Apple's Dual 2GHz By The Numbers 776
mallumax writes "ComputerWorld has an exciting review of Apple's Dual 2GHz machine." An excerpt: "It's clear from two weeks of testing that Apple's new Power Mac G5 dual 2-GHz machine is the fastest thing the company has ever produced. And while you can debate benchmarks until eternity, it certainly appears poised to meet or beat anything now out on the Windows side."
Re:Price [NOT] a bit steep... (Score:3, Informative)
People miss the point (Score:5, Informative)
Re:News flash! (Score:3, Informative)
So much for meeting and beating... (Score:1, Informative)
I just recently got a Sager Laptop (for any who haven't heard about them, check out PCTorque.com for some outrageous laptops)
Here's the specs:
P4 3ghz HT
1 gb RAM
Radeon 9600
Two 60gb 7200RPM HD's in RAID 0
I have Photoshop 7. It launched in 4 seconds off cold boot. Relaunched in 2.
WinXP boots in 20 seconds, loading just about everything I have (Gaim, Kazaa, TV studio (it has a TV tuner), antivirus, etc). If it weren't for RAID initialization, the entire computer would boot in under 30 seconds.
It can run a good game of BF1942, all settings up on highest, while playing a DVD on another monitor, and downloading various things off Kazaa.
True, the laptop was about $2800, but hey, it's a LAPTOP. Try getting an apple laptop at that price that can compete with mine...
Mars or Bust (Score:5, Informative)
What about running real stuff like FCP's Compressor or Maya's mental ray renderer plug-in? Maybe even a After Effects render speed. Using iMovie to test anything isn't very fair to the people who would buy a G5. They're not using iMovie to work on SD video. Photoshop users aren't using a bunch of filters picked at random.
Re:G5 Rules (Score:4, Informative)
Is this good enough for you?
Wow, you redefine "ignorant." (Score:5, Informative)
RTCW? Yup. [amazon.com]
C&C Generals? Yup, coming soon. [gamespot.com]
Halo? Yup, soon. [bungie.org]
Sim City 4? Yup. [amazon.com]
Civ III? Yup. [amazon.com]
In conclusion, you need to take a break from the gaming and check your facts before you post. Otherwise you come off looking like a dumb shit when someone like me comes along to easily prove you wrong.
~Philly
Re:G5 Rules (Score:2, Informative)
With the arival of the g5, the performance of macs has finally catched up with x86. But while on the paper the chip looks like a killer, it looses to the a64. and most likely prescott,too, but thats speculation.
Yes, the g5 has dual fpus capable of doing a mac each per cyle. But people should realize that even with 32 registers you need 2 loads and one store per MAC. Thus whenever you could really use the power of the 2 fpus, you will be so hopelessly memory-bound that it wont matter if you have 1 or 2 mac units...
Re:Big deal. (Score:2, Informative)
Halo? Yes, about a month behind the PC version
Sim City 4? Yes
Civ 3? Yes
Granted anyone who just wants to play games for cheap has no need for a Macintosh. But you could also argue that they don't need a PC either (get a console).
I agree that there is a lot to be said for compatability: it gotten a lot better in the past few years.
Re:When the cows come home (Score:5, Informative)
It's not just you, it's everyone who hasn't done their homework.
For more or less equivalent dual processor systems I get:
Dell - $4,763.00
Apple - $3,623.00
Note that the Apple price does not include the $50 or less you would have to spend on a mouse to keep you happy.
Re:So much for meeting and beating... (Score:5, Informative)
That's not a freaking laptop! It's a freaking desktop, LITERALLY! No wonder the weight/size specs are buried 3 pages deep way down in a chart here [sagernotebook.com].
There is NO MENTION of battery life. What does it get? 15 minutes?
Meanwhile the powerbook 15" weighs less than 6 pounds, and is an inch thick.
Do you walk with your laptop?
Re:Where the dual processors come in handy (Score:3, Informative)
If apple can penetrate even 1% of the enterprise market with it's new lineup it will be a huge thing for them. They have never been able to get out of the graphic dept ghetto and now they have a real shot at getting into the server room. Just like your friends switched from linux desktops to macosx sysadmins could be replacing their aging intel based linux servers to Macs.
Who would have guessed.
Re:Congrats! You are no longer using CaveOS! (Score:3, Informative)
I got a 1.3ghz, running windows xp
when I copy over the network from my pb12"
the winxp computer slows like a dog.
7200rpm maxtor in the xp
5200 rpm whatever in the 12".
Re:Congrats! You are no longer using CaveOS! (Score:4, Informative)
Re:The question is then (Score:4, Informative)
Regarding its bloodline, it's more Unix than Linux is being that it is BSD based.
Just because an OS is easy to use, doesn't mean it isn't Unix based.
Re:The question is then (Score:2, Informative)
Are you talking about pro-level 3D graphics boards? 3Dlabs is currently in talks with Apple about bringing their workstation 3D cards to the Mac.
Re:benchmark against hyperthreaded CPU (Score:3, Informative)
Or at least, that was an early claim. It ultimately turned out, however, that all the standardized optimizations that should have been turned on, were. And the ones that weren't, actually degraded performance. So it is hardly surprising that subsequent benchmarks are confirming what Apple claimed--the G5's are speed-competitive with the fastest Intels, and for some applications, notably faster.
Re:Price / Performance (Score:2, Informative)
Re:The real problem with Apple computers (Score:1, Informative)
Re:"Meet or beat?" Yeah, right (Score:2, Informative)
Remember NASA? They were benchmarking a custom-written PPC app for fluid dynamics. It was hand-tuned to exploit AltiVec for floating-point vector computations. It showed that an equivalently-clocked G5 ran about 30% faster than a P4. If this is what you're going on, I'm laughing. The instructions-per-cycle on a processor means nothing -- P4s run at a significantly faster clock. The problem is that the fastest G5 available on-market runs at 2.0 Ghz, and the fastest available P4 on-market runs at 3.2 Ghz. So the G5 loses if we measure by absolute fastest possible speed. Perhaps we should use a value metric instead? The best bang-for-the-buck you can get in a G5 from Apple is their $1999 1.6Ghz model. If I pick out a new P4 desktop at Dell using the Apple price as a guide, I can get a 3.0 Ghz desktop for less, which runs about half again as fast as the Mac...*with* a monitor, which Apple doesn't include, plus a bunch of other goodies, for over a hundred dollars less.
Wrongo, dimwit. The "overwhelming number of times" (speak English much?) it's I/O. Your computer spends more time waiting than it does working. This has been true for years and years now.
Heh. All right, you're right -- I wasn't very clear. I was thinking of long-running tasks (which *are* generally CPU-bound), not simply browsing through your filesystem -- the latency there isn't going to kill anyone. Trust me, you don't want to change the competition to I/O latency rather than CPU speed -- OS X is an extremely heavy RAM consumer, and Apple charges a notoriously high premium on RAM.
Is this a metaphor, or are you just an idiot? You know that Quake 3 isn't CPU bound, right?
It certainly was on my computer when I played it. I'm sure it's possible to build a system where that's not the case, but given that the rate of graphic chipset speed increases significantly outpaces that of CPU speed increases, that's a pretty weak claim you're making if you're considering an ordinary old computer.
You also know that nobody gives a flying fuck about Quake 3 frame rates, right? I mean, you do realize that the people who hang out in apple.slashdot.org actually do this for a living, and are more interested in Final Cut Pro or Logic performance than silly games. RIGHT?
You do realize that the majority of people on apple.slashdot.org (or any slashdot subdomain) are under 20 and care more about games than Final Cut Pro, right?
But, hell, since I've made assumptions to favor you all the way through here, I'll do so again. We'll go with your DV folks -- want to read their opinion [digitalvideoediting.com]? Apple's PR people are full of it WRT performance.
That doesn't mean that the G5 systems are bad, as I pointed out above. They're a great choice if you use Macs. But claims of them stomping x86 boxes are simply not true, and folks simply repeating false claims that Apple's made are not doing anyone any favors.