[:dragonflypro:]

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,4149,1274138,00.asp

Not the SMACK we were hoping for... but, Very Impressive!

T

edit:

Dell is actually 6300.

customized at Dell.com

Dual P4 Xeon 3.06
2 GB DDR / ATI Fire 128mb / 146GB ATA HD / SB Audigy / Modem / Optical mouse.

[Eug]

The strange part is the Photoshop numbers. The G5 handily beats the dual Xeon in PSBench as seen here in terms of test by test comparison averages. In time, the dual Xeon and dual G5 are neck and neck. However, in the PCMag tests, the Xeon handily beats the G5, even in subtests that the G5 destroys the Xeon on in PSBench. So I'm not sure I understand what's going on.

Nonetheless, the article seems fair.

Apple has succeeded in boosting its Power Mac line, taking Apple users into high-performance computing. And by outperforming top-specked Windows machines on some tests, Apple has proved that megahertz isn't everything. The new flagship Mac will more than satisfy power-hungry graphics, video, and business users and may even win Apple some users from the Windows/Intel camp.

Oh and by the way, that Dell should be well under $5000 AFAIK, not $7000.

[CubeBoy]

Different filter selections, different results, Barefeats PS action file had a dual 2.4 GHz Xeon beat a Dual 2 GHz G5 (even though they only took the overall times rather than the geometric mean of the normalized scores). The filters selected by Adobe for PSBench7 are a pretty good selection for general comparisons however.

[EDIT]:Not really handily beat, both systems won 10 filters although the G5 tended to perform alot better in some filters (altivec optimizations?) hence the higher geometric mean.

[Eug Wanker]

Originally posted by CubeBoy:
Different filter selections, different results,

No, but the same filters have completely different results. eg. RGB-->CMYK is faster here on the dual Xeon, but was 5X as fast on the G5 with PSBench.

[lewdvig]

I agree, the Dell is too much. I think that the Fire GL card is 2-3x more than a regular 9800Pro. On a side note, I hope ATI and NV start making pro cards for Mac too.

Who cares? This is the first time that Mac has even been close in years. This is great news!

Apple really came through this time. By the time G6 comes around I think the Mac's lead over Intel will be definitive.

[Severed Hand of Skywalker]

I don't ever want a PC. It is not a consideration for me. I don't think faster photoshop filters will convert many PC dead heads either, they rather argue over the benchmarks.

What matters to me is how fast is the G5 to the computer I am replacing it with such as my G4.

[lewdvig]

Macs have PCs beat where it counts: workflow

A smart intuitive OS and apps are what make the difference. Based on the above, and if you ignore the benchmarks and time people doing real computing (video, photo, etc.), the Mac has never really been slower than their Wintel counterparts.

I like to play video games, so the Wintel box serves a purpose. Yes, it does bug me that I have paid for MS to extend their monopoly and criminal activites.

[MindFad]

Didn't the Dell have 2GB of RAM, and the G5 only 512MB?

Anyhow, cool. I want one. A G5, that is.

[Cipher13]

WHEN will people learn that BENCHMARKS MEAN NOTHING.

[mac freak]

Um, that's not true. Benchmarks are a good overall indicator of the speed of a system. If benchmarks show it as consistently fast, it's probably fast. If benchmarks show it as consistently slow, it's probably slow. Individual tests might not mean much -- but overall conclusions drawn from many, many tests can mean a lot. If benchmarks are "meaningless," how would I know what video card to buy? Should I just buy the most expensive one? When the Radeon 9700 came out, benchmarks showed it whomping the GF4; I experienced the same results when I considered those benchmarks in my purchase of a 9700 over a GF4. For computer components, benchmarks, and "reviews" typically based upon those benchmarks, are essentially all we have to assess their quality. After all, if we don't care about performance, why bother ever upgrading?

Would you buy a sports car without looking at its quarter mile time, 0-100-0, top speed or skidpad scores? I guess they'd all be "meaningless" if you were buying it merely for status, but I hope you don't buy computers simply to serve as status symbols!

[chrisutley]

This will convert some people back/to Mac. Lots of pros on the dark side are using P4 machines, not 6K Xeon DP's. The dual G5 is a friggin STEAL!

Super cool, freaking awesome OS, ultra reliable, FAST (faster than competition), AND AND AND ... CHEAPER! When has Apple ever pulled all of that off at the same time?

[Magic Genie]

G5 smokes the Dell for the same money- no comparison/



That's me with my new G5.

[Cipher13]

Originally posted by mac freak:
Um, that's not true. Benchmarks are a good overall indicator of the speed of a system. If benchmarks show it as consistently fast, it's probably fast. If benchmarks show it as consistently slow, it's probably slow. Individual tests might not mean much -- but overall conclusions drawn from many, many tests can mean a lot. If benchmarks are "meaningless," how would I know what video card to buy? Should I just buy the most expensive one? When the Radeon 9700 came out, benchmarks showed it whomping the GF4; I experienced the same results when I considered those benchmarks in my purchase of a 9700 over a GF4. For computer components, benchmarks, and "reviews" typically based upon those benchmarks, are essentially all we have to assess their quality. After all, if we don't care about performance, why bother ever upgrading?

Would you buy a sports car without looking at its quarter mile time, 0-100-0, top speed or skidpad scores? I guess they'd all be "meaningless" if you were buying it merely for status, but I hope you don't buy computers simply to serve as status symbols!

A machine may excel in one area, and totally fall down in another.

Saying "G5 slaughters Dell" is stupid. Simple as that.

Sure a Photoshop benchmark may be useful for people that solely use Photoshop... but you'll find the G5 excelling with some plugins, and the Xeon with others.

And so on.

I just read that PC Mag review... terrible.

Sounds like they just read the Apple G5 page and almost copied and pasted.

They don't seem to realise that El Capitan could be locked (they imply the case cannot lock), they say the G5 can only hold 8 GB or RAM when it holds 16, they make no mention of PCI-X, and so on and so on.

Terrible.

[Immortal K-Mart Employee]

Originally posted by Cipher13:
WHEN will people learn that BENCHMARKS MEAN NOTHING.

When they actually have work to do and money to spend on another computer rather then arguing which system is the fastest and how they are not getting either until [insert some bullshit here].

[TC]

There are 2 big differences in the setups here and in the other test.
First off the PC has 2GB of RAM here instead of 512MB. It may be that the RGB -> CMYK was hitting the disk and that's why there is such a difference.

Also in the other test they definitely set the energy saver to Highest Performance. If they haven't done it here then the G5 results could have been a bit better.

The major point here is that hardly any of the apps they where using have been optimized for the G5 yet. When they have we should see a much better performance.

The other test results are here:
http://www.chaosmint.com/benchmarks/...c-g5-ps7bench/

[Eug Wanker]

I don't know what you're getting at with the 512 MB comment. Both the Mac and Dell here had 2 GB.

With PSBench, with it's small 50 MB file, going from 512 MB to 1 GB to 2 GB makes absolutely no difference in RGB-->CMYK performance.

[ZildjianKX]

Yeah, both have 2 Gigs of RAM.

FYI a barebones dual 3.06 GHz Xeon costs $3800 from Dell.

Adding in a modem, mouse, keyboard, operating system, videocard, etc would actually bring them neck and neck in price. There is no way to customize it like that from Dell.com, well, since its a server. Don't forget the 10,000 RPM hard drive that Dell includes (30 gigs) is about the same retail price as a 160 gig 7,200 RPM drive.

Dollar for dollar, they're about the same performance value.

[olePigeon]

Does the Dell run Mac OS?

Anyway, I think Macintosh users should be rejoicing anyway. We have a computer that's litterally neck-to-neck with the fastest PC, and with AltiVec specific operations, can be as much as 4x faster.

I'm not too worried right now if it's faster or even a little slower. Whats important is that Apple is now using IBM for its main source of microprocessors. IBM says 3GHz by next year, and I believe them. I think we can expect regular speed updates on a timely schedule.

I believe Apple will clearly surpass Intel based PCs (all around) within the next year.

AMD based PCs, however, is a different story. Intel's not the one Apple should be worrying about now, in my opinion.

[blackwind]

Originally posted by Cipher13:
A machine may excel in one area, and totally fall down in another.

Saying "G5 slaughters Dell" is stupid. Simple as that.

Sure a Photoshop benchmark may be useful for people that solely use Photoshop... but you'll find the G5 excelling with some plugins, and the Xeon with others.

And so on.

I just read that PC Mag review... terrible.

Sounds like they just read the Apple G5 page and almost copied and pasted.

They don't seem to realise that El Capitan could be locked (they imply the case cannot lock), they say the G5 can only hold 8 GB or RAM when it holds 16, they make no mention of PCI-X, and so on and so on.

Terrible.

While I agree that saying that the G5 "slaughters" the Dell is a hyperbole, the fact that the G5 is competitive with it is a good thing. (The fact that the G5 does this well and is less expensive is even better.) Otherwise, complaints about the G4's speed would never have arisen.

As for the G5 itself, it can hold only 8 GB of RAM. It has 8 DIMM slots, each capable of supporting a 1-GB DIMM.

[CubeBoy]

Originally posted by Eug Wanker:
No, but the same filters have completely different results. eg. RGB-->CMYK is faster here on the dual Xeon, but was 5X as fast on the G5 with PSBench.

318% faster if my math is right

The test image was quadrupled in size since some of the operations completed too quickly to time (I believe the lowest you can go is .3 seconds). Perhaps the larger test image prevented the G5 from running some filters entirely inside it's cache (possibly through hardware prefetching provided by excess bandwidth).

[blackwind]

Originally posted by olePigeon:
Does the Dell run Mac OS?

Anyway, I think Macintosh users should be rejoicing anyway. We have a computer that's litterally neck-to-neck with the fastest PC, and with AltiVec specific operations, can be as much as 4x faster.

I'm not too worried right now if it's faster or even a little slower. Whats important is that Apple is now using IBM for its main source of microprocessors. IBM says 3GHz by next year, and I believe them. I think we can expect regular speed updates on a timely schedule.

I believe Apple will clearly surpass Intel based PCs (all around) within the next year.

AMD based PCs, however, is a different story. Intel's not the one Apple should be worrying about now, in my opinion.

AMD does not have any particular advantage over Intel at the moment. Indeed, the converse is true.

The fastest Opteron is currently only about on par with the fastest Xeon (similar to the fastest G5), and it does not have any pricing advantage over the Xeon nor the G5.

The Athlon FX will be released in a few days, but it will not take away the crown from the Pentium 4C as the fastest consumer processor. (And yes, a 3.2-GHz Pentium 4C is faster in most cases than a SINGLE 2-GHz G5 or a single 2-GHz Opteron.) We should be thankful that Intel has, for some reason or other, crippled the Xeon with a comparatively slow shared frontside bus. A dual Pentium 4C would be deadly...

When Prescott is released this November, it will add the following:

-4 instruction + 1 branch dispatch/retire
-1 MB L2 cache
-double the L1 caches of the current P4C
-SSE3
-Hyperthreading II
-initially, up to 3.4-GHz

In a year, we would have a super-powered Prescott running at 4-GHz or so. The G5 will undoubtedly fall slightly behind until IBM releases its planned updated-G5 in a year (3-GHz G5 with larger caches, hopefully with something similar to Hyperthreading).

Apple is right to focus on Intel. Intel is the most dangerous foe for the foreseaeble future, at least in the high end.

[CubeBoy]

Originally posted by TC:
The major point here is that hardly any of the apps they where using have been optimized for the G5 yet. When they have we should see a much better performance.

The ones they used all seem to actually be pretty well optimised. Unoptimised or poorly optimised programs likes UT2003 (and these are fp intensive which is the G5's strongpoint) has Pentium 4 based systems performing at nearly double the speed of a dual 2 GHz G5.

[CubeBoy]

Originally posted by blackwind:
AMD does not have any particular advantage over Intel at the moment. Indeed, the converse is true.

The fastest Opteron is currently only about on par with the fastest Xeon (similar to the fastest G5), and it does not have any pricing advantage over the Xeon nor the G5.

The Athlon FX will be released in a few days, but it will not take away the crown from the Pentium 4C as the fastest consumer processor. (And yes, a 3.2-GHz Pentium 4C is faster in most cases than a SINGLE 2-GHz G5 or a single 2-GHz Opteron.) We should be thankful that Intel has, for some reason or other, crippled the Xeon with a comparatively slow shared frontside bus. A dual Pentium 4C would be deadly...

When Prescott is released this November, it will add the following:

-4 instruction + 1 branch dispatch/retire
-1 MB L2 cache
-double the L1 caches of the current P4C
-SSE3
-Hyperthreading II
-initially, up to 3.4-GHz

In a year, we would have a super-powered Prescott running at 4-GHz or so. The G5 will undoubtedly fall slightly behind until IBM releases its planned updated-G5 in a year (3-GHz G5 with larger caches, hopefully with something similar to Hyperthreading).

Apple is right to focus on Intel. Intel is the most dangerous foe for the foreseaeble future, at least in the high end.

Not to mention built in 64 bit functionality which we've only recently confirmed from this article below:
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=11668

I also seem to remember lower latency integer multiples, improved branch prediction and a bunch of unofficial stuff covered by Hans DeVries (who was actually the first to postulate on 64 bit compatibility).

Intel seems to enjoy raining on everyone else's parades, they did this at WWDC when they launched the 3.2 GHz P4 on the very same day. Now their doing this with the Athlon64 by unveiling 3.2 and 3.4 GHz Pentium 4EE models, with an added 2 megs on die L2/L3 (the debate continues over exactly which) cache. They plan on unveiling a Pentium 5 version of this cpu as well.

[Eug Wanker]

As for the G5 itself, it can hold only 8 GB of RAM. It has 8 DIMM slots, each capable of supporting a 1-GB DIMM.

The G5 can support 16 GB with 2 GB per slot.

[DeathMan]

Originally posted by Eug Wanker:
The G5 can support 16 GB with 2 GB per slot.

Eug, stuff like this, you really should post a link or something. Though I haven't heard them say that it ONLY supports 8GB, Apple has said more than once that the G5 supports 8 GB. I believe you when you say you could get 16GB in there (I don't have any real reason to believe otherwise), but just you writing a number, isn't really definative.

[Eug Wanker]

Linky.

Each DIMM can contain 256 and 512 MB (also is capable of 128 MB, 1 GB, and has future expansion ability of 2 GB) of double data rate synchronous dynamic RAM (DDR SDRAM).

It's listed in other Apple documentation too.

[ebuddy]

You rock Eug, I had just copy-pasted the article, but you beat me to it. linky indeed.

[blackwind]

Originally posted by Eug Wanker:
Linky.

Each DIMM can contain 256 and 512 MB (also is capable of 128 MB, 1 GB, and has future expansion ability of 2 GB) of double data rate synchronous dynamic RAM (DDR SDRAM).

It's listed in other Apple documentation too.

Well, I'll be darned...

I seem to be wrong or incomplete a lot these days.

Still, PC Magazine is technically not wrong for saying 8 GB maximum since this future 2-GB DIMM does not exist yet.

As for the Prescott... it seems even more formidable now that CubeBoy has added several other tidbits.

And they are only going to call this a Pentium 4?

They really should at least make it: "The Pentium 4.5: We could call it a Pentium 5, but... nah...."

[Cipher13]

Originally posted by blackwind:
As for the G5 itself, it can hold only 8 GB of RAM. It has 8 DIMM slots, each capable of supporting a 1-GB DIMM.

Wrong.

EDIT: Already clarified, I see.

[olePigeon]

The PowerMac G5 beat the Dell by more than a MINUTE. What they didn't include in the benchmarks was the nearly 1 minute wait time to just load the dialogs, palletes, and windows. The PowerMac was nearly instantaneous.

As somene pointed out on Slashdot, if they don't consider the delay times in loading windows, then he doesn't mind making a cup of coffee while his 'My Computer' window loads.

[Ratm]

I wouldn't place to much faith in what PC mag has to say.
http://arstechnica.infopop.net/OpenT...967585&p=1