New barefeats article proves G4s sometimes faster, sometimes slower than AMD/Pentiums [Archive]

ddtlm

Oct 7, 2002, 11:14 AM

I'd be more impressed with these "tests" if the pro-Mac cowards had used a top-of-the-line Athlon system (1.8ghz is available for duals, 2.13ghz is pretty much available for singles) or a top-of-the-line P4 (2.0ghz? haha!). The 2.0ghz P4 runs on the old 400mhz FSB whereas there is a 533mhz FSB P4 clocking at 2.8ghz available. They also make no mention of memory type used on any platform. For the P4, PC1066 RDRAM is tops, for the Athlon the new nForce2 with 2 channels of 333mhz DDR is tops (although I will admit that chipset still has a one-month ETA). OK, so maybe use the VIA KT400 for the Athlon, it's pretty good.

And what's his quote about a dual Xeon 2200 probably being top dog? Other than the fact you can get Xeons at 2.8ghz as well...

Anyway I think these tests are crap. But they will suffice so that "Macs are fastest!" freakos can keep them in mind and make vauge statements about how Macs and PCs are about the same speed in "tests". (Those people annoy me.)

ddtlm

Oct 7, 2002, 11:18 AM

Backtothemac:

Um, no. You are wrong. Just because the Intel machine is 2GHZ doesn't mean squat. Pipelines, stages, all of this matters. Don't assume anything about the quality of a 25 year old architecture. X86 blows crap, and always will.
Does it annoy you to know that even in Photoshop (gasp!) those 25-year old ISA x86 machines kick the snot out of the latest and greatest Mac? Sure seems to.

2.8ghz, by the way.

alex_ant

Oct 7, 2002, 11:27 AM

...but usually slower

gopher

Oct 7, 2002, 11:39 AM

cr2sh

Oct 7, 2002, 12:16 PM

I thought we decided to ignore everything that barefeats has to say? They are not a reputable source at all, their tests are flawed and they have little metadata at all.... why even bother?

PCUser

Oct 7, 2002, 12:40 PM

Originally posted by gopher

Well so can the G4 be overclocked. So what's your point? Big whoop, overclock all you like, but we are talking about systems sold by manufacturers. To learn more about overclocking Macs, visit http://www.xlr8yourmac.com/

No, no, the Athlon in the test was overclockled. That Athlon would not be sold by system manufacturers overclocked that far.

Added: The guy who ran this test even states that a dual 1GHz G4 rig is equal to 2GHz, which it isn't.

On the graphics test, he doesn't even give the Athlon and P4 the same graphics card. That's a very innacurate testing site, IMO.

Backtothemac

Oct 7, 2002, 01:54 PM

Originally posted by ddtlm
Backtothemac:

Does it annoy you to know that even in Photoshop (gasp!) those 25-year old ISA x86 machines kick the snot out of the latest and greatest Mac? Sure seems to.

2.8ghz, by the way.

Um,
Don't know what chart you were looking at, but with both processors being used, the 1.25 kicked the "snot" out of the PC's.

MrMacMan

Oct 7, 2002, 03:01 PM

Just one little statement.
They Overclocked to make the Althon Faster, so why not the mac. They could make their mac 'Closer' to the 2 GHZ mark, just by a little. And anyways not every program is going to take the 2ed processor and use it fully.
1 (1 ghz processor) *2 does not equal to 2 GHZ.

ddtlm

Oct 7, 2002, 03:10 PM

Backtothemac:

Um, Don't know what chart you were looking at, but with both processors being used, the 1.25 kicked the "snot" out of the PC's.
Ohhh, you mean that one test where the Mac beat an old dual Athlon by, look, 2 points? 38/40 hardly matters, especially seeing as how Athlon MP's are available at 1.8ghz rather than the 1.6ghz tested. Xeons are available at up to 2.8ghz if you want a real top of the line SMP PC. How do you suppose the dual 1.25 would do against that sort of competition?

ddtlm

Oct 7, 2002, 03:15 PM

MrMacman:

Perhaps you missed it the first few times around, but Athlons are available at speeds of 2400+ (2.0ghz) and there are even a few 2600+ (2.13ghz) models out there. Why does it matter if they overclocked an old Athlon to 1.6ghz? Tell you what, to make it fair why don't we add in my overclocked dual 800?

Backtothemac

Oct 7, 2002, 03:41 PM

Originally posted by ddtlm
MrMacman:

Perhaps you missed it the first few times around, but Athlons are available at speeds of 2400+ (2.0ghz) and there are even a few 2600+ (2.13ghz) models out there. Why does it matter if they overclocked an old Athlon to 1.6ghz? Tell you what, to make it fair why don't we add in my overclocked dual 800?

Jesus you still don't get it. If you compare Apples to Apples, the 1.6GHZ Dual Athlon is still slower in apps that are multi processor aware. Now, how about the PIV? How does that stack up? The x86 is garbage. Any real IT director would know that.

The point that I was making was that the testing was flawed.

And pc's suck.

ddtlm

Oct 7, 2002, 03:53 PM

Backtothemac:

Jesus you still don't get it. If you compare Apples to Apples, the 1.6GHZ Dual Athlon is still slower in apps that are multi processor aware. Now, how about the PIV? How does that stack up? The x86 is garbage. Any real IT director would know that.
No, I "get it" fine. Don't bother testing a 1.6ghz dual Athlon when 1.8ghz dual Athlons are readily available. It would do you good to note that this test did not cover all "apps that are multi processor aware", it covered only two apps that are multi-processor aware, and on one of them the Mac looses by a lot. Even on its one win, the dual 1.25 G4 would still loose to a top-of-the-line dual Athlon. Which is slower than a top-of-the-line dual Xeon. Get it?

samdweck

Oct 7, 2002, 04:08 PM

Originally posted by gopher
http://www.barefeats.com/pentium4.html

As I've always said, it is in the software!

yeah w/e.. winblows!! forever live apple!

barkmonster

Oct 7, 2002, 04:19 PM

I emailed this to rob-art morgan on Saturday :

I know the test was to find out how similarly clocked G4, Athlon and Pentium 4 chips perform but I was wondering if it was possible for you to test against the 2 fastest Intel and AMD chips ?

The price of both a 2Ghz Pentium 4 and 1.6Ghz Athlon PC put's it in the same range as the entry level eMac and that's assuming the PC is built using high quality drives and components. This is true for the UK at least.

I'd suggest the following systems, I don't know the details of motherboards or specific RAM configurations but going off cpu speed and the fastest availble RAM for the systems these 3 configurations would make for a fair "high end mac" vs "high end PC" comparison :

Dual 1.25Ghz, stock HD, stock graphics card, 1Gb of 333Mhz DDR SDRAM, OS 10.2.1

Athlon XP 2200+, 7200 rpm HD, same video card as the mac, 1Gb of 333Mhz DDR SDRAM, Windows XP Professional

2.8Ghz Pentium 4, 7200 rpm HD, same video card as the mac, 1Gb of 533Mhz RDRAM, Windows XP Professional

He responded with this :

That's a great suggestion. I'll try to get that arranged.

In the mean time, I'm working on a Pentium 4 2.53MHz + GeForce4 Ti 4600 versus G4 1.25GHz *2 + GeForce4 Ti (4600) comparo.

I can just see the look of disappointment on everyone's faces when the dual 1.25Ghz mac is slapped silly by both windows systems at practically everything.

Call me a pesimist but concidering how it's scrapped by when compared with lower end cpus I can see a thorough G4 thrashing coming up on barefeats very soon.

samdweck

Oct 7, 2002, 04:24 PM

Originally posted by ddtlm
Backtothemac:

Ohhh, you mean that one test where the Mac beat an old dual Athlon by, look, 2 points? 38/40 hardly matters, especially seeing as how Athlon MP's are available at 1.8ghz rather than the 1.6ghz tested. Xeons are available at up to 2.8ghz if you want a real top of the line SMP PC. How do you suppose the dual 1.25 would do against that sort of competition?

all pcs are is snot... he is right.. now leave... cease and desist you s.o.b. PROPAGANDA STARTED THE HOLOCAUST, AND YOU ARE GIVING PROPOGANDA... arn this is a personal attack and is totally fair... let me speak my peace!

alex_ant

Oct 7, 2002, 04:26 PM

Originally posted by barkmonster
I can just see the look of disappointment on everyone's faces when the dual 1.25Ghz mac is slapped silly by both windows systems at practically everything.
Won't happen. To a Mac zealot, if the G4 is slower than anything, either 1) the benchmark was rigged, or 2) "pcheese" and "Windblowz" suck anyway.

The Pentium 5 could come along and deliver 15,000 in SPECfp and all the Mac zealots would be whining about how SPEC isn't a real-world benchmark and how Macs deliver such better real-world performance etc., even when they have nothing to substantiate their claims but the biased and selective evidence from themselves and their Mac-using friends.

I love Macs, but I harbor no illusions about them not generally being just about the slowest thing on the block at the moment.

Alex

samdweck

Oct 7, 2002, 04:28 PM

Originally posted by alex_ant

Won't happen. To a Mac zealot, if the G4 is slower than anything, either 1) the benchmark was rigged, or 2) "pcheese" and "Windblowz" suck anyway.

The Pentium 5 could come along and deliver 15,000 in SPECfp and all the Mac zealots would be whining about how SPEC isn't a real-world benchmark and how Macs deliver such better real-world performance etc., even when they have nothing to substantiate their claims but the biased and selective evidence from themselves and their Mac-using friends.

I love Macs, but I harbor no illusions about them not generally being just about the slowest thing on the block at the moment.

Alex

mac rules, pc sucks, how hard is this? if you dont' agree, why are you on a site devoted to macs? leave now!!!!!!! (not u alex... lol)

alex_ant

Oct 7, 2002, 04:35 PM

I wish I could leave. Macrumors is to the GPA what the bug zapper is to the fly.

samdweck

Oct 7, 2002, 04:42 PM

well then just get the heck out of here, leave, please, it may happen soon! godspeed!

arn

Oct 7, 2002, 04:51 PM

Originally posted by samdweck
well then just get the heck out of here, leave, please, it may happen soon! godspeed!

Sam... you need to chill.

Personal attacks and pure emotional posts are not very helpful. The point of this site is not to be Pro-Mac at all costs.

A fast enough Pentium will beat a 1.25GHz G4. How fast the Pentium has to be appears to be a point of contention... but that's all it is... as long as people keep it civil... it's cool.

Besides, alex_ant's post was a joke. Slow down, and read the intent of the posts.

arn

samdweck

Oct 7, 2002, 04:54 PM

Originally posted by arn

Sam... you need to chill.

Personal attacks and pure emotional posts are not very helpful. The point of this site is not to be Pro-Mac at all costs.

A fast enough Pentium will beat a 1.25GHz G4. How fast the Pentium has to be appears to be a point of contention... but that's all it is... as long as people keep it civil... it's cool.

Besides, alex_ant's post was a joke. Slow down, and read the intent of the posts.

arn

sorry arn, but it pisses me off! i mean really, i am very pro-mac and i should chill, but what does a pc person have business doing here... sorry though!

arn

Oct 7, 2002, 04:58 PM

Originally posted by samdweck

sorry arn, but it pisses me off! i mean really, i am very pro-mac and i should chill, but what does a pc person have business doing here... sorry though!

30% of visitors are on a Windows machine.

And if you look above... the people you attacked own Macs. They are simply being realistic.

arn

samdweck

Oct 7, 2002, 05:00 PM

Originally posted by arn

30% of visitors are on a Windows machine.

And if you look above... the people you attacked own Macs. They are simply being realistic.

arn

okay fine, i was wrong... sorry to whomever i offended!

UnixMac

Oct 7, 2002, 06:54 PM

Sam

I share your very pro-mac attitude, but it IS pro-mac to call a spade a spade. I hate to admit it too, but Wintel is getting faster and faster and we're sitting still.

OS X is an amazing Unix based os that should Scream in every app, and yet Wintel is kicking our buts in 3D graphics which should be a mac relm. Instead of blindliy saying that Mac is best we should self examine and send Apple our opinion via their feedback on their website.

I know that people hate car examples so I will use a totally different one. War history.

Hitler was not only an evil Nazi facist, but he was once a corporal and knew little or nothing about war tactics/strategy. He had some of the greatest generals of the 20th century working for him. Field Marshalls Von Manstein, Von Rundstedt, Rommel & ColonelGeneral Guderian but to name a few. Read up on military history, these were great leaders of fighting men, and Hitler was a politician.
They constantly told him that he was doing things wrong and he just refused to listen, to the point of firing all of them at one time or another for telling him The Truth Now, granted, we are better off that Hitler lost (those Generals themselve were even happy about it) but that proves that you gain nothing by denying the truth.

now back to Apple. Apple is only gonna make machines that are faster than Intel (i.e. G5, G6 etc...) if we DEMAND it. If we are content with 800MHz note books, while IBM makes 2.0GHz and Alienware makes 2.6GHz ones that smoke us, then we are doing ourselves a disservice.

I am a dedicated Apple user, but only because of OS X, until OS X, I was a Windows guy and wanted an Apple, becasue back in 2000, the G4 was the top. I figured that between the G4 and Unix, I was gonna be top. But Apple has stood still (compared to Wintel) and I am starting to get anxious, and so are others.

there, I've said my $.02............can we still be friends?

samdweck

Oct 7, 2002, 07:11 PM

yes, we can still be friends, and i am sorry about comparing you to hitler... i am jewish and know the seriousness of that!

UnixMac

Oct 7, 2002, 07:27 PM

No....you did no such thing, and no offense was taken. I didn't join this thread till the last post. I only used Hitler as an example becasue it rang true of the same kind of "head in the sand" attitude we in the Mac community take at times.

AtomBoy

Oct 7, 2002, 07:49 PM

This is my first post but I think I can comment on this thread because my wife and I use both a Mac and a PC in our business.

People get hung up on bench tests but, for me, the real 'speed' difference between a Mac and a PC is uptime.

When my wife's hogging the Mac and I'm stuck on the PC she will be sailing through her work while I'm having to to reboot every couple of hours or so. While the PC is stalling and crashing, the Mac just keeps on working. Benchmarks, more often than not, deal in seconds whereas crashes and reboots are wasting minutes at a time.

On the whole, I use resource-intensive programs, for image/video/audio editing. If I used mainly office programs or if I was a gamer, I'd probably stick to a PC for reasons of cost.

As it is, I'm simply waiting for G5 developements next year to do away with the last PC I'll ever own.

UnixMac

Oct 7, 2002, 07:54 PM

Hi AtomBoy......great english for being from Japan, or are you an ex-pat?

Anyway, I agree, the OS X part of a Mac is worth being a little behind on Mhz/DDR/etc...but I still want Apple to be "on par" atleast with Wintel, since I am spending close to double for their machines as if I had bought an unglybox.

MacAztec

Oct 7, 2002, 08:07 PM

Unfair Test.

They are using Apples latest and greatest processor.

The P4 has 2.6GHz out now...

AMD has like 2.2GHz out...

AtomBoy

Oct 7, 2002, 08:08 PM

Hi WanaPBnow,

Yeah, you guessed it, I'm an ex-pat!

You're right. Apple needs to 'kick-start' the Power PC. I hope the IBM rumours are true and we'll see a G5 sometime next year that can really compete with Intel/AMD.

If the speed/cost ratio continues to widen considerably over the next 12 months Apple might lose a number of loyalists.

ryme4reson

Oct 7, 2002, 09:30 PM

I for one think the current lines of macs are MUCH slower than the current comparable PCs. And to Back to the Mac, you may have heard of piplines and branches etc.. but do you have any idea what you are talking about?
"25 years old arch... the x86 sucks" Well you enjoy OS X and that's 25+ architecture also, so whats your point? Also, I think it is very hard to compare a Dual 1.25 to a single 2 Gig processor. Especially when the price difference is 500-1000+ I mean I would pay for performance, but the Macs are more than that. I am on a 1.6Athlon at school right now and it kicks the **** out of my 933. This 1.6 has 512 Ram I have 1.28GIGS. Simple things like starting Explorer to read macrumors is executed with NO DELAY. Bringing up Control Panels is also instantanious. I dont mind the fact my G-4 is slower, I enjoy OSX and my mac, but as far as speed I think you BACKTOTHEMAC needs to open your eyes.

Backtothemac

Oct 8, 2002, 08:26 AM

Originally posted by ryme4reson
I for one think the current lines of macs are MUCH slower than the current comparable PCs. And to Back to the Mac, you may have heard of piplines and branches etc.. but do you have any idea what you are talking about?
"25 years old arch... the x86 sucks" Well you enjoy OS X and that's 25+ architecture also, so whats your point? Also, I think it is very hard to compare a Dual 1.25 to a single 2 Gig processor. Especially when the price difference is 500-1000+ I mean I would pay for performance, but the Macs are more than that. I am on a 1.6Athlon at school right now and it kicks the **** out of my 933. This 1.6 has 512 Ram I have 1.28GIGS. Simple things like starting Explorer to read macrumors is executed with NO DELAY. Bringing up Control Panels is also instantanious. I dont mind the fact my G-4 is slower, I enjoy OSX and my mac, but as far as speed I think you BACKTOTHEMAC needs to open your eyes.

Why is the PC faster? It is the OS, not the processor. Windblows uses .dll's Dynamic link libraries. They allow programs to load only what is needed (GUI, and primary API's) and then load pieces of the program as the user uses it. Macs on the other hand load all of the program into memory because, Mac's don't use dll files. So. It takes longer to load a program on a Mac, however once loaded the program will actually perform faster.

As far as Macs being slower at everything. Dude, you obviously have not put a PowerBook up against a PC based notebook recentlly have you? See we sell IBM and Apple. We recently put my 667 up against a 2.0GHZ IBM laptop. The 667 was faster at everything in photoshop than the PC, encoded MP3's faster, and the only it did slower was render HTML. Now you say how much faster? Doesn't matter. If it was .1 seconds faster, it still shows the superiority of the PPC design.

Sure OS X is a 25 year old architecture. My reference is to the flaws of the X86 vs the PPC architecture. If you would like to discuss the flaws in Windows compared to OSX. Well, arn would have to make a dedicated topic for us to discuss it.

Macs run slower than winblows machines. So what. Would you really like to run winblows fast? That would be cool. Sure my machine goes 2.8GHZ, but it crashes once a day. I have never crashed X. Not even when it was a PB. Oh, and btw. I am an MCP, and Apple certified, so yes, I do know what I am talking about.

PCUser

Oct 8, 2002, 09:54 AM

What? No Dynamic Link Libraries in the MacOS X? You've got to be kidding me. That's a very bad choice on Apple's part. Especially since UNIX has their own type of DLL's. The whole point of a DLL is to make it so that programs don't need to load the same exact libraries into memory and waste space... the standard C library alone is about 2 megs. And the speed benefit from static libraries versus dynamic in *nix is nill. I know, I've compiled the same library both ways just to test that fact. (For those that don't know, static libraries are compiled into an app, and dynamic libraries are stored only once in memory.)

The point you had said before was that the reason x86 sucked was that it was 25 year old technology. Your exact wording was:

Don't assume anything about the quality of a 25 year old architecture. X86 blows crap, and always will.

Backtothemac

Oct 8, 2002, 10:02 AM

Yea, OSX uses libraries, but not specifically poorly designed libraries like winblows. .dll files are attributed to the majority of crashes on a PC. The structure of windows .dll and libraries in Unix are totally different. And yes, the X 86 structure sucks. ;)

UnixMac

Oct 8, 2002, 10:41 AM

OS X being 25 years old (actually, UNIX is much older) is a GOOD thing, Software (Read OS) can evolve much more easily than hardware. Unix is a work in progress to this day, and this is why it is years (literally years) ahead of windows.

As for X86 being great. I think that sure, the top X86 at 2.8Ghz is faster than the top G4 at 1.25Ghz, but not 2.2 times faster, as the clock would have you think. And when you add Altivec coded software like Photoship, then you actually get more IPC's than the P4. So the archtecture of the G4 is superior, However the P4 is faster by a small margin due to the significant speed advantage and its long pipeline.

I think a G5 with multicore process and a bump in clock will eclips the X86 entirely. AMD is the best bet against the G5 and when that day comes, as it will, this arguement will be moot.

I for one am still waiting on Apple to make a PB worth my $3500 investment. That I think is long overdue.

ryme4reson

Oct 8, 2002, 11:54 AM

The point you had said before was that the reason x86 sucked was that it was 25 year old technology.
For all purposes I think the PPC is a fast architecture, BUT and here is the but lets say the factor is 1.2 or 1.3, or 2.0 (for BACKTOTHEMAC) All that was well and fine when the clock speed was not a HUGE gap as it is today. Now I have the fastest Single Proc and my 933 is NOT NOT NOT the same speed as a 1.8PV or Athlon 1800+ Also, the 933 was offered by Apple only a few months ago, where a 1.8 can be had in the low end lines on the PC world where the iMac is supposed to compete.

My 933 on the 133 bus is only going to do so much. With the 933 they increased the pipelines(just like PV to scale MHZ) and increased the cache. As far as speed, I think Windows itself is fast software(2K and XP, and the x86 as an entire arch is fast (SYS, MEM, CPU, etc) It may not be the most effecient, or crash proof but who cares, its 2-3X in terms of speed FASTER(Machine speed, not actual). OSX.x may never be as fast as its Microsoft counterpart, but the services and UI are of greater importance.

Also, while intel released 3.0GHZ and new tech after new tech, are you still going to say Apples newest offering in 4 months say (Dual 1.4, with 2 SUPERDRIVES, or some other goodie to direct you away from its slow speed increase) is going to keep up?

Face it, as it stands x86 is CHEAPER, and FASTER, BUT I avoid PC's at all costs. 1. I live in Cupertino (Home of Apple) 2. I am more than an Apple user, I am a fan of its products.

This is an Apple site, and I am on an Apple as we speak, but I will not fall for the fallacious arguments you are trying to make

jefhatfield

Oct 8, 2002, 12:12 PM

Originally posted by Backtothemac
These test that this guy puts up are crap! The Athlon is overclocked to be a 2100+, none of the systems have the most current OS. I personally have seen great variations in his tests over the years, and personally, I don't buy it. Why test for single processor functions? The Dual is a DUAL! All of the major Apps are dual aware, as is the OS!

Try that with XP Home.

i don't think there is an easy way to test a mac vs a pc for speed issues

but overall, i like barefeats and i think those tests give one a general idea of what a machine can do and are not specifically one hundred percent accurate all the time in the tests

sometimes magazine comparisons between two pc machines are not equally matched in terms of ram, video card, etc...

one thing is certain, the athlon is faster than the duron, the pentium 4 is faster than the celeron, and the G4 is faster (in photoshop) than the G3...but beyond that, it is hard to get a perfect reading

my overclocked 2 cents;)

ryme4reson

Oct 8, 2002, 12:21 PM

one thing is certain, the athlon is faster than the duron, the pentium 4 is faster than the celeron, and the G4 is faster (in photoshop) than the G3...but beyond that, it is hard to get a perfect reading

Now I will agree with that!!!!

javajedi

Oct 8, 2002, 04:20 PM

Originally posted by Backtothemac

Why is the PC faster? It is the OS, not the processor. Windblows uses .dll's Dynamic link libraries. They allow programs to load 2.only what is needed (GUI, and primary API's) and then load pieces of the program as the user uses it. Macs on the other hand load all of the program into memory because, Mac's don't use dll files. So. It takes longer to load a program on a Mac, however once loaded the program will actually perform faster.

As far as Macs being slower at everything. Dude, you obviously have not put a PowerBook up against a PC based notebook recentlly have you? See we sell IBM and Apple. We recently put my 667 up against a 2.0GHZ IBM laptop. The 667 was faster at everything in photoshop than the PC, encoded MP3's faster, and the only it did slower was render HTML. Now you say how much faster? Doesn't matter. If it was .1 seconds faster, it still shows the superiority of the PPC design.

Sure OS X is a 25 year old architecture. My reference is to the flaws of the X86 vs the PPC architecture. If you would like to discuss the flaws in Windows compared to OSX. Well, arn would have to make a dedicated topic for us to discuss it.

Macs run slower than winblows machines. So what. Would you really like to run winblows fast? That would be cool. Sure my machine goes 2.8GHZ, but it crashes once a day. I have never crashed X. Not even when it was a PB. Oh, and btw. I am an MCP, and Apple certified, so yes, I do know what I am talking about.

Come on.. lets get real..

1) Macs don't use shared libraries? You must be using System 6. For the folks who aren't familiar with the concept of the shared library (what Microsoft calls a dynamic link library) simply put shared libs are object orientated pieces of code containing functions/methods and other objects that can be invoked upon from other code. Mac OS X being highly object orientated relies almost exclusively on shared libraries. In the modern world of software engineering we rarely find it necessary to statically build an executable. If you look back at OS 7/8/9, while not as much as 10, developers could take advantage of off the shelf code. (eg, sprockets, mp lib, etc). Also you are not accurate in saying OS X is a 25 year old archiecture.

1.5) Microsoft OS's that use versions of the Windows 2000 kernel (2000 itself and XP) just like Mach, have a hardware abstraction layer. The "DLL Hell" days (Windows ME and below) are over. This is no longer an issue with the new kernel. The fact of the matter is that my P4 2.8 machine running XP is equally as stable as my PowerBook G4 800 running Mac OS X. I have not *ONCE* had either one core dump or "blue screen". Sure programs screw up, and when they do, they die, not the OS. Both OS's are very mature.

2.) I have *literally* put my PC up against my PowerBook, and the PowerBook fails miserably. I've wrote a simple stopwatch Java application that iterate through floating point instructions, and if I my PC finished 2.5 times faster than the PowerBook. If you want more details (hell I'll even give you the code) of my app, I'll be glad to share it with the community. Playing/decoding MP3's faster on the Mac? No way in hell. Winamp uses 0-1% CPU, iTunes consumes 8-12%.

3.) You speak of flaws of the "x86 architecture" but do not provide us specifics as to why you say this. The x86 processor began in the late 70's when Intel first offered the 8086 as a CISC successor to it's 4004 line of processors. Many, many things have changed over the course of 20 years. Had they sit still (like the G4/motorola chip) intel wouldn't be selling products today, now would they? The G4 is not much more than an improved G3 series processor with vector processing instructions. Be honest (especially be honest to yourself!) if you look back and compare the G3/G4, you do see improvements, but not drastic improvements. More clock, the maxbus protocol (debatable), and more cache. One of the reasons why you see Apple adding cache like mad to it's recent products is because they are in between a rock and hard place with this Motorola chip. This is exactly the same approach AMD took with their failing processor, the K5/K6. I want you to contrast this to a P4 with an i850e chipset: Insanely high clock speeds, a 533mhz bus, fast memory with RIMMs @ 4.2GB/s, with a next stop of 9.6GB/s -- to MaxBus. You will soon see why the current generation of PowerPC processors is "inferior", dare I say it.

For the most part I think its fare to say that the current Macintosh hardware performance is “status-quo”. The current best of breed of Macintoshes are slower than the current best of bread PCs. Mac’s are slower - just accept it. I don’t like it any more than you do.

nixd2001

Oct 8, 2002, 04:25 PM

Originally posted by javajedi

3.) You speak of flaws of the "x86 architecture" but do not provide us specifics as to why you say this.

The floating point instruction set architecture of the x86 (silly stack based thing) is/was a naff design decision. I don't even know whether there are alternative routes to accessing FP ops on an x86 these days, as its ages since I've been interested in that level (tad of compiler writing in my history). [Intel did always work pretty hard to get IEEE FP conformance though, which is more than most other CPU mnfs.]

The limited number of GPRs is also a design flaw that has largely been worked around.

Maybe the best way to get an understanding of what Intel privately thinks is good/bad about x86 ISA is to look at what sorts of x86 instructions get translated into what sort of micro-ops internally - the larger the change, the less Intel like their original decisions.

javajedi

Oct 8, 2002, 04:33 PM

I'm actually not a Windows developer (hence my nick :) ) but from what I understand you can do most of your fp stuff using the P4's vector engine. I also wanted to add to my first post that in integer ops, the G4 only achives clock parity. It goes without saying that the massively clocked P4's will well outperform a G4 in integer.

nixd2001

Oct 8, 2002, 04:35 PM

Originally posted by WanaPBnow

now back to Apple. Apple is only gonna make machines that are faster than Intel (i.e. G5, G6 etc...) if we DEMAND it. If we are content with 800MHz note books, while IBM makes 2.0GHz and Alienware makes 2.6GHz ones that smoke us, then we are doing ourselves a disservice.

I think the real world is more complicated than this. If Apple did not have financial and shareholder issues to think about, you'd have an absolute stonker of a box on your desk. I think if you peer behind the commercial front,
Apple is just as keen to get something faster. But "keenness" doesn't mean they can roll a new solution out tomorrow - unfortunately a really dull set of real world issues keep getting on the way. SJ has some problems to solve and the measure of him will be whether he solves them. Sure, everyone would like him to solve them on their own timescales, but Apple doesn't have the Si R&D budget of Intel, so they have to work smarter. This may indeed mean they produce machines that by some measures (whether valid or invalid is not a debate I care to get into) don't stack up for a while. The question is, and indeed their survival, will be measured against, whether they can fix this. This will happen in old fashioned real world engineering timescales, not rumor board timescales.

I know it's easy to get frustrated thinking there should be something better, but I strongly DON'T believe that the deciding factor is whether you demand a change or not. If you really want to demand something, demand a larger revenue and market share, etc, and the rest will sort itself out.

UnixMac

Oct 8, 2002, 04:38 PM

Sadly the lack of a system bus faster than 133/167 and use of leading edge RAM technology is a major downside to Mac hardware. G4 with software optomized for it is still on par with P4, but when Altivec is not in the picture or MultiProcessor awareness, the Mac slips very fart behind. I still have faith that the G5 will make up for this gap.

As for OS X vs Windows 2000, I am not as technically aware as the above poster, however my own experience in a large office environment with heavy networking is that Windows 2000 has failed us. We are switching to Unix and Sun, because we can't afford the down time that windows 2000 is giving us, the cost advantage of windows not withstanding.

I have not come accross many large computer operations people that will tell me that Windows is a replacement for Unix. Not unless dealing with small size and limited budget.

nixd2001

Oct 8, 2002, 04:38 PM

Originally posted by jefhatfield

one thing is certain, the athlon is faster than the duron, the pentium 4 is faster than the celeron, and the G4 is faster (in photoshop) than the G3...but beyond that, it is hard to get a perfect reading

True, but hardly going to provoke torrents of postings of heated debate and disagreement - surely a necessity in modern society :p

my overclocked 2 cents;)

So that's 2 cents of irrational exuberence then?

javajedi

Oct 8, 2002, 04:39 PM

I completely agree. As a software guy myself (maybe I'm a bit biased :)) I think the real magic is software. I think most would agree with me that Apple has a rather "unique" approach to software engineering, that sets it apart from the rest of the pack. Afterall, this is the biggest reason we use Macintosh. In my opinion, this is much more important than speed.

javajedi

Oct 8, 2002, 04:49 PM

Originally posted by WanaPBnow
Sadly the lack of a system bus faster than 133/167 and use of leading edge RAM technology is a major downside to Mac hardware. G4 with software optomized for it is still on par with P4, but when Altivec is not in the picture or MultiProcessor awareness, the Mac slips very fart behind. I still have faith that the G5 will make up for this gap.

As for OS X vs Windows 2000, I am not as technically aware as the above poster, however my own experience in a large office environment with heavy networking is that Windows 2000 has failed us. We are switching to Unix and Sun, because we can't afford the down time that windows 2000 is giving us, the cost advantage of windows not withstanding.

I have not come accross many large computer operations people that will tell me that Windows is a replacement for Unix. Not unless dealing with small size and limited budget.

To clarify, I was referring to Windows XP and Mac OS X on the desktop, not server. I have had excellent experiences with both in terms of stability. As far as the Windows platform on the server side, again, the magic is in the software. I work for a modest sized isp, and we recently transitioned all of our production servers to bsd and linux blades. All of our web/dns/mx/mail/mrtg/etc machines are Unix. The result has been they are more reliable, and easier to maintain, not to mention the substantial less total cost of ownership.

UnixMac

Oct 8, 2002, 05:04 PM

We're on the same sheet of music, Java...

I for one don't know a thing about using XP/2000 on a desktop, as I have no desire to learn it. I was a windows man from the days of 3.1 thru 98SE, and then I had to go back to Apple, having left them with my IBM PCXT in 1982. I like the IIe, but IBM seemed to be more serious about software at the time. I missed the whole Mac thing, and only joined in with my lastest rig.

javajedi

Oct 8, 2002, 05:22 PM

Sorry about the rant earlier, but I had to address Backtothemac's logical fallacies.

I always tell people if you want to make an argument for the Mac, make it in software. Despite XP being rock solid, in my opinion it lacks the passion of 10. Everytime I turn on my Mac I can feel the amount of passion that was put into it, and think passion is a very important quality. Without passion you are doomed. This becomes obvious when you compare something like compare Windows Media Player (even 9 beta) to iTunes. I'm not going to go into details but IMO, there is no comparison. This is why we use Macintosh.

Passion is clearly Apple's best strength. Microsoft still has a long way to go in this, but they are starting to learn, too.

hvfsl

Oct 8, 2002, 05:34 PM

Linux runs programs faster than windows on intel hardware so Apple has a fast OS, just not fast hardware. Mac are the fastest in things like MP3 encoding, MPEG4/DIVX encoding and photoshop. But PCs are faster in games and 3D graphics. I have top of the range Macs and PCs at home and have done the tests. But the Macs speed is all thanks to AltiVec, if not a $1000 PC would be faster in PhotoShop than a top of the range Mac.

javajedi

Oct 8, 2002, 05:51 PM

Mac are the fastest in things like MP3 encoding, MPEG4/DIVX encoding ...[/B][/QUOTE]

1) DiVX performance on the mac absolutely blows.

2) After I read your little post I ran a simple benchmark comparing my $3500 top of the line PowerBook:

The P4 ripped and encoded a 6:20 song @ 128kbit/s in a total of 12 seconds. The same process (same song) @ 128kbit/s in iTunes took 47 seconds.

What does that say?

ryme4reson

Oct 8, 2002, 05:59 PM

It says the cd-rom on your Pb is slower than the PC. In addition the G4 sucks, but its the CD ROM speed making most of that difference

javajedi

Oct 8, 2002, 06:06 PM

Originally posted by ryme4reson
It says the cd-rom on your Pb is slower than the PC. In addition the G4 sucks, but its the CD ROM speed making most of that difference

Absolutely. To isoloate the cdrom drive on the PC, I seperated the process of ripping and encoding. Once I had the song ripped encoding took 5 seconds. I wish there was a way to just see how long encoding takes in iTunes, but I don't think you can do just this , I believe it only rips and encodes.

jefhatfield

Oct 8, 2002, 06:24 PM

Originally posted by nixd2001

True, but hardly going to provoke torrents of postings of heated debate and disagreement - surely a necessity in modern society :p

So that's 2 cents of irrational exuberence then?

no. just enough to get a decent woody going:D

UnixMac

Oct 8, 2002, 07:38 PM

I just got off the phone with an Apple tech and had a long discussion with him about my "concerns" about apple Hardware Tech. He basically all but agreed, and told me to pass my comments to Customer Care, and that he would not my arguements.

I know that I'm basically pissing in the wind, but I had to get it off my chest.

Now, Give me a PB worth my $3500 damn it!

DakotaGuy

Oct 8, 2002, 08:47 PM

Who really gives a damn?

I would rather be sitting at my "old" iMac DV with a sllllloooow 400Mhz G3 then my buddies new 2. whatever GHz Wintel computer. Why you might ask? Because mine works and works right everytime. He has already had his back to the store 3 times for service and faulty components, not to mention problems with XP. In fact, I can get more done in less time, because I have never experienced any downtime with my Mac. For the last 3 years it has never failed me once, never re-loaded the OS only upgraded it, and never had any hardware problems. Everyone says Apple's hardware is junk because it is not as fast. Okay so maybe you can buy a cheap PC with 2 million GHz, but I can tell you in the end the Apple will outlast it and be more productive.

Downtime and OS problems cause a lot more downtime, then a couple of seconds here and there. You complain about Mac speed, but what if, like most PC's Apple only cared about speed and not overall hardware and software quality...all we would have is a fast POS IMHO.

So as I might get flamed for this post, get off Apple's back. Their products are not the pieces of crap everyone on here tries to make them out to be. You pay more for Apple because they don't sacrifice quality. If you want only speed and don't care about software, OS, or hardware quality, then why are you here??? Get a cheapo PC. The new Macs are not slow computers, sure there are some PC's that are a little faster and win the old GHz race, but when you make a purchase you have to look at the entire picture. Look at everything the machine offers, value, quality, style, longevity, productivity, etc... Apple is better.

alex_ant

Oct 8, 2002, 09:45 PM

Originally posted by Abercrombieboy
So as I might get flamed for this post, get off Apple's back. Their products are not the pieces of crap everyone on here tries to make them out to be. You pay more for Apple because they don't sacrifice quality. If you want only speed and don't care about software, OS, or hardware quality, then why are you here??? Get a cheapo PC. The new Macs are not slow computers, sure there are some PC's that are a little faster and win the old GHz race, but when you make a purchase you have to look at the entire picture. Look at everything the machine offers, value, quality, style, longevity, productivity, etc... Apple is better.
I don't think many people here are making Apple's computers out to be pieces of crap. It's just tough to say something like "Apple's computers are about the slowest there currently are" with any sort of tact.

I would also disagree somewhat with the paying more for quality comment. I don't think you really pay more for quality when you buy a Mac. What you do pay for is anyone's guess - software, R&D, or whatever - but Apple is notorious for its very high margins. Whatever you pay more for, it's definitely not the hardware, because most (all?) Macs are made in the same massive Asian factories as the big PC manufacturers' are anyway.

And I disagree that all PCs are crap as you say they are. Windows has come a long way, like it or not, and PCs are not the BSOD-every-hour computers they used to be. They've gotten a lot better in recent years, and this is why so many Macrumors posters are worried and yelling at Apple to get a move on with the faster machines.

Alex

UnixMac

Oct 8, 2002, 10:01 PM

- but Apple is notorious for its very high margins. Whatever you pay more for, it's definitely not the hardware, because most (all?) Macs are made in the same massive Asian factories as the big PC manufacturers' are anyway.

Alex

This was exactly my point when I called Apple. I mean, we have lower tech everything, bus, RAM, Hard drives, Graphics cars, etc.....so where is the money going?

I'll tell you where, Apple and Dell are the only two hardware makers to post profits in the worst economy since 1980. The stock market is down 30% and Apple stock has not kept pace.

Also, Abercombieboy, go back to page two of this thread, and re-read my Hitler analogy, this is not about bashing Apple. I am a mac guy, it's about calling a spade a spade.

javajedi

Oct 8, 2002, 10:08 PM

Originally posted by alex_ant

I would also disagree somewhat with the paying more for quality comment. I don't think you really pay more for quality when you buy a Mac. What you do pay for is anyone's guess - software, R&D, or whatever - but Apple is notorious for its very high margins. Whatever you pay more for, it's definitely not the hardware, because most (all?) Macs are made in the same massive Asian factories as the big PC manufacturers' are anyway.

And I disagree that all PCs are crap as you say they are. Windows has come a long way, like it or not, and PCs are not the BSOD-every-hour computers they used to be. They've gotten a lot better in recent years, and this is why so many Macrumors posters are worried and yelling at Apple to get a move on with the faster machines.
Alex

I agree with you 110% all the way! Like I was saying earlier, my XP machine has never BSOD'd me. I used to have a shirt a long time ago that said, Macintosh 89' = Windows 95'. Now longer can I make this argument. Also very good point about the components.

Bewarned, ppl are going to flame us, but I don't care. I think you and I are being completely honost. Many of us here really want to see Apple lead the pack again in hardware.

AtomBoy

Oct 8, 2002, 10:46 PM

[QUOTE]Originally posted by Abercrombieboy
[B]Who really gives a damn?

I would rather be sitting at my "old" iMac DV with a sllllloooow 400Mhz G3 then my buddies new 2. whatever GHz Wintel computer. Why you might ask? Because mine works and works right everytime. He has already had his back to the store 3 times for service and faulty components, not to mention problems with XP. In fact, I can get more done in less time, because I have never experienced any downtime with my Mac. For the last 3 years it has never failed me once, never re-loaded the OS only upgraded it, and never had any hardware problems. Everyone says Apple's hardware is junk because it is not as fast. Okay so maybe you can buy a cheap PC with 2 million GHz, but I can tell you in the end the Apple will outlast it and be more productive.

Yeah, I agree with what you're saying, it's similar to my earlier post. What worries me is that most of my friends are telling me that XP is very stable (I haven't used it yet) and, if so, this negates a large part of our argument.

Years of crap MS OS's made me switch to Mac. I love OSX, and most PC fans with a decent working knowledge would agree that it's the best around. But Apple HAS to address the hardware issues in the Mac as soon as possible.

More and more ordinary people are using their computers for CD creation and video editing and for many, speed DOES matter.

DakotaGuy

Oct 8, 2002, 11:15 PM

I don't understand you guys, you say that Windows XP is now stable and maybe you are right, and you say that PC's are faster and the hardware is the same quality for less money.

I am getting close to replacing my old iMac and I have always been a Mac person, but maybe you are right PC's are better now. My buddy has had crappy luck with his, but it is a low priced one. I am going to keep my iBook. I have a Windows computer running 98 at the school where I teach, I don't like it, but I have never done anything with XP and from what you say and what I have started to read, XP sounds like an excellent operating system, just as good as OSX, and with lower prices and much better hardware I am going to seriously look at a new PC this winter and test it out. What is the best PC right now? Dell? Gateway? I have always been hell-bent against PC's, but when all I read anymore on Mac message boards is how good they have become then I need to go and check it out. I would prefer an all-in-one like my iMac. Gateway has the new Profile...does any other PC maker make a one-in-all?

I have always believed in buying the best product that offered more value, I have been a Mac guy, but when I hear Macs suck and PC's are better from people that actually like Macs and are not trolls, then I really have got to wonder, have I been wrong all along? and to think I just talked a buddy into a new iMac, I did not realize that PC's were this good now. He hated his old PC, but now they have became way faster then the Mac and more stable, I hope he will not be mad at me.

vniow

Oct 9, 2002, 12:57 AM

Originally posted by Abercrombieboy
I don't understand you guys, you say that Windows XP is now stable and maybe you are right, and you say that PC's are faster and the hardware is the same quality for less money.

Some facts and opinions based off of personal experience.:)

Yes, PCs are faster. Mhz or Ghz still isn't the best way of determining the power of the chip, you just can't compare 3Ghz with 1.25 Ghz, duals or not.
Granted the 1.25s aren't THAT slow, but if you just look at the numbers, one 3Ghz PIV looks a helluva lot faster than dual 1.25, and that does not look good. The Mhz myth may have worked in the past when it was actually true, but I hear nothing of it now.

As for stability, well, that all depends on a couple things.

1. I've heard a lot more problems with XP Home than I have XP Pro.
I don't know the exact details, but that's just what I've read.
Only occasionally does a person have a serious problem with Pro, but much more often with Home.

2. Hardware.
Specificaly, the right hardware. Apple's advantage is that they hand pick every piece of their hardware to make sure that everything works together right.
A PC manufacturer like Del, is not going to give you the best hardware because they are more concerned with cost over quality.
A manufacturer like Alienware for example, is more concerned with quality over cost. They too, like Apple, hand pick the right components to make sure everything works right, albeit mostly for gaming purposes, but the mission is still the same.

My personal experience with my PC has been good. The only time when it has ever crashed with XP Pro is when I installed RealOne. (what a POS program BTW)
After I removed it, no more crashes.
Sure various apps crash from time to time, but that can be said of any OS.
The reason being is that I picked the right combo of hardware and software (must be luck I guess) so I'm not going to be a switcher because my PC crashes all the time (that would be my parents, not me)
I'm going to be a switcher because I luuuuuuuuuuuuuuv the Cube. :D
It's what got me hooked on Macs in the first place and the reason I'm still here.
I like the community better. It's much tighter and friendlier than the PC community in my opinion.

The second reason why I'm going to be a switcher is because I don't trust Microsoft.
I don't like DRM, optional or not, it shouldn't be there in the first place, I don't like my media player spying on me, I don't like the fact that I can't uninstall a BETA, and I really don't like tha fact that I can't trust their updates.

Here's the EULA from a WMP 7.1 patch awhile ago:

You agree that in order to protect the integrity of content and software protected by digital rights management ('Secure Content'), Microsoft may provide security related updates to the OS Components that will be automatically downloaded onto your computer. These security related updates may disable your ability to copy and/or play Secure Content and use other software on your computer. If we provide such a security update, we will use reasonable efforts to post notices on a web site explaining the update.

Like what you read?
Didn't think so.
Another thing about their updates you should know (this one was more of an annoyance than a DRM threat, but God was it annoying)
When I first installed XP on my PC, Windows Messenger kept popping up. I looked for a way to get rid of it but the only way I found was to edit a .sys file in Notepad.
Potentially dangerous had this been a critical file and I didn't know what I was doing. Luckily, I did iknow what I was doing and I got rid of it permenently, or so I thought.
When SP1 was released, I downloaded it just to fix the vast number of security holes.
When I restarted my computer, there was my good buddy, Windows Messenger.
Every time I would start Outlook Express, that little icon would pop up and ask me if I wanted to set up a .NET account.
I got rid of it (again) but it was even more of a bitch the second time around.

Personally, I've had it with MS.
I don't have any problem with PC hardware (other than they still unclude serial, parallel and floppies) it's the software, specifically, the maker of the software which I'm fed up with.

Sorry for the long rant, I just have to have my turn at the http://www.rx7club.com/forum/images/smilies/soapbox.gif every once in awhile.:)

Wow, that's a lot of blue.:eek:

macmax

Oct 9, 2002, 02:35 AM

Originally posted by javajedi

Come on.. lets get real..

1) Macs don't use shared libraries? You must be using System 6. For the folks who aren't familiar with the concept of the shared library (what Microsoft calls a dynamic link library) simply put shared libs are object orientated pieces of code containing functions/methods and other objects that can be invoked upon from other code. Mac OS X being highly object orientated relies almost exclusively on shared libraries. In the modern world of software engineering we rarely find it necessary to statically build an executable. If you look back at OS 7/8/9, while not as much as 10, developers could take advantage of off the shelf code. (eg, sprockets, mp lib, etc). Also you are not accurate in saying OS X is a 25 year old archiecture.

1.5) Microsoft OS's that use versions of the Windows 2000 kernel (2000 itself and XP) just like Mach, have a hardware abstraction layer. The "DLL Hell" days (Windows ME and below) are over. This is no longer an issue with the new kernel. The fact of the matter is that my P4 2.8 machine running XP is equally as stable as my PowerBook G4 800 running Mac OS X. I have not *ONCE* had either one core dump or "blue screen". Sure programs screw up, and when they do, they die, not the OS. Both OS's are very mature.

2.) I have *literally* put my PC up against my PowerBook, and the PowerBook fails miserably. I've wrote a simple stopwatch Java application that iterate through floating point instructions, and if I my PC finished 2.5 times faster than the PowerBook. If you want more details (hell I'll even give you the code) of my app, I'll be glad to share it with the community. Playing/decoding MP3's faster on the Mac? No way in hell. Winamp uses 0-1% CPU, iTunes consumes 8-12%.

3.) You speak of flaws of the "x86 architecture" but do not provide us specifics as to why you say this. The x86 processor began in the late 70's when Intel first offered the 8086 as a CISC successor to it's 4004 line of processors. Many, many things have changed over the course of 20 years. Had they sit still (like the G4/motorola chip) intel wouldn't be selling products today, now would they? The G4 is not much more than an improved G3 series processor with vector processing instructions. Be honest (especially be honest to yourself!) if you look back and compare the G3/G4, you do see improvements, but not drastic improvements. More clock, the maxbus protocol (debatable), and more cache. One of the reasons why you see Apple adding cache like mad to it's recent products is because they are in between a rock and hard place with this Motorola chip. This is exactly the same approach AMD took with their failing processor, the K5/K6. I want you to contrast this to a P4 with an i850e chipset: Insanely high clock speeds, a 533mhz bus, fast memory with RIMMs @ 4.2GB/s, with a next stop of 9.6GB/s -- to MaxBus. You will soon see why the current generation of PowerPC processors is "inferior", dare I say it.

For the most part I think its fare to say that the current Macintosh hardware performance is “status-quo”. The current best of breed of Macintoshes are slower than the current best of bread PCs. Mac’s are slower - just accept it. I don’t like it any more than you do.

my pc with xp pro ed did crash a few times and it does.
on the other hand , my macs with os x do not

Pants

Oct 9, 2002, 04:18 AM

Ive been using xp pro for 3 months here at work, and I have to say I'm quietly impressed. Its never crashed, nothing has unepectedly quit (and its running a bunch of custom pci cards, so if ever it was flakey, id have expected it to be so with this rig...). My only complaint is the 'look' of it - osX does look nicer, but then osX is a lot less snappy.

So where does my money go to with Apple? I posses a bunch of apples, and each time I buy a new one i feel a little less 'happy' and a little more like a regular consumer. After all, the days of non proprietory hardware being used in apples are gone - its all usb and firewire (and not even cutting edge usb at that). Some of my reasons for disliking M$ are also beginning to surface with appl£ - .mac for a start. What osX has done is open my eyes to using linux at home (or maybe x86 solaris) ...switching? hmmm....

oh, and did anyone mention that apples floating point performance was good? no - its awful!

gopher

Oct 9, 2002, 07:28 AM

If Windows XP didn't have so much spyware attached to it, and required registration, and the insecurity that Microsoft is so famous for on its systems (yes there are still as many bugs and holes in XP for hackers to get through as in Windows 2000 and before), and the fact remains none of the source code is open, where at least some of Mac OS X is open and free for development purposes, I would have gone to Microsoft. Speed doesn't matter a hill of beans if your machine is so insecure you can't trust your bank numbers to it. Macs are faster in some cases than Windows XP, while slower in others and they maintain a level of security that doesn't require a firewall or anti-virus program anywhere near as much as Windows XP does.

I'd rather fly an airplane than a space shuttle with o-rings that leak.

What's more, who really wants to be forced to support Microsoft?
With a Mac you can avoid Microsoft altogether.

gopher

Oct 9, 2002, 07:32 AM

Originally posted by Pants
oh, and did anyone mention that apples floating point performance was good? no - its awful! [/B]

Oh really? Show me where PCs can do 18 billion floating point calculations a second!

benixau

Oct 9, 2002, 07:39 AM

alex_ant

Oct 9, 2002, 08:29 AM

Originally posted by Abercrombieboy
I don't understand you guys, you say that Windows XP is now stable and maybe you are right, and you say that PC's are faster and the hardware is the same quality for less money.

I am getting close to replacing my old iMac and I have always been a Mac person, but maybe you are right PC's are better now.
Nope, not better - faster. Nobody is saying Macs suck - they're saying Macs are slow. I paid $2300 for 550MHz of G4 molasses last year when I could have bought a PC notebook that kicked the pants off it performance-wise. But I don't regret my purchase decision. I would buy the same computer again today (well, maybe the iBook instead).

alex_ant

Oct 9, 2002, 08:31 AM

Originally posted by gopher
Oh really? Show me where PCs can do 18 billion floating point calculations a second!
Haven't we been over this before?

gopher

Oct 9, 2002, 08:41 AM

Originally posted by alex_ant

Haven't we been over this before?

Maybe we have, but nobody has provided compelling evidence to the contrary. The Mac hardware is capable of 18 billion floating calculations a second. Whether the software takes advantage of it that's another issue entirely. If someone is going to argue that Macs don't have good floating point performance, just look at the specs. If they really want good performance and aren't getting it they need to contact their favorite developer to work with the specs and Apple's developer relations. Apple provides the hardware, it is up to developer companies to utilize the hardware the best way they can. If they can't utilize Apple's hardware to its most efficient mode, then they should find better developers.

If you are going to complain that Apple doesn't have good floating point performance, don't use a PC biased spec like Specfp. Go by actual floating point calculations a second.
Nobody has shown anything to say that PCs can do more floating point calculations a second. And until someone does I stand by my claim.

DakotaGuy

Oct 9, 2002, 10:00 AM

Alex ant has made some good points on why Macs are a poor buy. They are so much slower and less stable then PC's these days according to everything I read. I still love my Mac, but since reading these message boards over the past year or so I have became more and more negative about Macs. Mac has lost the MHz war and are becoming slower and slower computers and has also lost out to XP for the best operating system, acording to so many people.

I am a consumer user, email, internet, MP3's, MS Word, digital camera photos, etc. I do like the iTunes, iPhoto, iMovie programs for what I do, but it sounds like with XP there is no longer any problems doing these things and they come loaded with programs that are just as easy to use. The sad thing as Apple was working on their switching campaign to switch people to Macs I am now considering switching to my first PC, because they have so much more megahertz and XP sounds so easy to use and stable.

Well I am broke right now so it will be next spring or summer until I buy a new computer, but as Mac has been going backwards on speed and their software is good, but not any better then Microsoft anymore I really should test out a new PC and see how it works for how I use a computer.

UnixMac

Oct 9, 2002, 10:07 AM

Originally posted by Abercrombieboy
Alex ant has made some good points on why Macs are a poor buy. They are so much slower and less stable then PC's these days according to everything I read. I still love my Mac, but since reading these message boards over the past year or so I have became more and more negative about Macs. Mac has lost the MHz war and are becoming slower and slower computers and has also lost out to XP for the best operating system, acording to so many people.

I am a consumer user, email, internet, MP3's, MS Word, digital camera photos, etc. I do like the iTunes, iPhoto, iMovie programs for what I do, but it sounds like with XP there is no longer any problems doing these things and they come loaded with programs that are just as easy to use. The sad thing as Apple was working on their switching campaign to switch people to Macs I am now considering switching to my first PC, because they have so much more megahertz and XP sounds so easy to use and stable.

Well I am broke right now so it will be next spring or summer until I buy a new computer, but as Mac has been going backwards on speed and their software is good, but not any better then Microsoft anymore I really should test out a new PC and see how it works for how I use a computer.

Or I have a better Idea: Call / Write Apple and complain about what you get for your hard earned $$$.......if enough people do, they will listen.

I for one am not ready to move on to PC....as I would have to learn Linux and find Linux versions of all my software....Windows XP never!

DakotaGuy

Oct 9, 2002, 10:21 AM

The funny thing is if I had never read a message board I would have never went and looked at a PC, because I just have always bought Macs, after 4 or 5 years, just went to the dealer and picked up a new one, I never used a PC except at school, which schools stuff is always years out of date anyway, so I just figured that this is what you had to pay for a good, fast, computer that will last 4 or 5 years, I have always been comfortable and pleased with my Macs, but this next when the DV is ready to be replaced, I am going to be smarter then I used to be and not just walk into the Apple dealer and pick up a new one, I am going to shop around and see if I like these all new PC's with XP. If I can save money and end up with a much faster, easier to use computer, then I am dumb to just go Apple like I always have. I don't know a lot about this freaking processor or that floating point, gigaflop, or whatever crap, I just want to buy something that works well and is a good value and I am sorry to say, but I have been blind to PC's and I see they have came so much farther then Macs have and also Microsoft is making some excellent software now. I am sad...because I used to love my Mackie and Booker, but now I get the point how crappy they really are compared to the PC's. ;o(

Pants

Oct 9, 2002, 11:13 AM

Originally posted by gopher

Maybe we have, but nobody has provided compelling evidence to the contrary. The Mac hardware is capable of 18 billion floating calculations a second. Whether the software takes advantage of it that's another issue entirely. If someone is going to argue that Macs don't have good floating point performance, just look at the specs. If they really want good performance and aren't getting it they need to contact their favorite developer to work with the specs and Apple's developer relations. Apple provides the hardware, it is up to developer companies to utilize the hardware the best way they can. If they can't utilize Apple's hardware to its most efficient mode, then they should find better developers.

If you are going to complain that Apple doesn't have good floating point performance, don't use a PC biased spec like Specfp. Go by actual floating point calculations a second.
Nobody has shown anything to say that PCs can do more floating point calculations a second. And until someone does I stand by my claim.

ahhhh...so to get performance from the damned thing, I have to write arcane altivec code yes? well, sorry, I and many like me, neither have the time nor the patience to hand wring performance like this. Jeez, the days of hand optimising code are thankfully long gone, except, it seems with a g4. And we have to of course assume that even this mythical 18 million flops is based on the assumption that we can get the altivec unit supplied with data? hmm... This is not acceptable - spec fp biased? well, yeah, because it doesnt justify your end argument - the fact that most other companies are 'happy' to stand by it is merely justification for its 'biased' nature yeah?

hmm.....

UnixMac

Oct 9, 2002, 11:31 AM

Well, lets hope that G5 will help the programmer and be less code intensive.

gopher

Oct 9, 2002, 11:38 AM

Spec fp is extremely biased because it assumes the case of zero error code. It doesn't measure raw performance like floating point calculations per second does. When errors occur in code, the Pentium grinds to a halt, sometimes even making the Pentium IV slower than the Pentium III that is a whole Ghz slower!

When RC5 and Genentech tests prove that raw performance the G4 is much faster than the Pentium IV or AMD, which it does, then it basically throws out the whole idea that Mhz matters. The G4 is 4 to 5 times faster.

As for hand optimizing code, you don't have to do it. What you do have to do is write developers of your software if you are displeased with how poorly they optimize code, or go seek better written software. That's why people who do video prefer Final Cut Pro over Adobe Premier in many cases.

As for other factors which influence speed, let's look at the internet browsing which people constantly harp about being slower on a Mac than a PC. My 768/128 DSL on my G4/800 Flat Panel iMac is easily 5 times faster browsing webpages than my T-3 based Windows 2000 Pentium III 1 Ghz machine. I wait and wait on this Pentium III. Goes to show you processor isn't everything. What really matters is how well written the software is. Mozilla for Mac OS X, and Chimera for Mac OS X, as well as iCab for Mac OS X are much faster than Explorer for any platform.
It is in software, and until people realize it is in the software, complaining about hardware is not going to matter a hill of beans. 64 bit processors are so slow to be developed because so few people have made their software optimized for 64 bit operations. If people need it, they'll get it. For 99% of computer use processor speed of machines nowadays is more than adequate both on PC and the Mac. Adding peripherals though is much easier on the Mac, and installing and removing software still is much easier on the Mac without causing a crash. And ease also means less time spent. So what does speed of the machine have to do with productivity when machines like PCs are so hard to manage? Nothing! Because when it is easier, it takes less time. That's the Mac advantage.

Cappy

Oct 9, 2002, 12:09 PM

Faster this, faster that. Software here, software there. Upgrade this, upgrade that. Blah! Blah! Blah!

I like computers just as much as the next geek but when you break it all down what can't you do with computers and OS's from even 5 years ago that you can today? In truth the only real benefits are that Windows and Mac systems are faster and more stable than they used to be. For Macs to make any inroads more innovation is the key. They cannot compete on price/performance and never will. Moving to x86 could help of course. Note that most people don't buy Macs because of price and not because of performance issues.

So with this in mind if you set aside the small contingent that truly needs faster Macs for their jobs in professional settings, the Mac really needs lower prices and more innovation. Do that and Apple will have a winner that they would need to open up the clone market again just to be able to make enough of them.

Frankly this whole benchmark argument is stupid for most of the people here. Benchmarks should be used as nothing more than a guide and you should have multiple sources if you want to base a purchasing decision from them alone. Too many people treat them as the end all be all.

Pants

Oct 9, 2002, 12:11 PM

Originally posted by gopher
[B]Spec fp is extremely biased because it assumes the case of zero error code. It doesn't measure raw performance like floating point calculations per second does. When errors occur in code, the Pentium grinds to a halt, sometimes even making the Pentium IV slower than the Pentium III that is a whole Ghz slower!
yes, but your assuming that

When RC5 and Genentech tests prove that raw performance the G4 is much faster than the Pentium IV or AMD, which it does, then it basically throws out the whole idea that Mhz matters. The G4 is 4 to 5 times faster.

As for hand optimizing code, you don't have to do it. What you do have to do is write developers of your software if you are displeased with how poorly they optimize code, or go seek better written software. That's why people who do video prefer Final Cut Pro over Adobe Premier in many cases.
what when the altivec unit gets starved of data?

Im talking from a 'doing' point of view - when a machine i have spent 2.5k wont allow me to use its best feature (with gcc) then i feel cheated.

Backtothemac

Oct 9, 2002, 12:22 PM

Ok,
Tell you what. I am setting up a Dual 867 for the Mall store with 256 MB Ram, and this thing is installing Windows under VPC faster than the PIII 733's that we have here. They are not SLOW! They may not have as fast a clock speed as a PC but who really gives a crap!

Macs have again taken the lead in my opinion with OS X and the Dual 1.25.

No one will ever change my mind. Call me a zealot, but that is what I think.

nixd2001

Oct 9, 2002, 12:43 PM

Originally posted by Pants

what when the altivec unit gets starved of data?

Im talking from a 'doing' point of view - when a machine i have spent 2.5k wont allow me to use its best feature (with gcc) then i feel cheated.

Is this that you think GCC can never invoke Altivec or that it doesn't know how to optimise from arbitrary code to Altivec?

ryme4reson

Oct 9, 2002, 12:56 PM

Macs have again taken the lead in my opinion with OS X and the Dual 1.25.

No one will ever change my mind. Call me a zealot, but that is what I think.

I am in a critical thinking class, and we spend 3 hrs a day, 2 times a week talking about people who rationalize like BackToTheMac. "No one will ever change my mind"
That is complete suppression of all the facts that are given to you. I think its a shame that you logically in your mind come to these conclusions. I bet you think Friday the 13th is dangerous, and you have lucky numbers huh :)

javajedi

Oct 9, 2002, 01:29 PM

Originally posted by Backtothemac
Ok,
Tell you what. I am setting up a Dual 867 for the Mall store with 256 MB Ram, and this thing is installing Windows under VPC faster than the PIII 733's that we have here. They are not SLOW! They may not have as fast a clock speed as a PC but who really gives a crap!

Macs have again taken the lead in my opinion with OS X and the Dual 1.25.

No one will ever change my mind. Call me a zealot, but that is what I think.

How incredibly ignorant. You know as well as everyone else here that this is complete ************. What really pisses me of is when people with agendas put spin on an issue. This is exactly what you are doing. Your remark is equally as arrogant as saying "PC's are faster and nobody will change my mind because they boot in 10 seconds in Windows XP and the Mac takes over a minute."

This attitude does not help Apple, and it does nothing but hurt the Mac community. You know folks it's interesting when you look back to the early to mid 90's at all the Windows bigots... you know those people who we tried to show them something intresting, something different, and something cool... the Macintosh, and they are entirely closed minded and extremely aggrogant. No matter how what you did, said, or anything else mattered. I'm seeing the exact same thing here, and it's discusting.

I would suggest you “Think Different.”..

Ateazz

Oct 9, 2002, 01:57 PM

Hi guy's

A job has to be done so use the best software to do that.
In my case OS-X can't be beaten.
Look at "The Knowledgenavigator", not about speed but easy to use.

Make life easy, and Think different.

greetz

gopher

Oct 9, 2002, 01:59 PM

Even more interesting was the advertisement from Apple when the Blue and White G3 came out, and how cool the case was when it opened so simply, they said the "Mac was more open-minded." What amazes me though is there are still just as many Windows users who are biggots in this world as Mac users who are, or even more so. Being though in the minority as we are, Mac users feel all the more need to defend themselves against this biggotted crowd. Apple is trying its hardest to level the playing field by its Switch campaign, and show that it is on the same playing field so that Windows users can't ignore us and demean us with lies, fabrications, and these myths. Only we have some people come on this board who claim that the Mac is much slower. For what purpose? How do we fight ignorance? I work with PCs only because the job I enjoy the most is run by an organization that is biased against Macs, and I'm not in the position to decide how to move Macs into the organization. But it certainly doesn't help to have people who would bad mouth the Mac. It makes us feel more in the minority and feel more the need to defend ourselves. Let's stop this attrocity. Show them what the Mac can do, and it is a viable solution. And Arne, if you are reading these boards, please delete clearly PC biased hate posts ASAP.

javajedi

Oct 9, 2002, 02:19 PM

Originally posted by gopher
Even more interesting was the advertisement from Apple when the Blue and White G3 came out, and how cool the case was when it opened so simply, they said the "Mac was more open-minded." What amazes me though is there are still just as many Windows users who are biggots in this world as Mac users who are, or even more so. Being though in the minority as we are, Mac users feel all the more need to defend themselves against this biggotted crowd. Apple is trying its hardest to level the playing field by its Switch campaign, and show that it is on the same playing field so that Windows users can't ignore us and demean us with lies, fabrications, and these myths. Only we have some people come on this board who claim that the Mac is much slower. For what purpose? How do we fight ignorance? I work with PCs only because the job I enjoy the most is run by an organization that is biased against Macs, and I'm not in the position to decide how to move Macs into the organization. But it certainly doesn't help to have people who would bad mouth the Mac. It makes us feel more in the minority and feel more the need to defend ourselves. Let's stop this attrocity. Show them what the Mac can do, and it is a viable solution. And Arne, if you are reading these boards, please delete clearly PC biased hate posts ASAP.

Actually you are solidifying my point. How do we fight ignorance? It's very simple. You fight ignorance with facts; you fight ignorance with truth. As far as "But it certainly doesn't help to have people who would bad mouth the Mac..." No. Myself, and the many people on this board who share my viewpoint are not hurting the Mac. We are being sincere, honost and truthful. If you think my post was a "PC biased hate post" you are deeply mistaken. I'm sorry if you can't understand that.

Backtothemac

Oct 9, 2002, 02:50 PM

Dude, I am a microsoft certified professional and spend all day dealing with PC problems. I have worked on the slowest ones and the fastest ones. The dual power macs fly! On top of that they do not run winblows. PC's suck because of the OS period. My mind will never be changed on that because I have almost 2 decades of dealing with Microsoft's crap!

TheFink

Oct 9, 2002, 03:10 PM

Originally posted by Cappy
Faster this, faster that. Software here, software there. Upgrade this, upgrade that. Blah! Blah! Blah!

I like computers just as much as the next geek but when you break it all down what can't you do with computers and OS's from even 5 years ago that you can today? In truth the only real benefits are that Windows and Mac systems are faster and more stable than they used to be. For Macs to make any inroads more innovation is the key. They cannot compete on price/performance and never will. Moving to x86 could help of course. Note that most people don't buy Macs because of price and not because of performance issues.

So with this in mind if you set aside the small contingent that truly needs faster Macs for their jobs in professional settings, the Mac really needs lower prices and more innovation. Do that and Apple will have a winner that they would need to open up the clone market again just to be able to make enough of them.

Frankly this whole benchmark argument is stupid for most of the people here. Benchmarks should be used as nothing more than a guide and you should have multiple sources if you want to base a purchasing decision from them alone. Too many people treat them as the end all be all.

One point you are missing is that I can upgrade my PC 5 times over and still have the cost be lower than buying a new Mac. So a mac can run modern apps 5 years later. For the same price, I can get a PC, drop a new HD, video card, and CPU in a few years later and then end up with a leading edge PC, and not a bleading edge mac. My B&W G3 isn't even upgradable to the speeds of the current iMacs. With a PC a new mobo and CPU will get me into whatever is the current CPU class....

javajedi

Oct 9, 2002, 04:34 PM

Originally posted by TheFink

One point you are missing is that I can upgrade my PC 5 times over and still have the cost be lower than buying a new Mac. So a mac can run modern apps 5 years later. For the same price, I can get a PC, drop a new HD, video card, and CPU in a few years later and then end up with a leading edge PC, and not a bleading edge mac. My B&W G3 isn't even upgradable to the speeds of the current iMacs. With a PC a new mobo and CPU will get me into whatever is the current CPU class....

Very ture. For better or wose, that is what happens when you get locked into a single vendor that sells proprietary hardware *or* software.... just look at Sun :)

UnixMac

Oct 9, 2002, 05:51 PM

Bottom line.......Macs are over priced....we just keep buying them and so why would the accountants want to change that gig?

MacCoaster

Oct 9, 2002, 06:06 PM

Originally posted by Backtothemac
Dude, I am a microsoft certified professional and spend all day dealing with PC problems. I have worked on the slowest ones and the fastest ones. The dual power macs fly! On top of that they do not run winblows. PC's suck because of the OS period. My mind will never be changed on that because I have almost 2 decades of dealing with Microsoft's crap!
Then use FreeBSD on the PC. FreeBSD ****in' flies. PCs don't suck. A particular OS does.

UnixMac

Oct 9, 2002, 06:08 PM

You are right, If I could get a Thinkpad T31 loaded with A GUI Unix preloaded, I would.

I am not ready to go into uncharted waters yet however....

MrMacMan

Oct 9, 2002, 06:55 PM

True that macs are overpriced but you do gain the operating system which kicks micrsoft xp sh*tless. They don't have the apps and other wounderful features.
As for performance we have lost in most catorgies due to, maybe companyies not writing code for the G4 altevic (sp?).
For many reasons Pc's have taken the lead in market share for a while now.
They have many choices, dell, gateway, and tons of other brands along with the possibality of Makeing Your Own.
Apple has: Apple for the OS
Apple for many of the Apps.
IBM/Motorola for the low clock speed processors.
Compared to the PC side:
Microsoft for the OS (mostly, linux users)
Microsoft and Many other fo apps.
Intel or AMD for nice processors...
We have the dis-advantage, for many of these factors...
Still many of us fight on for the better computer, and to fight off the world of monopoliyes.

jefhatfield

Oct 9, 2002, 07:48 PM

Originally posted by MrMacman
True that macs are overpriced but you do gain the operating system which kicks micrsoft xp sh*tless.

that alone is enough reason for me to buy mac ;)

it's not way more expensive for what you get, but i would like to see ibooks be $999 us and tibooks $1999 for starters

towers can come down a couple hundred and emac could stand to be $999 and imac at $1099

crt imac can go for $599 and os x can go for $99 dollars

but i still prefer the mac os and mac hardware over windows and pc boxes/laptops

UnixMac

Oct 9, 2002, 07:53 PM

Originally posted by jefhatfield

that alone is enough reason for me to buy mac ;)

it's not way more expensive for what you get, but i would like to see ibooks be $999 us and tibooks $1999 for starters

towers can come down a couple hundred and emac could stand to be $999 and imac at $1099

crt imac can go for $599 and os x can go for $99 dollars

but i still prefer the mac os and mac hardware over windows and pc boxes/laptops

Amen Brother!

javajedi

Oct 9, 2002, 08:03 PM

Someone inquired about the benchmark Java console program I created:

It's located at http://members.ij.net/javajedi

I've also included the source (FPMathTest.java) for the curious.

Download the class file and invoke it from Terminal via "java FPMathTest"

I must warn you in advance my PowerBook G4 performs miserabily. It does not utilize Altivec(G4), SSE2(P4), or other vector processing extensions.

Enjoy :)

Kevin

alex_ant

Oct 9, 2002, 08:08 PM

Originally posted by gopher
Maybe we have, but nobody has provided compelling evidence to the contrary.
You must be joking. Reference after reference has been provided and you simply break from the thread, only to re-emerge in another thread later. This has happened at least twice now that I can remember.
The Mac hardware is capable of 18 billion floating calculations a second. Whether the software takes advantage of it that's another issue entirely.
My arse is capable of making 8-pound turds, but whether or not I eat enough baked beans to take advantage of that is another issue entirely. In other words,

18 gigaflops = about as likely as an 8-pound turd in my toilet. Possible, yes (under the most severely ridiculous condtions). Real-world, no.
If someone is going to argue that Macs don't have good floating point performance, just look at the specs.
For the - what is this, fifth? - time now: AltiVec is incapable of double precision, and is capable of accelerating only that code which is written specifically to take advantage of it. Which is some of it. Which means any high "gigaflops" performance quotes deserve large asterisks next to them.
If they really want good performance and aren't getting it they need to contact their favorite developer to work with the specs and Apple's developer relations.
Exactly, this is the whole problem - if a developer wants good performance and can't get it, they have to jump through hoops and waste time and money that they shouldn't have to waste.
Apple provides the hardware, it is up to developer companies to utilize the hardware the best way they can. If they can't utilize Apple's hardware to its most efficient mode, then they should find better developers.
Way to encourage Mac development, huh? "Hey guys, come develop for our platform! We've got a 3.5% national desktop market share and a 2% world desktop market share, and we have an uncertain future! We want YOU to spend time and money porting your software to OUR platform, and on top of that, we want YOU to go the extra mile to waste time and money that you shouldn't have to waste just to ensure that your code doesn't run like a dog on our ancient wack-job hack of a processor!"
If you are going to complain that Apple doesn't have good floating point performance, don't use a PC biased spec like Specfp.
"PC biased spec like SPECfp?" Yes, the reason PPC does so poorly in SPEC is because SPECfp is biased towards Intel, AMD, Sun, MIPS, HP/Compaq, and IBM (all of whose chips blow the G4 out of the water, and not only the x86 chips - the workstation and server chips too, literally ALL of them), and Apple's miserable performance is a conspiracy engineered by The Man, right?
Go by actual floating point calculations a second.
Why? FLOPS is as dumb a benchmark as MIPS. That's the reason cross-platform benchmarks exist.
Nobody has shown anything to say that PCs can do more floating point calculations a second. And until someone does I stand by my claim.
An Athlon 1700+ scores about what, 575 in SPECfp2000 (depending on the system)? Results for the 1.25GHz G4 are unavailable (because Apple is ashamed to publish them), but the 1GHz does about 175. Let's be very gracious and assume the new GCC has got the 1.25GHz G4 up to 300. That's STILL terrible. So how about an accurate summary of the G4's floating point performance:

On the whole, poor.******

* Very strong on applications well-suited to AltiVec and optimized to take advantage of it.
** But these are relatively few.
*** And optimizing for it costs time and money.
**** Miserable on all double-precision floating point under all circumstances.
***** Miserable on all integer code under all circumstances.
****** Miserable on standard cross-platform code.

There you have it, G4 performance in a nutshell.

alex_ant

Oct 9, 2002, 08:12 PM

Originally posted by Abercrombieboy
Alex ant has made some good points on why Macs are a poor buy. They are so much slower and less stable then PC's these days according to everything I read.
Macs aren't a poor buy, though... they're only a poor buy if your primary concern is maximum performance. I doubt they're any less stable than PCs. They are slower, but in my experience they are much more enjoyable computers to use. You will have to weigh your need for performance against this.

alex_ant

Oct 9, 2002, 08:26 PM

Originally posted by gopher
Spec fp is extremely biased because it assumes the case of zero error code. It doesn't measure raw performance like floating point calculations per second does. When errors occur in code, the Pentium grinds to a halt, sometimes even making the Pentium IV slower than the Pentium III that is a whole Ghz slower!
I have a question for you:

Why does the Motorola G4 do so poorly in SPEC, while:

The MIPS R12000 & R14000,
The Intel Pentium III, 4 & Celeron,
The AMD Athlon,
The HP/Compaq PA-RISC,
The HP/Compaq Alpha,
The Sun SPARC,
The IBM Power3 & Power4,

all thoroughly trounce it? Only the Athlon and Pentium are x86 compatible. The MIPS R12000 only runs at 500MHz and it still kicks the snot out of the 1GHz G4. Why is that? Honestly, you don't believe Apple is at the mercy of a vast conspiracy which is the plot of SPEC and the processor manufacturers, do you?
When RC5 and Genentech tests prove that raw performance the G4 is much faster than the Pentium IV or AMD, which it does, then it basically throws out the whole idea that Mhz matters. The G4 is 4 to 5 times faster.
At certain highly specialized tasks, yes. Because these are two of the very few tasks which are ABLE with ANY amount of tweaking to perform well on the G4.
As for hand optimizing code, you don't have to do it. What you do have to do is write developers of your software if you are displeased with how poorly they optimize code, or go seek better written software.
Great idea.

Dear Microsoft,

I am displeased with the performance of Word v.X on my Mac (PowerBook G4 667). The cursor always seems to lag, and the application doesn't respond nearly as quickly as it does on my similar PC notebook. Could you like, fix this? Throw a little AltiVec in there, couldn't cost you more than $50,000.

Thanks,
Joe User
As for other factors which influence speed, let's look at the internet browsing which people constantly harp about being slower on a Mac than a PC. My 768/128 DSL on my G4/800 Flat Panel iMac is easily 5 times faster browsing webpages than my T-3 based Windows 2000 Pentium III 1 Ghz machine. I wait and wait on this Pentium III. Goes to show you processor isn't everything.
So your argument has changed from "the G4 isn't slow" to "processor isn't everything anyway?"
It is in software, and until people realize it is in the software, complaining about hardware is not going to matter a hill of beans.
Of course "it is in the software." "It" is also in the hardware. "It" is in both. Apple needs faster software. They have been improving in that area. They need faster hardware as well. They have not been improving nearly as much as they need to be in that area.
64 bit processors are so slow to be developed because so few people have made their software optimized for 64 bit operations. If people need it, they'll get it. For 99% of computer use processor speed of machines nowadays is more than adequate both on PC and the Mac. Adding peripherals though is much easier on the Mac, and installing and removing software still is much easier on the Mac without causing a crash. And ease also means less time spent. So what does speed of the machine have to do with productivity when machines like PCs are so hard to manage? Nothing! Because when it is easier, it takes less time. That's the Mac advantage.
Finally, something you said that I agree with!

alex_ant

Oct 9, 2002, 08:32 PM

Originally posted by gopher
Only we have some people come on this board who claim that the Mac is much slower. For what purpose?
To show people that Macs are not as fast as Apple claims them to be, and to send Apple a message that they need to get their hardware in gear already. "We" want Apple to succeed as much as you do. What we don't want is for Apple to become complacent, as it has recently, and sell nothing but high-priced boxes full of yesterday's technology. (PC100/133 across the board, and crippled DDR in the Power Macs. No Firewire2, no USB2, no ATA-133. Is this 2002 or is it 1999?)
And Arne, if you are reading these boards, please delete clearly PC biased hate posts ASAP.
Silence your opposition - fabulous.

UnixMac

Oct 9, 2002, 08:47 PM

Alex you have made some very cogent points. I hope someone at Apple will listen.

javajedi

Oct 9, 2002, 09:34 PM

Alex, thank you for setting the record straight. I am so sick and tired of hearing the over and over highly fallacious arguments. In many ways these ppl are worse than Windows bigots. They *think* they are educated but aren't; at least Windows bigots don't pretend.

I can personally vouch for the miserable performance on double-precision floating point: The Java test I made is a simple timing comparison of a double-loop of 200,000,000 type double fp ops (multiply,square root, and addition).

Lower scores are better:

G4 800: 104251
P4 2.6: 5890

*VIA C3 Ezra: 103043

Incidentally I ran the test on my linux "cube" box. Actually more of a rectangle- but hey? :) Looks like this http://www.tech-report.com/reviews/2001q4/shuttle-sv24/index.x?pg=1

Anyways, I put in a VIA C3 processor. 800 mhz, runs very cool, no fan required. The chip is extremely reasonable.. I paid $29 for it 3 months ago. In my benchmark this low end, elcheapo $29 chip outperformed/equaled my $3500 PowerBook.

Jesus Jumping Christ ppl.. wake up and listen to what alex is saying; he is *NOT* arbitrarily pulling this out of his ass.

You may hear a bunch of flames from others, but not me. I for one (and many others on this board) thank you for taking the time. Regardless though, no matter what, there will always be those individuals that will not listen to logic and reason. Instead they will dismiss the truth along with anyone and everything as being “PC biased”. People need to stop treating this like religion and start being real.

DakotaGuy

Oct 9, 2002, 10:11 PM

I headed into the city after I was done teaching today and decided to go into the Gateway Country store and check out the new PC's. They are FAST and XP does seem just as nice as OSX. The guy quoted me some great prices as well. I want an all in one so I am looking at getting a new Profile. The guy told me that it is a lot faster then the iMac because the iMac has only 800MHz and even the cheapest Profile has a 1.7 Ghz processor. I use a computer at home for things like internet, email, digital photography, MP3's, etc. He showed me how great XP handles all of that stuff. I was impressed, before everyone slams the PC they really should go out and check out the new ones running XP.

Like I said before I never considered getting a PC, but after reading comments over and over by people on here I can see their point on what computer is becoming a better value for people like me who use a computer like I do.

It will probably be about a year until I get a new computer, I feel comfortable with the Mac and I do like OSX, but they seem like they are becoming poorer and poorer machines. My magical price point is around $1200-$1500 and I can't go over that. Like I said before it will probably be a year before I actually upgrade my desktop. I love my iBook and won't part with that, but I might try a Profile for a new desktop. I like the new eMac for the price, but by next year the eMac might be at 1 GHz but the Profile will probably be at 3Ghz and it just seems like a very poor value for the price.

javajedi

Oct 9, 2002, 10:33 PM

Absolutely. That's why I felt it was so important to comment. The Apple hardware has been standstill. I don't like this anymore than the other guy, but unfortunately it's an inescapable fact. A select few of the people here have become complacent over status-quo, old technology and don't even realize it. These people are doing both themselves and Apple a disservice.

I also think it's very important in this day in age to keep an open mind. If we look back at history, the m68k machines lagged behind x86. Then along came the 601/604, that turned the tables. Today Mac users are once again behind the times in hardware. Don’t worry though, it won’t always be like this. By the time you are ready to buy a new desktop I’m optimistic that Apple will have a solution to the G4 problem. Also keep in mind that within that 1 year Mac OS X will continue to evolve, it’s only going to get better.

But also keep in mind, (and I don’t think this will be the case) but if that does not happen, and in a year from now you see the Mac platform stuck in the same boat as it is today, it would be incredibly foolish to invest thousands of your hard earned dollars on one.

Good luck!

AtomBoy

Oct 9, 2002, 11:01 PM

I'm kind of caught between a rock and a hard place.

Speed is important for me: CD-burning, video-editing, animation-rendering. For that reason the last computer I bought was a Quicksilver. It was the obvious choice at the time.

I imagined that my next computer would be another Mac to replace my ageing PC. Now it's not so clear. From the informed posts by new P4/XP users on this site it's clear that PC could do the things I want it to do more quickly and, arguably, with comparable stability.

BUT, I'm an expat living in Japan. One huge advantage of OSX is unicode. My Mac has a Japanese OS, which is great for my wife, but when I'm using the Mac I can switch the user language to English. Much of our Japanese software is also unicode compatible, so we can buy one program that can be used in either of our native languages. This is very cost-effective in the long-run.

I'm prepared to wait until next year when, hopefully, Apple will be using G5 chips from IBM that are much closer to those from Intel/AMD. I don't need my Mac to be the fastest computer out there (the advantages of OSX would bridge the gap) but I want it to be comparable if I'm going to shell out the extra bucks.

I don't really want to use XP. On-line activation and security issues still put me off.

If, however, Apple fail to deliver an impressive new hardware set next year, my next computer may well be PC.

I hope not, but you have to be realistic...

j763

Oct 10, 2002, 01:54 AM

Originally posted by TheT
I think Mac users just live in their happy little world and think their computers are still the fastest... well, wake up!

couldn't agree more. you use macs for software not for the absolute $#!+ apple has under-the-hood. i was at this MUG meeting the other day and the question was raised as to whether a mac was the fastest thing out there for graphics. i laughed at the suggestion and said "No way". this guy next to me, who was obviously a mac bigot (not necessarily a bad thing) said "You're wrong. They are the fastest thing out there. The Velocity Engine makes the powermac g4 the fastest machine out there for graphics. Blah blah blah blah blah......". I just turned to him and said "SGI Workstations". that was the end of the conversation (he didn't know what an sgi workstation was).

all that said, i've got a dual 1.25 and it's an excellent machine... but you just have to realise that no, it's not the fastest thing out there.

[ANTI-WINDOWS]
BUT... i'd like to raise this important point. wtf are the win32 users using their CPU power for? Typing up word documents really fast? browsing the web with Internet Exporer v6.000.21312.185726351;SP1? or perhaps having to wait only 10 seconds for windows media player to launch? win32 is simply a craptacular operating system to the extent where it shouldn't be recognized (and i certainly don't recognize it) as a real operating system. mac and *nix (excl. linux-on-the-desktop) is where it's at. get over it.
[/ANTI-WINDOWS]

MacCoaster

Oct 10, 2002, 02:06 AM

Originally posted by javajedi
Lower scores are better:

G4 800: 104251
P4 2.6: 5890
8342, 8302, 8312, 8312, 8292, 8292, 8302, 8302... averaging 8307 on AMD Athlon Thunderbird 1.4GHz under Windows XP. Will test under FreeBSD and Linux later.

MacCoaster

Oct 10, 2002, 02:21 AM

Originally posted by javajedi
Someone inquired about the benchmark Java console program I created:

It's located at http://members.ij.net/javajedi

I've also included the source (FPMathTest.java) for the curious.

<snip>

Kevin
That was me. :)

Thanks. See above post for my results. I even ported your Java code to C# (so similar, it scared me!) and got slightly lower numbers.

8152, 8151, 8162, 8142, 8172, 8142, 8161, 8152... all for a final average of 8154.25.

[edit: whoa, recently got 7891... running it more to average]
[edit #2: 7891, 7892, 7902, 7891, 7882, 7892, 7882, 7881... all for a final average of 7889.125]

You may have the source code/binary to test on your Windows computer (or Linux, with Mono; or BSD, with Microsoft's ROTOR)--just give me a hoot.

ryme4reson

Oct 10, 2002, 02:59 AM

Well I tested my G4 933, and I have CHUD tools installed so I can disable my L2 and L3 cache. I also could not get the java to work so I compiled with C++, its the same stuff, but I used time() with gave me seconds, so * 1000 to get the adjusted scores

Here are my scores

933 256L2 2MBL3 79 seconds or 79000
933 NO L2 or L3 124 seconds or 124000
933 L2 only 79 seconds
933 L3 only 79 seconds

Judging by these scores I have to think that CHUD is not working and it only worked with completely disabled. as the diff of 45 seconds.

And you can get CHUD from apple ftp.apple.com

Needless to say it takes me 79 seconds when a PV is completing this in 5-10 seconds, something is wrong!! (the the G4)

Lastly, I have not seen BACKTOTHEMAC telling us how great the G4 is lately, must be installing Win 2K under VPC with a stopwatch in 1 hand, an apple in the other, and a smile on his face...

<EDIT> I am gonna try to run this on my brothers 333 celeron on a 66MHZ bus with 320 RAM, I know my 933 is not the fastest, but maybe it just found its competition. :) </EDIT>

MacCoaster

Oct 10, 2002, 04:06 AM

Originally posted by ryme4reson
<EDIT> I am gonna try to run this on my brothers 333 celeron on a 66MHZ bus with 320 RAM, I know my 933 is not the fastest, but maybe it just found its competition. :) </EDIT>
I had a friend run my C# implementation on his 333MHz Celeron o/c'ed to 375MHz. His result was 108085. *GASP!* 375 MHz Celeron BEATS 933MHz PowerPC G4 (no L2/L3). This is interesting.

MacCoaster

Oct 10, 2002, 04:10 AM

Originally posted by Backtothemac
These test that this guy puts up are crap! The Athlon is overclocked to be a 2100+, none of the systems have the most current OS. I personally have seen great variations in his tests over the years, and personally, I don't buy it. Why test for single processor functions? The Dual is a DUAL! All of the major Apps are dual aware, as is the OS!

Try that with XP Home.
Quoting your OLD post...

Why would anyone run XP Home on a dual processor. They should be running Windows XP Pro.

But to play the devil's advocate... let's see... Windows can use up to 32 processors (Windows .NET). Try that with Mac OS X! Oh wait, you can't. Of course, no 32-way Power Macs available.

BTW, Steve Jobs has made it clear that since his time at NeXT that it's the software, damn it! If it weren't for his work at NeXT, we would not have the Cocoa library nor Mac OS X.

nixd2001

Oct 10, 2002, 04:13 AM

Originally posted by AtomBoy
I'm kind of caught between a rock and a hard place.

Speed is important for me: CD-burning, video-editing, animation-rendering. For that reason the last computer I bought was a Quicksilver. It was the obvious choice at the time.

I imagined that my next computer would be another Mac to replace my ageing PC. Now it's not so clear. From the informed posts by new P4/XP users on this site it's clear that PC could do the things I want it to do more quickly and, arguably, with comparable stability.

BUT, I'm an expat living in Japan. One huge advantage of OSX is unicode. My Mac has a Japanese OS, which is great for my wife, but when I'm using the Mac I can switch the user language to English. Much of our Japanese software is also unicode compatible, so we can buy one program that can be used in either of our native languages. This is very cost-effective in the long-run.

I'm prepared to wait until next year when, hopefully, Apple will be using G5 chips from IBM that are much closer to those from Intel/AMD. I don't need my Mac to be the fastest computer out there (the advantages of OSX would bridge the gap) but I want it to be comparable if I'm going to shell out the extra bucks.

I don't really want to use XP. On-line activation and security issues still put me off.

If, however, Apple fail to deliver an impressive new hardware set next year, my next computer may well be PC.

I hope not, but you have to be realistic...

As a rule of thumb, there will always be a faster machine available if you're prepared to spend more, and whatever you buy will become obsolete somewhere between next day and next year. If speed is the only consideration, you'll probably be disappointed whatever you do and whenever you do it.

Decide your budget. Decide what you want to do with it. Find a shop where you can try it and see if it works for you. Work on the basis that you won't get the perfect machine, so decide whether whatever you're considering is good enough. Consider the software you'll want (and it's price!) as well as the hardware. Work on the basis that different people want different things from their computer(s) and get something that matchs your needs rather than whichever gets the loudest shouts for (or against).

And no, I'm not going to try and make a recommendation because I don't know enough about the ins and outs of all the details of what will meet your requirements.

D*I*S_Frontman

Oct 10, 2002, 08:34 AM

I love my Macs. I love OS X. Having a reliable machine running unobtrusively and intuitively makes me more productive and lets me enjoy the process more.

That being said, I am now pretty much immune to the reality distortion field that surrounds Steve Jobs. High-end Macs are dog-slow at most things when compared with high-end AMD/Intel offerings. On the occasional perfectly-tweaked AltiVec intensive tasks a Dual G4 can just barely eek out a frog hair margin victory over the competition. Otherwise they get smoked.

The software side of Apple is doing great things, however. When good ol' Steve said Apple would be "innovating" its way through the recession, this has got to be what he meant. And they are succeeding on that front. OS X spanks all comers when it comes to features, interface, and stability. NO contest.

I think everyone knows that the latest Mac offerings are stop-gap measures. Steve is treading water calmly, trying not to panic, waiting on his two primary chip manifacturers, IBM and Motorola, to deliver the real world processors the R&D has been promising for some time now and rescue Apple.

Not to say Apple is in immediate financial trouble. With Steve at the helm, Apple will continue to be profitable. Apple is in serious credibility trouble, however, among professionals due to lackluster performance. 100mhz mobos are a complete joke for $1k + systems and 167mhz top speed with crippled DDR as the best available? Yikes.

Mac people don't expect the world. We just want machines on par with the rest of the computing world, because we KNOW we already have far and away the best OS working environment. We just don't have that right now. It is my hope that IBM will charge in like the Cavalry and drop a powerful new chip in Apple's lap that will bring Macs right back to the top performance-wise.

Then those switch ads will have some teeth.

jefhatfield

Oct 10, 2002, 11:17 AM

Originally posted by alex_ant

Macs aren't a poor buy, though... they're only a poor buy if your primary concern is maximum performance. I doubt they're any less stable than PCs. They are slower, but in my experience they are much more enjoyable computers to use. You will have to weigh your need for performance against this.

i agree with your balanced comment

it has to be better than, "macs rule all the time or pcs rule all the time"

things are just not that black and white:p

benixau

Oct 10, 2002, 11:29 AM

Dear lord,

If you have any heart for 25 million of your wiser men, please make apple use the power4 chip at lightning speeds, and please lord, do it soon. It is becoming hard for us mac men to defend ourselves.

PS. If you could give me a brand new top of the line mac while your at it i wouldnt mind either.

Edit: There is no blasphemy intended here

TheFink

Oct 10, 2002, 11:37 AM

Originally posted by alex_ant
My arse is capable of making 8-pound turds, but whether or not I eat enough baked beans to take advantage of that is another issue entirely. In other words,

18 gigaflops = about as likely as an 8-pound turd in my toilet. Possible, yes (under the most severely ridiculous condtions). Real-world, no.

Do you have any pics of your closest attempt at an 8 lb turd?

jefhatfield

Oct 10, 2002, 11:45 AM

Originally posted by benixau
Dear lord,

If you have any heart for 25 million of your wiser men, please make apple use the power4 chip at lightning speeds, and please lord, do it soon. It is becoming hard for us mac men to defend ourselves.

PS. If you could give me a brand new top of the line mac while your at it i wouldnt mind either.

Edit: There is no blasphemy intended here

it reminds me of that janis joplin song...imagine the music in the background ;)

when motorola was stuck at 500 mhz for 18 months, then i started becoming very vocal about dropping them on the high end stuff and going to ibm when there were rumors that they can make a faster chip

but motorola has climbed, though somewhat slowly, out of their pit, and are doing ok

sure, it may be many months ahead when the pcs hit 3.5 ghz+, but i think motorola will deliver a 2 ghz chip sometime next year

and really, after 2 ghz, does anyone think speed will be a top five factor in why one buys a machine?

when i was a computer salesman in 1999, speed and price were the top two issues...and while price will remain a top issue until all computers get really cheap, i think speed will diminish in its importance for the average consumer

many seem to like the dual 1.25 ghz machines and we know apple will speed bump their whole line of powermacs early next year, if not sooner

a lot of the complaints about apple's speed on their machines sound like a lot of benchmark stats reading and not real world usage

most of us do email, internet, word processing, spreadsheets, and light graphics most of the time in the majority of users in the field...of the many machines i sold, i did not come across one high end graphics user or audio professional who needed more than our store was able to provide them

alex_ant

Oct 10, 2002, 12:04 PM

Originally posted by TheFink
Do you have any pics of your closest attempt at an 8 lb turd?
Yes actually!

benixau

Oct 10, 2002, 12:07 PM

maybe, anyway I tell my buddies that a mac works. It is great to have all that speed but here is a thought:

I have a PC that is really 5x as fast as a mac
I spend 5x as long setting it up as i do the mac
I am also 5x less productive on it then a mac as it keeps breaking

I may not be a great mathematician but 5x5 = 25. 25x less usable than a mac. Personal experience proves this.

Long Live King Mac!! Long Live King Mac!!

For the dark side to wonder at how easy I get my life done

MacCoaster

Oct 10, 2002, 12:24 PM

Originally posted by benixau
If you have any heart for 25 million of your wiser men, please make apple use the power4 chip at lightning speeds, and please lord, do it soon. It is becoming hard for us mac men to defend ourselves.
Simply won't happen unless you're happy to shell out a half million dollars for a POWER4 supplied Power Mac.

ddtlm

Oct 10, 2002, 01:10 PM

alex_ant:

Great to see you fighting the good fight!

others:

As true as it is that the G4 is slower than most of its compeditiors, when it is performing as bad as the numbers that some people have posted here then I can just about assure you that the Mac is at a severe software disadvantage. I mean really, look at the specs of a G4, the worst case performance delta between it and a top-of-the-line PC should be maybe 4x or 5x, not these 10x and higher numbers. There are very few situations when a G4 should do less work per clock than a P4.

So lets try to remain realistic here. It is virtually gaurenteed that the actual performance potential of a 1.25ghz G4 falls between that of a 1.3ghz P4 and the 2.8ghz P4.

EDIT:
Almost forgot to talk about SPEC. Some time ago, the only SPEC results that I know of for Macs were obtained by c't:

http://www.heise.de/ct/english/02/05/182/

In these they showed the G4 was more or less the same speed as a P3 of equal clock (1.0ghz) in the integer tests, when both where done done with GCC. Intel's compiler can give the P3 at 30% edge or something, so we know that the quality of compiler is hurting the G4 here. It is not fair to look at SPEC and declare other chips to be a zillion times faster than the G4, simply because they are all using very good compilers whereas Apple is stuck with GCC. Apple is working to improve GCC however, so things may get better.

(In SPEC FP the G4 get beat worse, I might add. Compilers played a role for sure, but can't explain the whole loss.)

MacCoaster

Oct 10, 2002, 02:28 PM

Originally posted by ddtlm
I can just about assure you that the Mac is at a severe software disadvantage.
And hardware. No hardware double precision floating point Altivec unit.

Backtothemac

Oct 10, 2002, 02:41 PM

Originally posted by benixau
maybe, anyway I tell my buddies that a mac works. It is great to have all that speed but here is a thought:

I have a PC that is really 5x as fast as a mac
I spend 5x as long setting it up as i do the mac
I am also 5x less productive on it then a mac as it keeps breaking

I may not be a great mathematician but 5x5 = 25. 25x less usable than a mac. Personal experience proves this.

Long Live King Mac!! Long Live King Mac!!

For the dark side to wonder at how easy I get my life done

There someone in this thread actually gets it. Sure the PC may be faster, SO FRIGGIN WHAT! I will never go back to a PC, and do not know a single Mac user that really would. Sure we bitch and moan, but the fact is that we know that we are on a much better platform!

ddtlm

Oct 10, 2002, 03:50 PM

MacCoaster:

(Don't be offended if I repeat myself a few times, I want to make sure everyone gets it. Not trying to say anything about you in particular.)

Anyway, you missed my point. I know very well that the G4 is at a hardware disadvantage. I pretty much said that when you see a G4 being beat by margins greater than 4x or 5x, then you can be pretty sure there is ALSO, note ALSO, a software disadvantage. Hopefully everyone will see what I meant that time. :)

I'm glad to see that many people here agree that the G4 isn't really a faster chip than the x86 competition, but I want to see moderation and understanding of the "benchmarks" that have popped up showing an unbelievably bad situation for the G4.

Remember folks, if the test shows a G4 slower than a P4 per clock cycle then the test probably is handing the software advantage to the P4. Note, for perfect clarity, that I said per clock cycle performance and not overall performance.

MacCoaster

Oct 10, 2002, 04:03 PM

ddtlm:

Ah, thanks for clarifying.

javajedi

Oct 10, 2002, 04:46 PM

Originally posted by ddtlm
MacCoaster:

(Don't be offended if I repeat myself a few times, I want to make sure everyone gets it. Not trying to say anything about you in particular.)

Anyway, you missed my point. I know very well that the G4 is at a hardware disadvantage. I pretty much said that when you see a G4 being beat by margins greater than 4x or 5x, then you can be pretty sure there is ALSO, note ALSO, a software disadvantage. Hopefully everyone will see what I meant that time. :)

I'm glad to see that many people here agree that the G4 isn't really a faster chip than the x86 competition, but I want to see moderation and understanding of the "benchmarks" that have popped up showing an unbelievably bad situation for the G4.

Remember folks, if the test shows a G4 slower than a P4 per clock cycle then the test probably is handing the software advantage to the P4. Note, for perfect clarity, that I said per clock cycle performance and not overall performance.

If you recall the java program I created ran without modification on a p4/g4, in addition others on this board have ran it on their Athlon systems. The code is unbelievably simple, I did not give the p4 any "software advatage" whatsoever (and as I said, the code remained changed).

The only difference (and this could be a big difference), is the different versions of the jvm on the mac, and on windows. On my p4 pc I was using jvm version 1.4.x, while Mac OS X is limited to 1.3.x. To factor this variable out of the equation I decided to port it directly to Mac OS X and created a cocoa application. Java is now out of the equation.

The cocoa version, as well as it's source is located at http://members.ij.net/javajedi/FPMathTest.dmg.gz

My PowerBook G4 800 now takes *only* 94 seconds running natively. The P4 running the slower java version (slower because it’s interpreted and the byte code translation) finishes it in 5.9 seconds. Please feel free to take a look. I don't see how the P4, or any other of the x86 processors are cheating. I've tried to make it as fair and possible - to the extent of creating a cocoa app.

Thanks for your thoughts!

Kevin

UnixMac

Oct 10, 2002, 06:34 PM

my 500mhz MP did it in 87 seconds.

I am amazed however that a P4 can do it in 1/20 that time.... It almost says to me that there is a flaw in how software is coded. Can you use the Altivec to improve this?

I seem to recall that FP on the G4 was superior to PIII of double the MHz, so how can the P4 be THAT MUCH faster?

javajedi

Oct 10, 2002, 06:45 PM

This weekend I'm going to try to vectorize it with the Altivec and make it available for you guys. Frankly I don't know how simple or difficult this will be, but I'm going to look into it. As far as the code itself.. well.. it's very basic. Not only was it not vectorized for the G4, it wasn't vectorized for the P4. If anything the other platforms are at a software disadvatage because it's being ran under Java. The Mac OS X version is native code.

I think what we have learned from all this is that the G4 has a *REAL* problem with integer and double precision floating point. Ofcourse going to Altivec would bypass these registers and help considerably. But that just goes to show you without Altivec code you are far behind everything else.

Once again I'll see what I can do about an Altivec version, it should be very intresting indeed.

EDIT: I should also note that your 500MP didn't benifit from the extra processor, all of the math is being done in the main event loop.

javajedi

Oct 10, 2002, 07:10 PM

I just ran the cocoa version on a 700mhz iBook..

get this: 73 seconds! Still very slow compared to x86, but considerably faster than my 800mhz G4 w/L3 cache??
If I recall the processor in the iBook is a 750FX IBM chip.

Amazing. All the more reason to go with an IBM chip for the future Pro Macs.

Thought you guys might find this intresting..

Kevin

ddtlm

Oct 10, 2002, 07:55 PM

javajedi:

Yes, the JVM is the deciding factor here. If the Java takes that damn long on a G4 but goes fast on a P4, can can rest assured that the JVM Apple is distributing sucks compared to whatever one the x86 machines are using.

There is no way in heck that the performance delta can be so large without a large difference in quality of JVM. G4's may be slower, but they are not as slow as those number indicate.

Like I've been saying, when you start to see 5x leads by the PCs you need to start asking questions about the fairness of the benchmark. The G4 is better than 1/5 the speed. There are very few things were a P4 can get better performance per clock than a G4.

BTW:
Your G3 results as bizzarre as well, because of the contrast between them and the G4 results. Do not take it as proof one way or the other of the G3 or other IBM chips being superior to the G4. What we have here are raw numbers that defy a simple explanations. We should ask why these numbers are popping up, rather than running off with them as if they were uttered by a great voice in the sky or somthing.

javajedi

Oct 10, 2002, 10:28 PM

Originally posted by ddtlm
javajedi:

Yes, the JVM is the deciding factor here. If the Java takes that damn long on a G4 but goes fast on a P4, can can rest assured that the JVM Apple is distributing sucks compared to whatever one the x86 machines are using.

There is no way in heck that the performance delta can be so large without a large difference in quality of JVM. G4's may be slower, but they are not as slow as those number indicate.

Like I've been saying, when you start to see 5x leads by the PCs you need to start asking questions about the fairness of the benchmark. The G4 is better than 1/5 the speed. There are very few things were a P4 can get better performance per clock than a G4.

BTW:
Your G3 results as bizzarre as well, because of the contrast between them and the G4 results. Do not take it as proof one way or the other of the G3 or other IBM chips being superior to the G4. What we have here are raw numbers that defy a simple explanations. We should ask why these numbers are popping up, rather than running off with them as if they were uttered by a great voice in the sky or somthing.

I should note that the 90 second and 72 second results I just recently posted are from my cocoa implementation, not java.. so the jvm is out of the picture now on the mac.

Do not take it as proof one way or the other of the G3 or other IBM chips being superior to the G4.

Don't worry, I don't make assumptions like that. And no, I don’t think this does defy simple explanations. I will say that, what we are starting to see here is evidence that the scalar units (integer and fpu) in the IBM 750FX (G3) are more efficient than those in the Motorola G4.

If this is true, then my program hit it right on the nail. Also if this is true, it means there exist theoretical situations when using non altivec code that it would be faster on one of these newer G3 chips.

Also what alex said about how tedious it was to make altivec code, I would agree there is some truth to this. When you vectorize code (either for the P4 or G4), if you don't watch your p's and q's you can actually slow *down* your code. Just because you use the nice and special vector registers on these G4 and Pentium 4 processors does not mean you gain 5 times the speed. You literally have to take your methods back to the drawing board. You will only get peak performance out of pipelined, fully vectorized code.

None the less, scalar operations on both G3/G4 are miserable compared to x86. The JVM is no longer the deciding factor in the performance delta. It's out of the equation on the Mac since the benchmark is now a 100% native cocoa application with c code and no longer java. Mean while on the x86, the benchmark remains java.

70-ish seconds navtive on a G3
90-ish seconds on a native on a G4
5.9-6-ish seconds running under JVM 1.4.1 on a P4

ddtlm

Oct 11, 2002, 01:45 AM

javajedi:

70-ish seconds navtive on a G3
90-ish seconds on a native on a G4
5.9-6-ish seconds running under JVM 1.4.1 on a P4
Admittedly I am getting lost in what all the numbers people have mentioned are for, but looking at these numbers you have here and assuming that they are doing the same task, you can rest assured that the G3/G4 are running far inferior software. AltiVec and SSE2 or not, there is just nothing that can explain this difference other than an unfair playing field. There is no task that a P4 can do 11x or 12x the speed of a G4 (comparing top-end models here). The P4 posseses nothing that runs at 11x or 12x the speed. Not the clock, not the units, the bandwidth to memory and caches are not 11x or 12x as good, it is not 11x better at branch prediction. I absolutely refuse to accept these results without very substantial backing because they contradict reality as I know it. I know a lot about the P4 and the G4, and I know a lot about programming in a fair number of different languages, even some assembly. I insist that these results do not reflect the actual performance of the processors, until irrefutable proof is presented to show how they do.

I guess the 70 and 90 don't surprise me a lot for the G3/G4, depending on clock speed difference. But all this trendy wandwagon-esque G4-bashing is not correct just cause every one else is doing it. There are things about the G3 that are very nice, but the G4 is no slouch compared to it, and given the higher clock that it's pipeline allows, the G3 really can't keep up. The G4 not only sports a better standard FPU, but it also sports better integer units.

ryme4reson

Oct 11, 2002, 02:14 AM

If you know about programming languages, and still refuse to accept the scores on the test, check this out:

Here is the code snippet in question: (C not java, for the sqrt function)
double x1,x2,x3 ;
for (x1=1; x1<=20000; x1++) {
for(x2=1; x2<=20000; x2++) {
x3 = sqrt(x1*x2);
}
}
Very simple, 3 variables of double precision. 2 for loops that and 1 to each number, then multiply the 2 and square it.

This should not take 73 seconds on my 933 and 6 seconds on a PV 2.4 Gig.

Also, if the MHTZ myth was so true, then why would Apple be investing time and money into merklar. Imagine Head of Hardware: "today we release OSX on x86. Sure it was slower in the past to the the MHTZ myth, but now its not"

I think apple knows the G4 is a pile of crap, but they have no options, so they are hopefully finding a new supplier while doing there best to make the code as optimized as possible.

Not the clock, not the units, the bandwidth to memory and caches are not 11x or 12x as good

If you are a believer of the Myth then you should not find it hard to believe that this CAN be true. The PV is just faster, and better optimized hardware wise to accept standard code.

Apple has pushed that the G4, and the PowerMacs are faster for sometime. They say sure our harddrives are slower, but we are still faster. Our system bus is slower, but the computer is faster. Our Ram is slower, but the computer is faster. Sure our Processors are 50% slower, but still guys are computers are faster, and they look good. If you believe this BS, then surely looking at the sinple code, and listening to the results of people who are not selling or pushing anything cant be 2 hard to believe.

And yes I am a mac user, and if Apple is still in business in another year, my next computer will be a mac.

javajedi

Oct 11, 2002, 08:48 AM

Originally posted by ddtlm
javajedi:

Admittedly I am getting lost in what all the numbers people have mentioned are for, but looking at these numbers you have here and assuming that they are doing the same task, you can rest assured that the G3/G4 are running far inferior software. AltiVec and SSE2 or not, there is just nothing that can explain this difference other than an unfair playing field. There is no task that a P4 can do 11x or 12x the speed of a G4 (comparing top-end models here). The P4 posseses nothing that runs at 11x or 12x the speed. Not the clock, not the units, the bandwidth to memory and caches are not 11x or 12x as good, it is not 11x better at branch prediction. I absolutely refuse to accept these results without very substantial backing because they contradict reality as I know it. I know a lot about the P4 and the G4, and I know a lot about programming in a fair number of different languages, even some assembly. I insist that these results do not reflect the actual performance of the processors, until irrefutable proof is presented to show how they do.

I guess the 70 and 90 don't surprise me a lot for the G3/G4, depending on clock speed difference. But all this trendy wandwagon-esque G4-bashing is not correct just cause every one else is doing it. There are things about the G3 that are very nice, but the G4 is no slouch compared to it, and given the higher clock that it's pipeline allows, the G3 really can't keep up. The G4 not only sports a better standard FPU, but it also sports better integer units.

Keep in mind this test does not reflect balanced system performance. The point of this exercise has been to determine how the G4's FPU compares to an assortment of different processors and operating systems.

I'd like to know you you qualify "inferior software" on the x86. If the P4 is some how cheating, then all of the other processors are cheating as well. Again, we ran the exact same code. We even made it into C code on the mac for maximum speed. In fact I'd like for you to check the code out for yourself, so you can see there is no misdirection here. Keep in mind, other people here have ran it on Athlons in Linux and still get sub 10 second times. I've also had a friend of mine (who i can trust) run it under Yellow Dog on a G4, he got 100+ seconds. And I did not tell him the scores we've been getting on the Mac, I had him run the test first and tell me how long it took before I even said anything. The JRE and now Mac OS X have been factored out of this equation.

When you look at operations like these, for example scalar integer ops, that's all register. The fsb, bsb, or anything else doesn't matter. This is a direct comparison between the two units on the G4 vs everything else. Also, my question to you is, in what way are the integer and fpu units "better" in the G4? I did not build the chip so I can't say weather they are better or not better than those in the 750FX, but I can say I've ran a fair benchmark comparing the FPU on the G4 from everything to a P4, Athlon, C3, G3, different operating systems, on x86 Windows and Linux, and on the Mac, Mac OS X and Yellow Dog. The results are consistent across the board. What more "proof" do you want?

UnixMac

Oct 11, 2002, 09:04 AM

How does it run on an UltraSparc III 900?

How does it run on an Alpha?

Lets get an assortment of score, there could be a code bug for the G4, I am not an expert, but 10-20 times slower sounds like science fiction.

jefhatfield

Oct 11, 2002, 09:12 AM

when i got my ibook, which was manufactured in summer-1999 and listed for $1599 us, i got a 300 mhz G3 processor, 32 MB of 66 mhz sdram, 3 GB hard drive, 4 MB agp graphics, and os 9.0

the next day i bought a compaq presario 1272 laptop, manufactured in spring-1999, $1599 us, and i got a 366 mhz amd k6-2 processor, 32 MB of 66 mhz sdram, 4.3 GB hard drive, 2 MB pci graphics, and windows 98

i would clearly say that these two machines were marketed for students and home users who were then looking for a bargain computer under sixteen hundred dollars

while the higher clock speed compaq presario had a larger hard drive, more output ports, more software bundled, pcmcia, and floppy against the single usb ibook;

i found the ibook to be much faster in everyday use for e-mail, internet, and word processing

it would be fun to get an $1199 ibook and get an $1199 dell laptop and use these machines every day for three years and see what kind of performance i get from them

...of course, at $1199, the pc laptop would give me a dvd optical drive vs. the cd-rom in the ibook, and a 14" inch screen vs. the ibook's 12" inch screen, and the pc would include much more software:p

MacCoaster

Oct 11, 2002, 09:16 AM

Originally posted by WanaPBnow
How does it run on an UltraSparc III 900?
I don't know. I'll run it on an UltraSPARC II sometime when I can. My step-dad's box isn't loaded up yet.
Lets get an assortment of score, there could be a code bug for the G4, I am not an expert, but 10-20 times slower sounds like science fiction.
Really? Code bug? How? It's a simple C/C#/Java/obj-C program. The G4 shouldn't be so slow with a task oh so simple. It's also no bug that Altivec doesn't include hardware double precision floating point. But then again, we weren't testing them with hardware support--just testing the pure CPU power. In fact, if you don't believe us--please, we beg you, look at the source code. Nothing Altivec/SSE/SSE2/3DNow/any of that crap there. 10-20 times slower isn't science fiction when it comes to double precision floating point on the G4. It simply blows.

UnixMac

Oct 11, 2002, 09:36 AM

Oh well, I'm out of my league on this.... I'll defer to others..

javajedi

Oct 11, 2002, 10:57 AM

I think it was Back2TheMac who posted earlier in this thread "x86 plain sucks". The reason why he belives the x86 ISA and CISC are inferior is because Apple put out a bunch of marketing in the early days of the PowerPC touting RISC as superior new technology. In today's world, RISC processos really aren't RISC, and CISC processors really are CISC.

I recommend anyone who still believes in this spin to read this:
http://www.arstechnica.com/cpu/4q99/risc-cisc/rvc-1.html

It's most informative.
Enjoy

jefhatfield

Oct 11, 2002, 11:32 AM

Originally posted by javajedi
I think it was Back2TheMac who posted earlier in this thread "x86 plain sucks". The reason why he belives the x86 ISA and CISC are inferior is because Apple put out a bunch of marketing in the early days of the PowerPC touting RISC as superior new technology. In today's world, RISC processos really aren't RISC, and CISC processors really are CISC.

I recommend anyone who still believes in this spin to read this:
http://www.arstechnica.com/cpu/4q99/risc-cisc/rvc-1.html

It's most informative.
Enjoy

it's really most fascinating...thank you

some of us hardware side IT people often make fun of the software IT people and it is often because of the introverted way most of them act or their lack of knowledge of the hardware side of things

but what's interesting is that the hardware side techies like network engineers and desktop techs would not have anything to implement and maintain if it wasn't for those coders who make it all possible

i always hear a lot about the hardware side of apple's products and the praise they get when things are done right, but i rarely hear about the heroes in the background, the developers who make it all run smoothly

of all the products apple has ever made, the mac operating systems is what really makes a mac a mac:D

snoopy

Oct 11, 2002, 12:01 PM

Hate to drop in late like this, but the G3 had the same FPU as the 603, not the better one in the 604. When Motorola built the G4, they did not upgrade the FPU, but added AltiVec. This is what I understand. So, yes, double precision floating point does run poorly, with that old 603 FPU.

Inhale420

Oct 11, 2002, 12:26 PM

Originally posted by j763

[ANTI-WINDOWS]
BUT... i'd like to raise this important point. wtf are the win32 users using their CPU power for? Typing up word documents really fast? browsing the web with Internet Exporer v6.000.21312.185726351;SP1? or perhaps having to wait only 10 seconds for windows media player to launch? win32 is simply a craptacular operating system to the extent where it shouldn't be recognized (and i certainly don't recognize it) as a real operating system. mac and *nix (excl. linux-on-the-desktop) is where it's at. get over it.
[/ANTI-WINDOWS]

you gotta be ****ing kidding me. it's so amusing to witness the brainwashed and ignorant roam the earth. yes, i use the latest version of ie and browse these forums 10x faster than whatever mac browser you're using. i only have the default ie on my mac, because there's no point in installing other browsers when you have a pc.

i also have a hell of an easier time developing for the web using the tabbeb-based version of dreamweaver and coldfusion studio. i export 3ds artwork to flash, and the performance of my 2 year old 1ghz athlon is amazing. and when i'm done with work, I USE MY PC AS A GAME MACHINE. the only reason i have a mac, is because i really want to use them for 2d graphics, but apple really ****ing do something brilliant if they expect me to upgrade.

so can you explain what you mean by 'not recognizing' windows? that statement made absolutely NO sense. don't be such a bigot.

javajedi

Oct 11, 2002, 12:26 PM

What you are saying makes a lot of sense. Now that I think about, I too recall reading this somewhere.

Now that we know the real truth about the "better standard FPU", I thought it was time to shed some light on non vectorized G4 integer processing.

It still does 200,000,000 calculations, but this time I'm multiplying ints.

Motorola 7455 G4@800Mhz: 9 seconds (Native)
IBM 750FX G3@700Mhz: 7 seconds (Native)
Intel P4@2600Mhz 2 seconds (Java)

PowerPC 7455 integer processing is consierabley better than floating point (obviously less work doing ints), but still less per cycle than the Pentium 4.

Very intresting the G4 looses both floating point and integer to the IBM chip, at a 100MHz clock disadvantage.

I'm still waiting to see that "better standard FPU" in the G4. It seems the G4 is absolutely useless unless you are fortunate to have vectorized (AltiVec) code.

PCUser

Oct 11, 2002, 12:44 PM

This isn't going to further the discussion any, but... javahedi, perhaps you could post a link to the C code? I'd very much like to compile it with GCC under Linux and Windows. Just a curious benchmark, IMO. :) Thanks!

(Doesn't the benchmark do 1,600,000,000 calculations? 20,000 x 20,000 x 4 = 1,600,000,000... am I missing something? It does two adds, one multiply, and one sqrt per cycle. The loop cycles 400,000,000 times... ?)

Backtothemac

Oct 11, 2002, 12:49 PM

Originally posted by Inhale420

you gotta be ****ing kidding me. it's so amusing to witness the brainwashed and ignorant roam the earth. yes, i use the latest version of ie and browse these forums 10x faster than whatever mac browser you're using. i only have the default ie on my mac, because there's no point in installing other browsers when you have a pc.

i also have a hell of an easier time developing for the web using the tabbeb-based version of dreamweaver and coldfusion studio. i export 3ds artwork to flash, and the performance of my 2 year old 1ghz athlon is amazing. and when i'm done with work, I USE MY PC AS A GAME MACHINE. the only reason i have a mac, is because i really want to use them for 2d graphics, but apple really ****ing do something brilliant if they expect me to upgrade.

so can you explain what you mean by 'not recognizing' windows? that statement made absolutely NO sense. don't be such a bigot.

And I care why? It doesn't matter how fast you can surf on your PC. I can get around fast enough on my Mac. People who say Mac's are too slow are the same people that never take the time to watch a sunset or spend a day with their kid.

They are fast enough. They do what they are supposed to do the way they are supposed to do it.

The don't crash, don't get viruses, and don't look like something from the 1980s!

javajedi

Oct 11, 2002, 12:50 PM

http://members.ij.net/javajedi

You're more than welcome to download the Java version, or the Mac OS X native one. When I said C, I really should clarify. It's actually a Cocoa version so the source is a .m objective c file, however the math function itself is from the C library. It's really cool how in objective c you can use regular C :)

For integer testing:

int x1,x2,x3;
for (x1=1; x1<=20000; x1++) {
for(x2=1; x2<=20000; x2++) {
x3 = x1*x2;
}
}

if you don't want to mess with the cocoa thing, just use that snippet and use time.h to time it.

javajedi

Oct 11, 2002, 12:56 PM

Originally posted by Backtothemac

And I care why? It doesn't matter how fast you can surf on your PC. I can get around fast enough on my Mac. People who say Mac's are too slow are the same people that never take the time to watch a sunset or spend a day with their kid.

They are fast enough. They do what they are supposed to do the way they are supposed to do it.

The don't crash, don't get viruses, and don't look like something from the 1980s!

More fallacies...

#1 My PC doesn't crash
#2 It does not get infected with virii
#3 It doesn't look like something from the 1980s

You take a look for yourself
http://homepage.mac.com/kevindecker/PhotoAlbum3.html

Oh and one more thing Back2TheMac: I've noticed now you are signing quite a different tune, before the G4 was supreme... now.. it is slower and... uhh.. doesn't matter?? How convenient.

alex_ant

Oct 11, 2002, 04:21 PM

alex_ant

Oct 11, 2002, 04:36 PM

Javajedi, what you've done with your benchmarking is very helpful and I believe provides much insight. I too was surprised to see that the PowerPC performed as poorly as it did. Sorry if I missed you addressing this, but did you use GCC 3.x on the PPC?

There are a few conclusions I could draw from this performance data:

1) AltiVec acceleration is crucial to attain performance competitive with x86.
2) In the best case, AltiVec-accelerated code will perform several times faster than optimized x86 code. However, the best case is very rare and limited to specialized tasks like BLAST, RC5, SETI, certain Photoshop filters, and so on.
3) In the worst case, AltiVec-optimized code will perform barely any better or perhaps even worse than non-optimized code.
4) The G4's integer and floating-point units are extremely weak.
4a) Even MHz-for-MHz, they appear to be slower than those of the Pentium 4.
4b) The 750FX's integer unit is stronger than the Pentium 4's clock-for-clock, but considering the Pentium 4 is clocked 4x higher at the moment, it does about 4x better overall.
5) The c't SPEC benchmarks from a while back (the only source of G4 SPEC results I'm aware of) weren't that far off.

I'm disappointed but not surprised to see that gopher has split from the thread. Oh well, I'm sure he'll reappear at a later date oblivious to everything that has just been presented in this thread.

Alex

javajedi

Oct 11, 2002, 06:30 PM

Originally posted by javajedi
What you are saying makes a lot of sense. Now that I think about, I too recall reading this somewhere.

Now that we know the real truth about the "better standard FPU", I thought it was time to shed some light on non vectorized G4 integer processing.

It still does 200,000,000 calculations, but this time I'm multiplying ints.

Motorola 7455 G4@800Mhz: 9 seconds (Native)
IBM 750FX G3@700Mhz: 7 seconds (Native)
Intel P4@2600Mhz 2 seconds (Java)

PowerPC 7455 integer processing is consierabley better than floating point (obviously less work doing ints), but still less per cycle than the Pentium 4.

Very intresting the G4 looses both floating point and integer to the IBM chip, at a 100MHz clock disadvantage.

I'm still waiting to see that "better standard FPU" in the G4. It seems the G4 is absolutely useless unless you are fortunate to have vectorized (AltiVec) code.

Alex, yeah, the native version was compiled under 3.1. It really is interesting to note that despite the 750FX's 100MHz clock disadvantage, it is able to outperform it by 22%. Since there is a 13% difference in clock speed, and if clocks were equal, the 750FX is technically 25% more efficient in scalar integer. I should also re-emphasize that I never bothered compiling the test natively for x86, I left it java, so it's not out of the question the P4 could do this in 1 second - and that is *NOT* using any vector libraries, just plain old integer math.

I've found some documentation on the Altivec C programming interface, and this weekend I'm going to make a first attempt at vectorizing it. The integer test should be no problem, but my FPMathTest app that did square roots will be more difficult. With Altivec, there is not recognized double precision floating point, so this complicates doing square roots. If you want more accurate, precision square roots, you have to do Newton Raphson refinement. In other words more ************ you have to go through. I believe in SSE2 you have double precision floating point ops, and if you were to vectorize it, you wouldn't have to compensate for this.

Another theory as to why the P4 is scoring so good is because if I'm not mistaking (and I'm not), the P4's ALU runs at double its clock. So in my case, 5.6GHz. I'm sure this relates to the issue.

I don't know how true this is, but I wouldn't be suprised if there is some truth to it, surely some food for thought:

http://www.osopinion.com/perl/story/17368.html

The G4 was just a hacked-up G3 with AltiVec and an FPU (floating point unit) borrowed from the outdated 604

If this is the case, then no wonder why we are getting these abysmal scores, and no wonder why a 400mhz Celeron can nearly equal it, and no wonder why the 750FX can outperform it (different company, different fpu)

jefhatfield

Oct 11, 2002, 07:29 PM

javajedi

Oct 11, 2002, 11:34 PM

Originally posted by gopher

Maybe we have, but nobody has provided compelling evidence to the contrary.

Originally posted by gopher

And until someone does I stand by my claim.

Originally posted by Backtothemac

My reference is to the flaws of the X86 vs the PPC architecture

Originally posted by Backtothemac

Why is the PC faster? It is the OS, not the processor. Windblows uses .dll's Dynamic link libraries.

Originally posted by Backtothemac

the X 86 structure sucks

I gave you what you asked for, a fair and balanced benchmark, one even created by a Mac user. You guys have seen the code to the simple floating point and integer benchmarks, have you learned anything? You read my other posts, as well as those by others who ported the code themselves and tried it on a variety of platforms. I think it's good you both are passionate about the Mac, but hopefully this has done you both good, opened your eyes to the truth of G4 performance. Personally, I think the truth was there all along, you just didn't want to see it. Knowing what you now know you can no longer rationalize claims such as "x86 sucks", that it is the "OS that makes the other computer so fast "(a crappy one at that according to both of you).

You have both seen some very serious flaws in the G4 (to the extent a G3 can out perform it) and so you can no longer claim you have no irrefutable proof. I think you also both know that those who ran the test, including myself are not "PC biased".

You also know this has nothing to do with how much you hate "Winblowz", what you think of the CEO of chipzilla, how much nicer the Macintosh UI is, or how pretty you think youre computers are.

jefhatfield

Oct 11, 2002, 11:51 PM

i agree with you that pcs are faster and that some mac users will not see the facts today, but what major advantage does the faster pc give to me (the average user with e-mail, internet, office, and sometimes light graphics and digital photos)?

but it would be nice for the macs to close the speed gap someday, whether it's done with motorola processors or ibm processors

when i tell die hard mac users that one can do graphic design with pcs, they look at me like i am crazy

but today, in late-2002, it's entirely possible and if a computer user is used to using pcs for office stuff and wants to learn graphic design, it's ok for them to learn on their pc (assuming it's not too old)

only if they insist on a mac should they learn that platform to do most types of graphic design

at one time, the mac was the only real choice

it's kind of like music and rock and roll in the early days of recording that medium...if the bass player wanted to record an electric bass, it was almost always a "fender" inc. bass that was used

even years after bass players started using bass guitars made by other makers, they would still often get credited on the album as having played the fender bass or being the fender bass player

today, of course, a bass player is simply referred to as a bass player and their instrument of choice is as likely to be another make as it is to be a fender instruments electric bass guitar

snoopy

Oct 11, 2002, 11:52 PM

Originally posted by javajedi

. . . You have both seen some very serious flaws in the G4 (to the extent a G3 can out perform it) . . .

I'm sure Apple has known of those flaws for quite some time, and likely that is what started them looking for another processor vendor. I'm sure Apple and IBM have been working together for more than two years. Hopefully we will see the fruits of that venture in six months or so. Stay tuned for feedback from the October 15th Microprocessor Forum.

jefhatfield

Oct 11, 2002, 11:58 PM

that's prolly why sj goes ballistic when any reporter mentions anything to that effect...it may be true or ...maybe... apple and steve jobs may be with motorola 100% percent and hate the "ibm talk" because of how it undermines the high end computing relationship they have now

on the low end, the G3 has had a pretty good run and now with the G3fx and 512k level 2 cache, things are good in that sector for some time to come...hopefully

alex_ant

Oct 12, 2002, 01:22 AM

Originally posted by jefhatfield
i agree with you that pcs are faster and that some mac users will not see the facts today, but what major advantage does the faster pc give to me (the average user with e-mail, internet, office, and sometimes light graphics and digital photos)?
IMO, not much. A couple things would be the ability to do all of those a bit faster, but that only makes a difference if you're being held back by your Mac at the moment.

2 points: 1) I think the computing industry has historically been all about the trickle-down effect, where the highest of high tech starts at the very top - the high-end workstations, the mainframes, etc. - and trickles down into low-end workstations/servers, then desktops, then consumer electronics. This could be seen as a technological entropy of sorts, and if you look at it as a hierarchy, the PC (hardware wise) is closer to the root (top level) of that hierarchy at the moment. What that means is that it's closer to being the latest & greatest than the Mac is, which puts it in a position whereby its relative speed advantages are self-perpetuating, in that being closer to the source of the newest, best technology, it has a chance to incorporate that technology before the Mac does, thus raising itself up on the hierarchy yet further. This explains why PCs have been eating into the specialty markets of SGI and Sun (and Apple) and show no signs of stopping. The Mac is a fantastic platform, but it has some formidable competition that is driven by the pure force of the capitalist marketplace, and when you look at it that way, you realize how amazing it is that it has held on all this time.

2) Software is always getting more featureful and less efficient. (With a few exceptions, like the way the performance of OS X has improved between the public beta and Jaguar.) The kind of Mac that's adequate now (say an 800MHz TiBook) will probably seem quite slow in three years, whereas if you buy a top-of-the-line PC notebook today, it could easily last 5 or more. With OS X, the days of Macs lasting 5+ years are gone, at least for the moment. We do things with our computers today that we didn't do with them 5 years ago - mainly due to the trickle-down effect. We do pro-quality video editing on consumer-class machines, our resolutions and color depths are higher, our digital cameras take higher-resolution photos, our audio & video is encoded with more processor-intensive compression codecs, and hell, our email client has a little tray that slides out! (Imagine animation like that on a ca. 1997 computer running a ca. 1997 OS!) A Mac will always be able to check e-mail, but so will a Performa or a 486. But I don't know how many people Performas and 486s appeal to. Probably not many... you tell me why. :)

Alex

jefhatfield

Oct 12, 2002, 05:51 AM

Originally posted by alex_ant

The kind of Mac that's adequate now (say an 800MHz TiBook) will probably seem quite slow in three years, whereas if you buy a top-of-the-line PC notebook today, it could easily last 5 or more. With OS X, the days of Macs lasting 5+ years are gone, at least for the moment. We do things with our computers today that we didn't do with them 5 years ago - mainly due to the trickle-down effect.

Alex

because the way the pc software gets so overbloated so fast, any pc laptop is rendered too slow in two years and any pc desktop (with the desktop's higher specs and expandability) is rendered too slow in three years

i can't see any pc lasting four years comfortably, unless it's an ultra sparc, sun, or silicon graphics unit

i am assuming this for someone who would sometimes need to use photoshop, autocad, or a fifty dollar high end game

.....

as for macs, i give them the same time frame even though they are behind the pc speed curve

i don't see mac software titles pushing the mac hardware off the planet like in the pc world, which is seen more as a throwaway consumer electronic

thank god that macs are not seen or built as throwaway consumer electronics

even the "now" lowly crt imac is a sturdy machine that will outlast, on the physical level, most pcs on the market

.....

when i got my ibook, even though the single usb port left me stranded peripheral wise two years later, it was built to last and last

when i got my pc laptop, made by compaq, the thing was definitely sold as a throwaway unit

the rubber feet fell off which i had to glue back on

one screen hinge kept on popping off so i have to avoid touching it on that left side

when i close the pc laptop unit, i have to do it slowly since that particular model had thin plastic latches that broke off easily and the ribbon cable connecting the lcd had a tendency to get unplugged inside the unit

and the battery was useless after a year and wouldn't hold a charge anymore

i never shelled out the $199 bucks to get a new battery and now i just use the short length ac adapter

.....

in contrast, my ibook's only deterioration has been the battery's ability to hold a 4 1/2 hour charge...the thing never got 6 hours in real world everyday use like advertised...using just word processing with the lcd dimmed way down, a reviewer got five hours on a new rev a. ibook battery

now the laptop's battery, after 34 months of daily use, holds a 2 3/4 hour charge...actually, not bad compared to the pc laptop whose battery died after just a year

.....

when i looked at a computer accessories catalog, they recommended that i replace my pc model's battery after one year of part time use

but they also recommended that i replace my rev. a ibook's battery after just one year, also...how wrong they were...ha:p

if i still have my 300 mhz ibook two years from now, even if i wouldn't likely be using it much, i will give it a five year birthday party on macrumors...ibook's in late-2004 will be at 1.9 ghz by then if apple still has an ibook on the consumer end...this is based on average speed climb in industry

right now, the earliest rev. a ibooks are now 3 1/4 years old, originally had os 8.5, and i bet most are still working:D

nixd2001

Oct 12, 2002, 06:14 AM

Originally posted by javajedi
I gave you what you asked for, a fair and balanced benchmark, one even created by a Mac user. You guys have seen the code to the simple floating point and integer benchmarks

It would be interesting to see the code generated for the loops - it won't change the answers but it might give some of us a bit more understanding on the perfomance differences.

benixau

Oct 12, 2002, 08:22 AM

Originally posted by jefhatfield

thank god that macs are not seen or built as throwaway consumer electronics

Too right. I had an LC630 up until about 2 months ago. First problem occured on week into use, apple monitor stoped working. 10 yrs later, power supply went. Only problem after the monitor problem and before the power supply porblem was the family needed to use it. That only meant that i couldnt sometimes.

A pc we had was upgraded every 6 months to make sure it would run. 2 months ago, four years into its life, the celeron 333 couldn't handle windows XP (it came with 98) after a serious OS problem. We chucked it, bought an AMD XP 1800+ and got two brand new power macs (MDD model). Cant afford an iBook or Powerbook yet.

Macs last longer, as long as you dont want the latest and greatest app to run, like Office v.X on a performa. If you can live with Office 2001 or 98 then, why get something untested.

A mac cost 2x as mush upfront. They last 4 - 5 times as long. Who saves money???

MacCoaster

Oct 12, 2002, 09:41 AM

Originally posted by nixd2001

It would be interesting to see the code generated for the loops - it won't change the answers but it might give some of us a bit more understanding on the perfomance differences.
javajedi's Java and Cocoa/Objective-C code has been available here (http://members.ij.net/javajedi) for a couple of days. My C# port is available for examination if you e-mail me.

nixd2001

Oct 12, 2002, 09:48 AM

Originally posted by MacCoaster

javajedi's Java and Cocoa/Objective-C code has been available here (http://members.ij.net/javajedi) for a couple of days. My C# port is available for examination if you e-mail me.

I was thinking of the x86 and PPC assembler produced for the core loops. I could bung the C through GCC and get some assembler on my windy tunnels, true, but I'm not geared up to do the Windows side of things.

MacCoaster

Oct 12, 2002, 10:29 AM

Originally posted by nixd2001
I was thinking of the x86 and PPC assembler produced for the core loops. I could bung the C through GCC and get some assembler on my windy tunnels, true, but I'm not geared up to do the Windows side of things.
You could add the argument --funroll-loops to gcc to `unroll' the loops and make it faster by predicting it more accurately at compile-time.

benixau

Oct 12, 2002, 10:41 AM

for crying out load, who cares if a pc can do its sums better than a mac. My brother does maths better than me but i kick him in english.

In other words if i am more productive on my mac then it doesnt matter that it might be a little 'slower' it is a faster machine because i can work faster. End of story. New Thread.

jefhatfield

Oct 12, 2002, 11:34 AM

Originally posted by benixau

A pc we had was upgraded every 6 months to make sure it would run. 2 months ago, four years into its life, the celeron 333 couldn't handle windows XP (it came with 98) after a serious OS problem. We chucked it

even swapping out parts and stuff, for any pc box to last four years is admirable...he he

but even if your celeron 333 worked after four years, it wouldn't be able to run much these days on the pc software shelf

however, a 333 mhz imac could prolly still run stuff off the shelf as it still exceeds min requirements of a lot of mac software

i have seen pc games which have min requirements of pentium II or athlon already...and we know what that means...recommended requirements mean it should be a pentium III 650 or so

to me, that is built in obsolescence...it's not that way in the mac world...at least, not as bad

if i see mac software that says min requirements, g4 and os x, then i will protest:p

snoopy

Oct 12, 2002, 11:41 AM

Originally posted by benixau

for crying out load, who cares if a pc can do its sums better than a mac. . . . . if i am more productive on my mac then it doesnt matter that it might be a little 'slower' . . .

True for many of us. For applications that use a lot of math functions, it makes a big difference. So, for others it does matter. They may be in the minority, but a very important group of users. In less than a year the picture will change, and that small group will be very pleased with the Mac. For now, there is nothing anyone can do about it.

MacCoaster

Oct 12, 2002, 12:20 PM

Originally posted by benixau
for crying out load, who cares if a pc can do its sums better than a mac. My brother does maths better than me but i kick him in english.

In other words if i am more productive on my mac then it doesnt matter that it might be a little 'slower' it is a faster machine because i can work faster. End of story. New Thread.
Believe me, a lot of people do. Thanks to my UNIX knowledge, I am so much more productive in Linux/BSD on a PC than a Mac. For beginners to computers, sure Macs could be much more productive.

We were just discussing the G4--it was never intended to be an explict vs war between Mac and PCs. It's not a software thread. It's a frickin' hardware thread where we are discussing the inferiority of the G4.

Research scientists should think twice before using a Mac for research--since the G4 blows so much. That's where it matters. It's faster for them to use PCs than Macs. Gee, by 100 seconds. Think about it... a lot of scientific formulas are a lot more complex than our simplistic benchmark programs--100 minutes is sure much longer than 5 minutes.

jefhatfield

Oct 12, 2002, 12:39 PM

Originally posted by snoopy

True for many of us. For applications that use a lot of math functions, it makes a big difference. So, for others it does matter. They may be in the minority, but a very important group of users. In less than a year the picture will change, and that small group will be very pleased with the Mac. For now, there is nothing anyone can do about it.

those math functions are extremely complex and hard to do fast if we stay way behind the curve of the pc world

i was in this computer repair class where we had to do the math, some of the math that a processor did, so we could appreciate that little thing

in the old days of computing, way back when in the 1970s, many computing funtions had to be done by phd mathematicians and there were very few silicon "math co-processors"

early computer science college programs were thus a lot like math programs...it's so funny, actually sad, to see how many older, math literate techies were completely unable to relate when gui came along...it was like the great slaughter in silicon valley...we take the mouse and gui for granted but not only did it take away jobs, it also was a curve ball many inflexible older techies could not adjust to

change is never easy in the IT field and that is why it is rare to see anybody go from mathematician with vacuum tubes to green screen coder to gui to "whatever" the future holds

i also had a friend who had memorized hundreds of key combinations like ctrl-a and such and he only just learned to use the mouse two years ago...he took literally five years to learn how to use it with its two buttons...he could never remember, "was that right click, left click, double click, and where do i keep my fingers?"

i could go on with old man stories from the trenches of san jose, but i will stop NOW ;)

if you started with a mouse, it only takes a few weeks to learn how to interact with windows and modern computers

one family friend, a computer professor at stanford, never got used to gui and he still uses his trusty 286...he says he can't think when there is more than one color on the screen and he never got used to the mouse

kind of the way i feel like when i use "hex-pee" or i try to play a game console thingy like x-box with all those buttons...as a ten year old yanks the keypad/console from me at the computer store and memorizes the keys and buttons within minutes as it relates to that game being played

:p

jefhatfield

Oct 12, 2002, 12:47 PM

Originally posted by MacCoaster

Believe me, a lot of people do. Thanks to my UNIX knowledge, I am so much more productive in Linux/BSD on a PC than a Mac. For beginners to computers, sure Macs could be much more productive.

We were just discussing the G4--it was never intended to be an explict vs war between Mac and PCs. It's not a software thread. It's a frickin' hardware thread where we are discussing the inferiority of the G4.

Research scientists should think twice before using a Mac for research--since the G4 blows so much. That's where it matters. It's faster for them to use PCs than Macs. Gee, by 100 seconds. Think about it... a lot of scientific formulas are a lot more complex than our simplistic benchmark programs--100 minutes is sure much longer than 5 minutes.

too many of those programs are only on pcs

one research scientist my wife works with started coding in dos on the mac compiler and if he succeeded in getting into the server, which would not happen anyway, he would have caused major damage

this phd had no idea that the g4 and the mac os was not dos...he was sure everything was dos like his windows 98 box he and all the other research scientists use

the sas program they have only works on 95 and 98:p

benixau

Oct 12, 2002, 03:22 PM

If you want to get exceptional mathematical performance then why are you getting a micro computer???? I cannot out-type my computer and i cannot do mathematical functions fater than it, or even excel with all of its overhead.

BTW, my g4 is soooo slow at doing maths functions that i finished an assignment a whole 5mins ahead of a mate. In excel. these were some serious slowdown stuff, 10 cross-referenced, dependently linked, nested functions sheets. Now my mac only has 2 867s with 256ddr, his p4 2.53 with 512 couldnt beat me, WITH WIN95.

Now any more real world tests you would like????:D

ddtlm

Oct 12, 2002, 03:30 PM

Wow I missed a lot by spending all of Friday away from this board. I am way behind in posts here, and I'm sure I'll miss a lot of things worth comment. But anyway, the code fragment:

int x1,x2,x3;
for (x1=1; x1<=20000; x1++) {
for(x2=1; x2<=20000; x2++) {
x3 = x1*x2;
}
}

Is a very poor benchmark. Compilers may be able to really dig into that and make the resulting executable perform the calculate radically different. In fact, I can tell you the answer outright: x1=20000, x2=20000, x3 = 400000000. It took me 2 seconds or so. Does this mean that I am a better computer than a G4 and a P4? No, it means I realized that the loop can be reduced to simple data assignments. I have a better compiler, thats it.

Anyway, lets pretend that for whatever reason compilers did not simplify that loop AT ALL. Note that this would be a stupid stupid compiler. At each stage, x1 is something, we ++x2, and we set x3 = x1 * x2. Now notice that we cannot set x3 until the result of X2++ is known. On a pipelined processor that cannot execute instructions out of order, this means that I have a big "bubble" in the pipeline as I wait for the new x2 before I can multiply. However, after the x3 is started into the pipe, the next instruction is just another x2++ which does not depend on x3, so I can do it immediately. On a 7-stage in-order chip like a G4, this means that I fill two stages of the pipe and then have to wait for the results on the other end before I can continue. You see that this is very inefficient (28% or so). However, the G3 is a 4-stage design and so 2/4 of the stages can stay busy, resulting in a 50% efficientcy (so a 700mhz G3 is "the same as" a 350mhz G3 at 100% and a 800mhz G4 is "the same as" a 210mhz G4 at 100%). These are of course simplified cases, the actual result may very a bit for some obscure reason.

Actually the above stuff is inaccurate. The G3 sports 2 integer units AFAIK, so it can do x3 = x1*x2 at the same time as it is doing x2++ (for the next loop of course, not this one). This means that both pipes start one bit of work, then wait for it to get out the other end, then do one bit of work again. So this is 25% efficientcy. A hypothetical single-pipe G3 would do x3 = x1*x3 and then do x2++, however it could not do x3 = x1 * x2 again until the x2++ was out the other end, which takes 4 cycles and started one after the previos x3 = x1*x2, which should mean 3 "bubble" stages and an efficientcy of 20%.

Actually, it may be worse than that. Remember that this is in a loop. The loop means a compare instruction (are we done yet?) followed by a jump depending on the results of the compare. We therefore have 4 instructions in PPC I think per loop, and we can't compare x2 to 20000 until x2++ has gone through all the pipe stages. (Oh no!) And we can't jump until we know r]the result of the compare (oh no!). Seeing the pattern? Wanna guess what the efficientcy is for a really stupid compiled version of this "benchmark"? A: really freaking low.

I'll see about adding more thoughts later.

nixd2001

Oct 12, 2002, 03:34 PM

Originally posted by ddtlm
Wow I missed a lot by spending all of Friday away from this board. I am way behind in posts here, and I'm sure I'll miss a lot of things worth comment. But anyway, the code fragment:

Is a very poor benchmark. Compilers may be able to really dig into that and make the resulting executable perform the calculate radically different. In fact, I can tell you the answer outright: x1=20000, x2=20000, x3 = 400000000. It took me 2 seconds or so. Does this mean that I am a better computer than a G4 and a P4? No, it means I realized that the loop can be reduced to simple data assignments. I have a better compiler, thats it.

I'll see about adding more thoughts later.

there is a lot a compiler could do to this - by us all (well, those who have the interest in the assembler output of a compiler at least) having a look at what the respective compilers have done, we can form more of an informed opinion of what works out to the benefit of the P4 for this case. This might all be a bit geeky, but I am intersted at least.

ddtlm

Oct 12, 2002, 03:46 PM

nixd2001, others:

Please note I am editing my previos post (last one on page 7) to address the issue.

ddtlm

Oct 12, 2002, 03:50 PM

OK, lets look at this code again. I'll write some x86 assembly to do it. Not the best in the world, but we'll get an idea whats going on. Also I need to do this to help my memory. :)

int x1,x2,x3;
for (x1=1; x1<=20000; x1++) {
for(x2=1; x2<=20000; x2++) {
x3 = x1*x2;
}
}

Ok, lets do it the stupidest way possible in x86 NASM:

OK:

segment .data

segment .bss

segment .text
global asm_func1, asm_func2
asm_func1:
enter 4,0

mov [ebp-4], dword 1
mov ebx, 20001
outloop1
mov ecx, 1
inloop1
mov eax, ecx
mul dword [ebp-4]

inc ecx
cmp ecx, ebx
jne inloop1

inc dword [ebp-4]
cmp [ebp-4], ebx
jne outloop1

leave
ret

asm_func2:
enter 0,0

mov edx, 1
outloop2
mov ecx, 1
xor eax, eax
inloop2
add eax, edx
add eax, edx
add eax, edx
add eax, edx
add ecx, 4

cmp ecx, 20001
jne inloop2

inc edx
cmp edx, 20001
jne outloop2

leave
ret

asm_func3:
enter 0,0

mov edx, 1
outloop3
mov ecx, 1
xor eax, eax
xor ebx, edx
inloop3
add eax, edx
shl edx, 1
add ebx, edx
add eax, edx
add ebx, edx
add eax, edx
add ebx, edx
add eax, edx
add ebx, edx
shr edx, 1
add eax, edx
add ecx, 8

cmp ecx, 20001
jne inloop3

inc edx
cmp edx, 20001
jne outloop3

leave
ret

The register eax is x3 in #1 and #2, and in #3 I am storing x3 into eax and eab alternatively.

Func #1 runs in 2.467 seconds on my Xeon 700 in Linux. I don't even want to look for where others posted number way back there, does anyone know numbers off the top of their head? I'll now do a version where I optimize it. :)

Function #2 runs in 0.667 seconds on the same machine. Wanna see if I can do better? Note that func #2 still does calculate every single value of x3, even though none are stored.

Function #3 runs in 0.547 seconds on the same machine, which as we can see is about a 20% speedup over #2. Note I am still doing every calculation of x3. We haven't even began to consider what a compiler could do if it saw that x3 didn't need to be computed.

Now I'll do some C compiler versions to see what happens:

unsigned int C_func1( )
{
unsigned int i, j, x3;

for(i=1;i<40001;++i)
for(j=1;j<40001;++j)
x3 = i * j;

return x3;
}

gcc driver.c -o exe && time ./exe
15.976

gcc -O driver.c -o exe && time ./exe
7.094

gcc -O2 driver.c -o exe && time ./exe
4.642

gcc -O3 driver.c -o exe && time ./exe
6.966

gcc -O2 -funroll-loops driver.c -o exe && time ./exe
0.240

gcc -O2 -funroll-all-loops driver.c -o exe && time ./exe
0.232

This is using GCC 2.96. Note how much difference I can generate even within a single compiler just by changing simple compiler options?

javajedi

Oct 12, 2002, 04:08 PM

Originally posted by ddtlm
OK, lets look at this code again. I'll write some x86 assembly to do it. Not the best in the world, but we'll get an idea whats going on. Also I need to do this to help my memory. :)

Ok, lets do it the stupidest way possible in x86 NASM:

I'll be back. Watch this space, I will write it up to make sure it runs.

ddtlm: I didn't know if you downloaded FPTest.java, but basically the only difference there was it was done with 2x precision fp, and doing square roots. BTW: I think I mentioned this in one of my previous post, but for the Mac OS X version, I compiled it with GCC 3.1, then ran both tests on the iBook and PowerBook G4.

C for Mac OS X:

double x1,x2,x3
for (x1=1; x1<=20000; x1++) {
for(x2=1; x2<=20000; x2++) {
x3 = sqrt(x1*x2);
}
}

Java:

double x1,x2,x3
for (x1=1; x1<=20000; x1++) {
for(x2=1; x2<=20000; x2++) {
x3 = Math.sqrt(x1*x2);
}
}

One more question i have for you while you are responding: What you suggested may very well be accurate, the compiler is making some really poor decisions, however if this were the case, what about javac? The 5.9 second score of the P4 was running under the JVM. Obviously the JVM is making some smart decisions and simplifications to the above code. I find it hard to believe these same economies of scale and efficiencies are not present in the Apple JVM (but still possible).

Lastly, lets say when we throw out the java one and go with C and GCC 3.1, lets take the scenario it is in fact, not making the best of the situation as you described. I would be disappointed if this was the case, but regardless, the same compiled code ran on the iBook, ran faster for some reason then the 800MHz G4.

Lastly, I don’t know if this well help clear up anything, but I’m going to ask my friend who ran it on a G4 with Yellow Dog, to run the Java version. This way we can eliminate the Apple JVM and GCC.

I think it's possible that GCC3.1 and specifically Apple's JVM could be causing this problem, but highly improbable.
Food for thought..

MacCoaster

Oct 12, 2002, 04:19 PM

javajedi: Well, well... I finally figured out GNUstep and ported your Cocoa program to it--works 100%. Funny thing it's slower than the Java one, but it might be the extra crap I put in there (menus, etc.). 10 seconds compared to 7 seconds with Java. But that's still faster than 70 seconds on a G4. I'll be making a pure C port if anyone hasn't.

JustAGuy

Oct 12, 2002, 05:05 PM

Hi all, just thought that I'd compile and run the tests on my G4/450 and PIII/733 for comparison. VERY interesting results. I had to change the i value from 20,000 down to 5,000 to save time...

In any event, the results are 15s for the G4/450 and, get this, 55s for the PIII/733.

Further compounding these results was the fact that the G4 was running setiathome with OSX's lousy priority scheduling (nice 20 usually takes up no less than 15% CPU) and the PIII was devoting 100% of it's processor resources to the task.

The best part about one-off, anecdotal evidense is that it is just that ;)

(gcc 2.95 - cygwin - on the PC, gcc 3.1 on OSX) I'll get the java version and give it a whirl...

ddtlm

Oct 12, 2002, 05:31 PM

JustAGuy:

You should try those tests with some of the compiler flags that I used in my post a few posts up, which I have been editing.

Right now I am looking at the assembly that gcc is generating. It looks like gcc gets the answer in a very strange way.

javajedi:
One more question i have for you while you are responding: What you suggested may very well be accurate, the compiler is making some really poor decisions, however if this were the case, what about javac?
I don't have an answer to that at this time, but it seems to me that we are looking at different quality of JVM's. I could see a P4 beat a G4 by a fair amount, but lets be realistic... the G4 is not so slow as the numbers here have been suggesting.

I wish I knew some PPC assembly. :) I would code up some stuff for that too, and I bet the nubmer of registers would help a lot. Registers are great for loop unrolling.

Anyway, some time ago you asked how the G4 has better scalar units than the G3. Basically the FP units are similar but the G4 unit has a lower instruction latency when doing double precision (in the G3 doubles take one more cycle than singles, on the G4 they are the same). Also, the G4 has 4 integer units where the G3 has only two. This is not always useful, but in this problem if I could do PPC assembly I could easily overwelm all 4 of them.

MacCoaster

Oct 12, 2002, 05:34 PM

JustAGuy: Okay, I modified that for 5000 and compiled on my Athlon-Tbird. Runs in about one second on average.

In fact, put back the 20000 values in both and compile it using:

gcc -mcpu=7450 -O2 -pipe -fsigned-char -maltivec -mabi=altivec -mpowerpc-gfxopt -funroll-loops -o benchmarker benchmarker.c

Or hell, use this C code:

#include <stdio.h>

int main()
{
double x1, x2, x3;
int result, startTime, finishTime;

startTime = time(NULL);

for (x1 = 1; x1 <= 20000; x1++)
{
for (x2 = 1; x2 <= 20000; x2++)
{
x3 = sqrt(x1*x2);
}
}

finishTime = time(NULL);

result = finishTime - startTime;

printf("This computer processed the double precision test in %d seconds.\n", result);
return 0;
}
And also, ddtlm, PLEASE tell us how you compiled your asm files and such so we can duplicate the results.

UnixMac

Oct 12, 2002, 05:49 PM

You guys lost me and prolly (I like that, Prolly) about 90% of this forum....

have fun, and lets see how many pages you can get this thread to go to? I predict, 12.

ryme4reson

Oct 12, 2002, 05:49 PM

Can some1 run this from within VPC. I believe that VPC is supposed to emulate the 486, so I am interested in finding out if they process is handled different, even though its a G4. Sure it will not be fast (emulatin) but i would be interested in seeing the results.

EDIT: ddtlm, are you interested in helping me with X86 assembly? I would be willing to pay for your time. Email me at jamesk777@mac.com or IM me at ryme4reson (AOL) Thanks

ddtlm

Oct 12, 2002, 06:02 PM

MacCoaster:

Missed your request for ASM directions for a sec there. :) Anyway, I use NASM. Available here:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/nasm

I do my assembly in a .asm file, and use a C program as a wrapper to make things easy. C program, including my C loops. Notice that is't ugly and I manually change it to test different things, but hey it works. You can do better Im sure. :)

#include <math.h>

unsigned int asm_func1( );
unsigned int asm_func2( );
unsigned int asm_func3( );

unsigned int C_func1( )
{
unsigned int i, j, x3;

for(i=1;i<40001;++i)
for(j=1;j<40001;++j)
x3 = i * j;

return x3;
}

unsigned int C_func2( )
{
double i, j, x3;

for(i=1;i<20001;++i)
for(j=1;j<20001;++j)
x3 = sqrt(i * j);

return x3;
}

int main()
{
/* unsigned int cnt; */
double cnt;

cnt = C_func2();

/* printf("%u\n",cnt); */

printf("%d\n",cnt);

return 0;
}

So anyway, now I have my driver.c and my stuff.asm. I "gcc -c driver.c" which should make a .o file. I then "nasm -f elf stuff.asm && gcc *o -o exe" which will make my .asm into a .o and then link the .o's. (BTW, I assume you are familiar with GCC already.)

This can also be done under VisualC if anyone wants to.

http://www.cs.uaf.edu/~cs301/usingnasm.htm

Docs (available all over probably):

http://www.cs.uaf.edu/~cs301/doc/nasmdoc0.html

PCUser

Oct 12, 2002, 06:06 PM

MacCoaster, wouldn't it be more accurate to use clock() instead of time()? Here's with that change:

#include <stdio.h>
#include <time.h>
#include <math.h>

int main()
{
clock_t cStart, cFinish;

double x1, x2, x3;

cStart = clock();
for (x1=1; x1<=20000; x1++) {
for(x2=1; x2<=20000; x2++) {
x3 = sqrt(x1*x2);
}
}
cFinish = clock();

float result = (float)(cFinish - cStart) / (float)CLOCKS_PER_SEC;

printf("This computer processed the double precision test in %f seconds.\n", result);

return 0;
}

I'm not sure if gcc 2.96 supports it. I know gcc 3.2 does, since that's what I'm using.

The test took 32.31 seconds on my Athlon XP 1.53GHz in Linux with no optimization, and 8.86 seconds with "-O2 -funroll-all-loops -march=athlon-xp". (It took the same amount when I condensed it into one loop of 400,000,000.)

ddtlm

Oct 12, 2002, 06:09 PM

Sheesh, where does the OSX 10.2 developer tools CD install gcc to, or under what name? The older dev tools gave me a compiler. Grumble.

nixd2001

Oct 12, 2002, 06:09 PM

Just to keep the numbers rolling:

User Elap User Elap
XEON G4 G4 G4 G4
gcc 15.97 6.500 6.59 76.34 1:19.92
-O 7.094 1.130 1.28 68.71 1:12.43
-O2 4.642 0.770 0.84 68.68 1:11.67
-O3 6.966 0.900 0.84 68.28 1:11.56
-O2 -funroll-loops 0.240 0.030 0.04 68.83 1:12.10
-O2 -funroll-all-loops 0.232 0.020 0.04 67.45 1:12.76
lots of flags 67.63 1:11.70
INT INT INT FP FP

gcc --version gives "gcc (GCC) 3.1 20020420 (prerelease)". This is the version that came with Jaguar in the developers stuff, so it is a bit later than the 2.9 you used. xeon numbers are for 700Mhz system, generated by ???. G4 numbers are my DP 1GHz windy tunnels (ie 167Mhz DDR, for what it's worth). Lots of flags is "-mcpu=7450 -O2 -pipe -fsigned-char -maltivec -mabi=altivec -mpowerpc-gfxopt -funroll-loops". Tests run in an emacs shell from terminal within Jaguar and with iTunes playing in the background. If any of this really impacts the performance, there's something a bit screwed with the scheduling, so I'm going to ignore it. I note that my CPU meter tended to show about 60% for both processors, whereas I'd expect one CPU to be flat out. It's also interesting how GCC is not capable of optimising the FP variant beyond the level achieved with minimal optimisations, whilst the INT version is makes a major difference when unrolling the loops.

All in all, GCC seems to be be able to optimise very simple case well when working with integers, but it's optimisations seem pretty incapable of contributing when using FP. So I'd conclude GCC on PCC with FP is naff (on this test case!), but I have no more direct comparison.

Oh yeah, the INT and FP code is the simple nested 20K loops given above.

MacCoaster

Oct 12, 2002, 06:11 PM

PCUser:

Thanks! Didn't think about clock()!

Though, that gives me 100.8 seconds (assuming 10.08 seconds) when it ran in 10 seconds. Didn't you mean to divide by ten?

MacCoaster

Oct 12, 2002, 06:23 PM

ddtlm:
Thanks. I do know gcc a bit, but I really need complete instructions...

i.e. What to do with the .asm. What to do with the .c. What to do with them both to finally bind those. The linker ld? The only time I've ever used ld was in my little OS development... it's been months since I've touched that.

nixd2001

Oct 12, 2002, 06:26 PM

Originally posted by MacCoaster
ddtlm:
Thanks. I do know gcc a bit, but I really need complete instructions...

i.e. What to do with the .asm. What to do with the .c. What to do with them both to finally bind those. The linker ld? The only time I've ever used ld was in my little OS development... it's been months since I've touched that.

Dunno about the asm files without delving deeper.

But imagine you've copied the benchmark code to mr2.c - then try

gcc -O2 -funroll-all-loops -o mr2 mr2.c

the -O2 and -funroll-all-loops are optimisation flags. The -o mr2 says to create an output file called mr2. GCC will work out this isn't an object file and manage the linking for you. The mr2.c on the end specifies the input file.

More?

ddtlm

Oct 12, 2002, 06:27 PM

nixd2001:

Those score I posted earlier were from the integer version of the loop that I was ripping on as meaningless. The float version is not quite so meaningless because you can't just unroll the thing, because floats get different results if the ops are even done in different orders. For the benefit of people who may not know it, with floating point numbers often 4x != x + x + x.

Anyway, my P3 Xeon 700 sports this compiler:

gcc version 2.96 20000731 (Red Hat Linux 7.3 2.96-112)

Results for the exact loop posted by PCUser are:

gcc -O driver.c -o exe && time ./exe
38.858

gcc -O2 -funroll-loops driver.c -o exe && time ./exe
38.818

On a side note, I also found gcc on my Mac after relogging into the terminal so that things were added to the path. Funny that the finder's find cannot see tools like gcc. I'll get results for that posted soon.

ddtlm

Oct 12, 2002, 06:35 PM

MacCoaster:

Ok, here we go. You have a program.c so compile it into compiler.o like this:

gcc -c program.c

You may place flags such as -O before -c, or maybe even after it. But certainly before it. Anyway, you have some asm_func.asm, so compile it into asm_func.o like this:

nasm -f elf asm_func.asm

Now, you can link these two .o files like this:

gcc *o -o exe

Which makes an executable named exe (which of course you can change to be whatever you want).

Anyway, do note that the ASM funcs do the integer "benchmark" and not the float one. Also, I think because I overwrite ebx when I am not supposed to, the asm routines tend to cause program segaults after they exit. :) But they still provide a valid result. I could fix that, but whatever.

ddtlm

Oct 12, 2002, 06:40 PM

The result for my OSX 10.2 DP 800 G4 on the floating test is 85.56 seconds. I used -O and -funroll-loops as flags.

So this is about 45% the speed of my P3-Xeon 700. Not very good at all, but it falls within the ream of believeability.

nixd2001

Oct 12, 2002, 06:47 PM

Originally posted by ddtlm
The result for my OSX 10.2 DP 800 G4 on the floating test is 85.56 seconds. I used -O and -funroll-loops as flags.

So this is about 45% the speed of my P3-Xeon 700. Not very good at all, but it falls within the ream of believeability.

Other than a -O to enable/disable any optimisations at all, what effect can you achieve with the remaining optimistion flags to GCC? I'm more surprised by the lack of variation they achieve on PPC than the actual relative performance - having looked at the PPC code briefly, it looks like I'd expect it to be slow :mad:

ddtlm

Oct 12, 2002, 06:56 PM

nixd2001:

The flags don't do anything to my x86 results either. This loop is just hard to optimize. I did manual unrolling, replaced mults with adds (which we can actually do safely since the float values in the loop controlls are not factions), and even replaced one of the loop counters with an int in conjuntion with the other two above (in such a way that I needed no typecaseing)... and the resukts inproved maybe 5% on the Mac and none on the PC.

javajedi

Oct 12, 2002, 07:35 PM

ddtlm check this out, this may suprise you:

I ran the double precision test (sqtrt()) for the first time today as a c program. I compiled on the same machine as I ran the java version, with gcc version 2.95.3-5 (cygwin didn't come with 3.x).
Here are the parameters to gcc:

$ gcc -march=i686 -O3 -pipe -mpreferred-stack-boundary=2 -fforce-mem -fforce-addr -fexpensive-optimizations -funroll-loops -fomit-frame-pointer

Using this, the C program does it in 7.01 seconds. The same code, in java does it in 5.9. The javac, or the jvm seems to better be able to tear apart the loop. I think Java being "slow" is another common misconception that people have ;)

Oh well...

Meanwhile on the PPC side of things, I compiled the fp test against:

mcpu=7450 -O2 -pipe -fsigned-char -maltivec -mabi=altivec -mpowerpc-gfxopt -funroll-loops

Ofcourse this is running in 10.2, and I'm still stuck at around 90 seconds.

Is there anything else you think we can do aside from vectorizing it? Lastly, now that we're all on the same page now on how we are compiling this, I reran the silly single percision int test, and my powerbook looses out to the 750FX. Same platform, same code and everything, but heck?

ddtlm

Oct 12, 2002, 07:40 PM

Anyway I've had my fun here for now. I think it is settled that the G4 does poorly at this particular float test. I've done everything I can think of and gone though all sorts of variations of the loop trying to increase the IPC but I could never make significant headway on either the PC or the Mac.

That said, this test is essentialy a test where we do 400000000 double precision square roots which we don't even store and nothing else. There are no memory access, only very predictable branches. I have radically changed the loop and compiler flags and essentially nothing besides the sqrt() makes any difference.

I do not regard this test as important in the overall picture. It does not illustrate anything important to anyone, unless someone sits around doing square roots all day.

I might also add that designing a meaningful benchmark is very hard. I think SPEC is about as good as it gets, and yes the G4 looses in floats there too. :)

ddtlm

Oct 12, 2002, 07:52 PM

javajedi:

Sheesh, I have no idea how Java is defeating C... and those scores are still bizzarre. However PCUser did get 8.86 seconds on an Athlon 1533 with the right compiler flags. Looking at that, I wonder if the compiler flags are the cause here. Since this whole thing is essentially sqrt(), I wonder if the newer x86 chips are packing some strange special sqrt() assembly instruction that makes this huge difference. Hmmm. Otherwise I wonder how an Athlon at a little more than twice my clock speed (compared to the Xeon) can post results that are more than 4 times as fast.

Anyway this is it for me, since this is the weekend. I'll look for some x86 fast sqrt function Monday at work (I am pretty sure that such a thing exists, and if so it may be used in this test).

javajedi

Oct 12, 2002, 07:59 PM

Originally posted by ddtlm
Anyway I've had my fun here for now. I think it is settled that the G4 does poorly at this particular float test. I've done everything I can think of and gone though all sorts of variations of the loop trying to increase the IPC but I could never make significant headway on either the PC or the Mac.

That said, this test is essentialy a test where we do 400000000 double precision square roots which we don't even store and nothing else. There are no memory access, only very predictable branches. I have radically changed the loop and compiler flags and essentially nothing besides the sqrt() makes any difference.

I do not regard this test as important in the overall picture. It does not illustrate anything important to anyone, unless someone sits around doing square roots all day.

I might also add that designing a meaningful benchmark is very hard. I think SPEC is about as good as it gets, and yes the G4 looses in floats there too. :)

I'm in the process of figuring out vMathLib. I'm a Java guy, so all this Altivec stuff looks totally foreign to me :(

Never the less, once I get it working, I'll share the results with you folks.

Also: If anyone here wants me to try something, G3 vs G4, or whatever, aside from the square root and integer mult, let me know. I'd actually like to make full featured cocoa app full of test suites.

jefhatfield

Oct 12, 2002, 08:30 PM

ya guys lost me way back there, too ;)

hey, do they use aluminum bats in the majors sometimes;) :p

ddtlm

Oct 12, 2002, 09:51 PM

Just passing through... an interesting test would be finding the determinants of large matricies of floats and ints. And I mean finding them by the straightforward stupid computation method, none of the simplification stuff.

Reasons:

1) Too large for all data to be in registers but easily small enough to fit in L1.
2) Takes a long time for surprisingly small matricies (20x20 is a huge number of calculations).
3) Stresses multiples and adds.
4) No massive-yet-trivial compiler simplifications, even for int.
5) The result has meaning.

MacCoaster

Oct 13, 2002, 04:16 AM

Overclocked my Athlon 1.4GHz Tbird to 1.522GHz, benchmark results (under C#, which was fastest) did an average of 7390 milliseconds (7.39 seconds). w00t!

Gotta love overclocking.

springscansing

Oct 13, 2002, 04:46 AM

This is actually my first post. Yay! Been a machead forever (using a IIgs when I was 4).

ANYWAY, regarding various posts about PCs encoding mp3s faster than macs. I am an audio engineer, and I must say the encoding algorithm is MUCH better sounding in iTunes than in Winamp, and I assume most of you are using iTunes in your comparisons. Different programs encode at vastly different rates. For example, I don't know if you recall an application called Soundjam and another called Audiocatalyst. Soundjam encoded 2.4x faster, but sounded like total junk.

Now.. I'm not part of the "MACS IS FASTR" group, because sadly, they aren't... I just wanted to point out the mp3 encoding tests weren't fair.

- Springs

MacCoaster

Oct 13, 2002, 08:12 AM

Originally posted by springscansing
Different programs encode at vastly different rates. For example, I don't know if you recall an application called Soundjam and another called Audiocatalyst. Soundjam encoded 2.4x faster, but sounded like total junk.
Hmm? Have you tried to encode them at the same rate, same song, whatever--and documented the results. Would be cool to know.

macwannabe

Oct 13, 2002, 11:19 AM

Saying that the 2.8GHz P4 is no good because it is based on 25 year old architecture is nonsense as far as I'm concerned.

Can I take it then that you don't think that any of the cars on the market at the moment are worth having or have been improved at all on the grounds that they are based on an 80 year old design? "I don't think that BMW is any good as it is based on a Ford model T", hmmmmmmmm dodgy logic methinks.

javajedi

Oct 13, 2002, 11:23 AM

Originally posted by macwannabe
Saying that the 2.8GHz P4 is no good because it is based on 25 year old architecture is nonsense as far as I'm concerned.

Can I take it then that you don't think that any of the cars on the market at the moment are worth having or have been improved at all on the grounds that they are based on an 80 year old design? "I don't think that BMW is any good as it is based on a Ford model T", hmmmmmmmm dodgy logic methinks.

You are absolutely 110% correct. We've allready dismissed BackToTheMac's outlandish fallacies though :)

I think he gets the picture now....

MacCoaster

Oct 13, 2002, 01:31 PM

Originally posted by javajedi

You are absolutely 110% correct. We've allready dismissed BackToTheMac's outlandish fallacies though :)

I think he gets the picture now....
Yup. Proven technology. I sure hope he gets the picture.

Sherman

Oct 13, 2002, 01:46 PM

Another rumor I've heard going around is one of Intels Pentium 5.

We all know about the amazing 4.7Ghz P4 but it's actually not that much faster than a 2.5Ghz P4 because they added so many steps to get up to that clock speed.

In the P5 they tried to stop this troubling trend and found out, they could only get a 1.3Ghz P5, pretty much equal to the G4, without all those extra steps.

Amusing...

ddtlm

Oct 13, 2002, 02:27 PM

Sherman:

Hmm, not sure where you got that rumor, but it reeks of uninformed "macz rulez!" PC bashing. They did not lengthen the pipeline to get the 4.7ghz P4. The P5, according to conventional wisdom, is the 90nm P4 sporting SSE3, not some totally new chip.

they could only get a 1.3Ghz P5, pretty much equal to the G4, without all those extra steps
Load of crap. Plain and simple. You know there are Pentium 3's available for sale at 1.4ghz, don't you? And lets not even contemplate for fast Athlons are clocking without the P4's super-long pipeline.

springscansing

Oct 13, 2002, 02:41 PM

Originally posted by MacCoaster

Hmm? Have you tried to encode them at the same rate, same song, whatever--and documented the results. Would be cool to know.

Yes I have actually. iTunes IS slow, but it's the best. There was an article in MacAddict a few years ago comparing the speeds and quality of different mp3 encoders at the same bitrates.

javajedi

Oct 13, 2002, 05:48 PM

ddtlm,

I have my theory as to why java took the lead over C in the sqrt example. There is quite a common misconception about Java that it's always slow, and there is a reason for it. Back in the early days prior to 1.2, it wasn't uncommon to see something like we did here run 10,20, or even 30 times slower then C. VM's today (1.4 /w hotspot) are much smarter than they were years ago. IMO, Hotspot makes the conventional "just in time compilers" look like a thing of the past.

Anyways, when you really think about it, Java really has an extra card up it's sleeve. Sure we tell GCC we want max optimizations, (03, etc), but GCC is limited to compile-time optimization. I think since java has adaptive runtime optimizations, specifically hotspot, the runtime optimization is what really makes the difference.

The reason why it's called "HotSpot", is literally because it looks for "hot spots" by profiling on the fly at runtime. Pretty cool, huh? Your first adaptive optimizations kick in second time the loop is ran. Not to mention the conventional JIT optimizations... code will natively compile and so you eliminate the costly overhead of bytecode translations.

Lastly, I am going to do the matrix operation you spoke about, I have to finish up some course work, so I may not get to it tonight, but as soon as I can devote some time to it, I will.

nixd2001

Oct 13, 2002, 05:54 PM

Originally posted by javajedi
ddtlm,

I have my theory as to why java took the lead over C in the sqrt example....

It might be worth finding C and Java language lawyers as well. ISTR that their treatment of IEEE FP values is different in subtle areas. I can tell you from past experience that these subtle areas are often what hammers performance. I'm talking about treatment for NaNs and that sort of thing. So this may be relevant?

javajedi

Oct 13, 2002, 05:56 PM

yeah, that's certianly possible. I'm not sure if that is or is not the case, but wouldn't be suprised if it is. I'll find out.

ddtlm

Oct 13, 2002, 06:30 PM

javajedi:

Lastly, I am going to do the matrix operation you spoke about, I have to finish up some course work, so I may not get to it tonight, but as soon as I can devote some time to it, I will.
Good to see the topic lives on. I thought about doing it yesterday but couldn't decide how I wanted to. I think it should be nonrecursive but honestly I haven't even decided how it can be reasonably done.

Anyways, when you really think about it, Java really has an extra card up it's sleeve. Sure we tell GCC we want max optimizations, (03, etc), but GCC is limited to compile-time optimization. I think since java has adaptive runtime optimizations, specifically hotspot, the runtime optimization is what really makes the difference.
JIT compilers are a mystery to me. I might add that they do exist at least a little for other languages too, read something somewhere about HP using them on their mega-servers for compiled apps. Can't remember details but it was said to help.