[axlepin]

I know that there are piles of websites that talk in engineering terms about how chips work and why they're fast..when I read some of these benchmarks, I'm still left wondering "yeah, but how fast IS it??"

Can anyone relate any of the benchmarks that are trickling in to lay terms? I don't run Cinema, but have heard of Cinebench..the numbers don't mean anything to me.

Anyone?

thanks much! Just trying to determine whether the G5 is a hot rig or just hot air.

axle

[DrBoar]

It appears that the G5 at the moment is more of hot air. The explanation is that the differenece in the CPU of the G5 compared to the previous jumps G1-G4 is bigger and it thus need more tweaking in the code to make it self justice. That is the optimistic explanation
The pesimistic is that the G5 really is a pice of crap and that IBM will never release a IBM 970 AKA G5 Linux blade server and that when IBM loose interest in the 970 that Apple really will be in a bad bad spot
From eweek.com
"The ULE models, which will run Linux and IBM's AIX OS, will ship in 2U two-way and 4U four-way configurations. A base configuration of the 4U is expected to cost less than $3,500, sources said."
Perhaps the deal is to let the IBM 970 servers from IBM out of the door before Apple get their G5 servers out.

Everything will pan out in the couple of weeks

[devmage]

I'm not sure why supposed mac people keep posting such horribly negative things about the future of there favorite machines/OS.

The G5 is dramtically a diffrent architecture than the G4. It has moved from a 32bit to 64bit system. While it was designed to still run 32bit code well it will run much better once optimized.

I take you back to the debute of the P4. When it came out the P3s actually scored much higher in most benchmarks than the P4 of much higher clock speeds. So far what I've been seeing of the G5, and pretty much from the 1.6 the G5 is scoring about the same or slightly better than the G4. This is a good sign IMHO because once things are optimized for the G5 it should be alot better.

From what I've read on the Altvec engine which was initially trashed earlie in the G5s life is not as bad as people thought. Again the benchmarks show it performing about as good as a G4 or slightly worse in some cases. However it has been discussed the new design while doesn't improve benchmark numbers would improve real world useage of the engine.

And of course to comment on benchmarks they mean little anyways. Its how the machine performs in real life use that matters. I have rarely seen benchmarks transfer into real life performance. Case in point would be the numbers people generate on PC graphics cards. The raw power don't always transfer into the highest FPS in the end.

Give it some time, I'm confident the G5 will be an excellent machine. I'm so confident I bought my first mac desktop and its a Dual 2gig G5.

Devmage