) for the MP-aware tests, leading one to assume that even this latest round of benchmarks were tested without the G5 plug-in, and thus don't give the re

  • While the comparison between the G5 and G4 processors is interesting, how about testing the other parts of the system that have been radically improved? Namely, the new 800MHz bus vs the old 133MHz bus. How about I/O throughput with the new serial ATA? The CPUs may go back and forth in some tasks, but the rest of the G5 systems ought to smoke the G4s. Let's see those tests.

    - Jasen.

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