More Intel iMac Benchmarks (Native and Rosetta)

[MacRumors]

http://www.macrumors.com/images/macrumorsthreadlogo.gif (http://www.macrumors.com)

MacCentral reviews (http://www.macworld.com/2006/01/features/imaclabtest1/index.php) and benchmarks the new Intel iMacs released at Macworld Expo.

MacCentral's tested both Universal applications (http://guides.macrumors.com/Universal_Binary) as well as PowerPC applications on the new 2.0GHz Intel iMac and compared them to the 2.1GHz iMac G5.

Of the Universal Applications tested, they focused on iMovie, iPhoto, iTunes, iDVD, iSquint, BBEdit and Zip Archiving. In these native applications, the Intel iMac was up to 1.82x as fast. Average increase however was closer to 1.2-1.3x, with one test coming in slightly slower (.91x) than the G5 iMac.

Meanwhile, PowerPC applications were tested using Rosetta emulation (http://guides.macrumors.com/Rosetta). They tested iTunes (PowerPC), Photoshop CS2 and Word. The tests showed the Intel iMac to be running .34-.48x as fast as the iMac G5. The performance penalty is expected due to the Rosetta emulation layer allowing PowerPC instructions to be run on the Intel processor.

[LifeIsCheap]

Rosetta emulation scores look terrible!

[Lacero]

And quieter, too. Remember folks, lack of fan noise is more important than pure speed. I wish these tests looked at the whole computing experience rather than how fast an app launches.

Rosetta emulation scores look terrible!Get out! Really?Here's to the Crazy Ones http://forums.macrumors.com/attachment.php?attachmentid=35452 (http://www.uriah.com/apple-qt/movies/think-different.mov)

[Dr. Dastardly]

The rosetta scores really are not all that bad considering that its all being emulated for an entirely different chip. I don't know if it shows the real speed of the intel chip or the skill of the Apple programers for creating a fairly decent emulation software.

All in all I'm not to upset, on the contrary I'm pretty impressed.

[arn]

yeah, usually for emulation, I always picture an order of magnitude speed decrease. 30-50% isn't that bad.

They don't mention if they tried running applications again. The way the Transitive technologies works, I think it's supposed to get faster with each iteration. So the longer you work with it, it will perform better.

arn

[sith33]

While I certainly understand the tests they chose, but many of them (iPhoto exports to files and to web and whatnot, zipping files) are largely limited by other factors - the disk and whatnot. So, it's not terribly surprising to see limited speedup. I think it's all good - native apps won't lose speed in the short term, and we're much better off for the long term.

[Thanatoast]

And what kind of speed hit does vpc take on a G5? It ain't pretty, that's fer damn sure. I think that these scores are fine. It's just a temporary measure designed to shore up must-needed software in the short-term, unlike the alleged long-term solution that vpc was supposed to be.

[skunkworks]

The speed will improve over time and if you looking to buy an imac obviously this is the one, if not hold out a little while longer as the next revision of imac will be much better but think that the timing will be late summer for that.

[EricNau]

One test came in lower? I guess my iMac is still good for something...:p

Rosetta is a little slower than I would have expected, but I guess it is acceptable.

iTunes runs natively on Intel now, right? So why did they test that on Rosetta? I know it doesn't really matter, but it just seems weird to me.

[noverflow]

"In these native applications, the Intel iMac was up to 1.82x faster"
Should say

"In these native applications, the Intel iMac was up to 1.82x as fast"
or
In these native applications, the Intel iMac was up to .82x faster

Other then that... Looks like the g5 can hold its own considering that you should expect at least this much of a gain just from the 2nd core alone

[FoxyKaye]

Nice to see that once everything gets Universal Binaries, that the apps will really (or at least, should) fly. I'm guessing that the pressure is really going to be on developers this year to re-compile. Rosetta is only (hopefully) temporary for a lot of major apps, and it might turn in to a PPC "classic" environment for apps that are never re-compiled in the future - presumably at which time the overall speed of the chips on the Intel roadmap will compensate for the emulation performance hit.

Though the early benchmarks on Rosetta would explain my experience with PhotoShop at MWSF - it felt like I was trying to run the CS2 suite on a Pismo. Thank goodness Adobe's promised universal updates by March.

And what kind of speed hit does vpc take on a G5? It ain't pretty, that's fer damn sure. I think that these scores are fine. It's just a temporary measure designed to shore up must-needed software in the short-term, unlike the alleged long-term solution that vpc was supposed to be.
Anybody else get the feeling that M$ either has abandoned, or will be abandoning VPC in the near future? I have this eerie feeling that VPC 7.0.2 is the last version we'll see on PPC-based Macs, and perhaps may go the way of Internet Explorer and Windows Media Player...

It kinda makes sense, and it kinda doesn't - since folks are already trying to install Windows on the new Intel Macs, it might be that it would be a heck of a lot easier for M$ to put code directly into Vista that will install it on Apple Intel hardware.

[After G]

Funny how Steve downplayed the poor performance of Rosetta.

Well, I only expect it to get better.

[kainjow]

I'd like to see some Xcode benchmarks. Does it compile much faster? I guess this would have to be compared with a dual processor Power Mac to be more realistic (the 2nd processor on the iMac will give it a huge advantage over the single processor iMac G5).

Anybody else get the feeling that M$ either has abandoned, or will be abandoning VPC in the near future? I have this eerie feeling that VPC 7.0.2 is the last version we'll see on PPC-based Macs, and perhaps may go the way of Internet Explorer and Windows Media Player...

It kinda makes sense, and it kinda doesn't - since folks are already trying to install Windows on the new Intel Macs, it might be that it would be a heck of a lot easier for M$ to put code directly into Vista that will install it on Apple Intel hardware.
No, and here's why (from MacMinute.com (http://www.macminute.com/2006/01/18/virtual-pc/)):
Microsoft has issued a statement on the development status of Virtual PC for Intel-based Macs."The Mac BU recognizes the need for the product and believes it is the best virtualization solution for PowerPC users, so it is committed to providing Virtual PC to new and existing PowerPC customers. However, Microsoft is still discussing with Apple the feasibility of bringing Virtual PC for Mac to Intel-based Macs in the future and has not made any announcements about if/how the product might work on the new machines."

[Yvan256]

Rosetta, Intel Core Duo, G5... How are the new iMacs compared to my little Mac mini and its G4? :confused:

And do you think we'll see iBooks and Mac mini updated at the same time? Will they offer a "Mac mini Pro" with a Core Duo or will the iBook and Mac mini be stuck with single-core processors?

[Rend It]

...Looks like the g5 can hold its own considering that you should expect at least this much of a gain just from the 2nd core alone

Exactly! It would be nice to compare it with a fictitious iMac G5 dual-core. The 30-50% Rosetta performance seems like the most positive thing about this story. However, it's hard to determine if the speed differential is small because Rosetta is super-awesome, or if it's due to the performance increase of the hardware (or both?). I hope for Apple's sake the underwhelming performance of the native apps is due to un-optimized code.... I figure a single core Yonah is about on par with the single core G5, so while I don't expect performance of the apps to be exactly twice as fast with Intel Duo, I would have expected many more of those tests to show ~1.5x speed improvements. Certainly, there shoudn't be any tests that ran slower!?

Intel's chips may have been bored in PCs, but the G5 certainly wasn't bored in the Mac. :rolleyes:

[shawnce]

Funny how Steve downplayed the poor performance of Rosetta.

Down played? He and Apple never up played it... others did.

[Abstract]

yeah, usually for emulation, I always picture an order of magnitude speed decrease. 30-50% isn't that bad.


But it's not "34% to 48%" slower. It's 52% to 66% slower used under Rosetta!

May as well be using Virtual PC :eek:








Ok, that's a bit of an exaggeration

[shawnce]

Rosetta, Intel Core Duo, G5... How are the new iMacs compared to my little Mac mini and its G4? :confused:

It is likely fully dusted by the new iMac Core Duo, possibly even when using Rosette (for some tasks at least).

[arn]

Anybody else get the feeling that M$ either has abandoned, or will be abandoning VPC in the near future? I have this eerie feeling that VPC 7.0.2 is the last version we'll see on PPC-based Macs, and perhaps may go the way of Internet Explorer and Windows Media Player...


Microsoft said they'd be doing VPC for the Intel Mac.

http://www.macrumors.com/pages/2006/01/20060111130931.shtml

arn

[ChrisA]

Other then that... Looks like the g5 can hold its own considering that you should expect at least this much of a gain just from the 2nd core alone

No, I think the tests they used did not make much use of the second core. For example compressing a file is not multithreaed. In theat test the second core would only be running OS system level processes and be mostly idle,

A better test would be to run four compression tests at once and then compare how long it takes to compress all four folders on each system.

Notice the Intel web site talks about "multi core" and gives "dual core" as just one possable examle or "multi-core" In time there will be eight core Intel chips. In fact Sun is shipping an eight-core Sparc chips right now, Intel will follow. What does this mean? It means we'd better start today thinking about paralleliusm and multitasking as "normal". We should expect or demand that when we ask Photoshop to resize 50 image files that it will fire off 50 threads all at once rather then converting one image after the other. The Sun chip can run 32 threads at once using 8 cores each with 4-way "hyperthreading".

Why wrte about this? Educated consummers will create a demend. Demand will get the developers motivated.

[So Nice]

All systems were running Mac OS X 10.4.4 with 512MB of RAM

All is said... someone to do the same with 1Go please?

[dr_lha]

Rosetta emulation scores look terrible!
Are you serious? Emulating another CPU at 30-50% speed is amazing. Usually such technologies have a 10-20x Speed hit. Emulation generally has only be useful when the machine you're running on is orders or magnitude faster than what you're emulating.

I don't know what people were expecting with Rosetta, but I'm frankly amazed at these scores.

[shawnce]

I'd like to see some Xcode benchmarks. Xcode on a iMac Core Duo 1.83GHz out compiles Xcode on a PowerMac Dual G5 2.7GHz.

From http://www.gusmueller.com/blog/archives/2006/1/17.html#1415
Subversion compiled in 5 minutes, 16 seconds on my dual 2.7 g5 with 1.5 gigs of ram. It compiles in 4:32 on the 1.83ghz intel mac with 1 gig of ram. Which makes me happy.

..and from an Apple Xcode team member to Xcode users developer list...

How is the compile speed on the new machines?
On an iMac Core Duo, a tick or two slower than a Quad G5.

[agreenster]

And this is why I have ZERO interest now in getting a MacBook. For real digital content creation (animation, video editing, etc) the MacBook is a waste of time until software is available (Maya in my case) I just dont want to wait 8 months for Alias to release Maya Universal Binaries

Im looking hard at an XPS M170...

[dr_lha]

Im looking hard at an XPS M170...
Don't look too hard, your eyes will crack at the sheer ugliness of it.

Reminds me of my old Donkey Kong Game and Watch in the early 80s with that weird brushed metal effect.

[kainjow]

Xcode on a iMac Core Duo 1.83GHz out compiles Xcode on a PowerMac Dual G5 2.7GHz.

From http://www.gusmueller.com/blog/archives/2006/1/17.html#1415


..and from an Apple Xcode team member to Xcode users developer list...
Interesting... thanks for that info. Just a hair slower than the Quad? :eek: I wonder how the Quad "ProMac" will compare to its PPC equivalent :D

[shawnce]

I wonder how the Quad "ProMac" will compare to its PPC equivalent :D It will likely make grown men cry. :D

[MrCrowbar]

Hmmm... they tested the speeds with iLife... iPhoto does not need that much power (at least not from the processor. The graphics card is working here). And since the new iMacs still have the same hard drives as the G5 version, it's no surprise they won't get a lot faster. You might want to see if the processor is doing the jobs at 100%. The SysStats widget shows processor load pretty well so I'd like a comparison showing the CPU load. I bet the intel works less than the G5.

Thus these are not reasonable benchmarks IMHO. Either do pure CPU-Benchmarks that don't use any memory at all or do multitasking tests, i.o. run all iLife apps at once doing exactly the same things on both mashines and compare the times. The Core Duo should handle this much better than the G5.

As for apps runnung through Rosetta, I believe one core is doing the translating the app while the other core actually runs the app. So no dual power for rosetta apps. And remember: Rosetta is simulating a G3. Now show me a G3 that runs Photoshop as fast as the new iMac using Rosetta. :-)

[shawnce]

I wonder how the Quad "ProMac" will compare to its PPC equivalent :D On a serious note...

I put forward that the Intel based PowerMac that are in the pipeline for late year will have a few extra bonuses thanks to using Intels chipset. One will likely be hardware RAID support for SATA attached disks (the chipset will have it as an option, just a question of Apple supporting it).

[agreenster]

Don't look too hard, your eyes will crack at the sheer ugliness of it.

Reminds me of my old Donkey Kong Game and Watch in the early 80s with that weird brushed metal effect.

I dont give a crap about the finish. I give a crap that its got a 2+ghz processor and a GeForce 6800 or 7800 graphics chip in it and runs Maya today. (well, months ago really)

[mkrishnan]

If MS decides not to pursue VPC, then I think that, between QEmu, GuestPC, and Bochs, at least one of them is going to be a usable alternative. My impression is that, at least as far as Bochs is concerned, it is written in a fairly rigorous way, like other OSS, and should not be that hard to port. And I think it's going to be a LOT faster on a Core Duo Mac than it is today. Even if a Core Duo emulates a Pentium M (single proc) running at say 1GHz, this will be well into the useful range for many tasks.

[shawnce]

Rosetta is simulating a G3. Now show me a G3 that runs Photoshop as fast as the new iMac using Rosetta. :-) No it is now simulating a G4 including AltiVec.

I give a crap that its got a 2+ghz processor and a GeForce 6800 or 7800 graphics chip in it and runs Maya today. (well, months ago really) If it does what you need it to do now, cool.

[shompa]

I think this shows that Intel is all hype.

The Imac could have been bumped with dual core G5, and it would have been faster than the "new" core duo.

This is also the reason why the powermacs has not been switched to Intel.
There is still no X86 machine that can touch the dual dual G5.
Shure. I can build a AMD dual dual system, but it costs at least 30% more than the G 5 system.

For powerbooks.
The 2 ghz G4 performs at the same as a 2 ghz Intel. If Apple had put some time into freescale and got the dual core G4ors instead?

The switch to X86 is only about money for Jobs/Apple. Not to give us the best computer they can deliver. I think it's sad.
Apple is mediocre now.

[shawnce]

The 2 ghz G4 performs at the same as a 2 ghz Intel. Sorry no it doesn't if you are talking about a Core Duo (and not just because the Core Duo has two cores either).

The Imac could have been bumped with dual core G5, and it would have been faster than the "new" core duo. It would be about the same (assuming you could get dual core G5 in the iMac form factor without much more active cooling)... but the Core Duo is a LAPTOP CPU that is holding its own against a DESKTOP CPU.

This is also the reason why the powermacs has not been switched to Intel. The reason why, saying it a different way, is that the Apple wants to use a desktop CPU in the PowerMac and those are coming later this year from Intel.

The switch to X86 is only about money for Jobs/Apple. Not to give us the best computer they can deliver. I think it's sad. You are way off on this.

[nospleen]

I think this shows that Intel is all hype.

The Imac could have been bumped with dual core G5, and it would have been faster than the "new" core duo.

This is also the reason why the powermacs has not been switched to Intel.
There is still no X86 machine that can touch the dual dual G5.
Shure. I can build a AMD dual dual system, but it costs at least 30% more than the G 5 system.

For powerbooks.
The 2 ghz G4 performs at the same as a 2 ghz Intel. If Apple had put some time into freescale and got the dual core G4ors instead?

The switch to X86 is only about money for Jobs/Apple. Not to give us the best computer they can deliver. I think it's sad.
Apple is mediocre now.

Apple is mediocre because the new products are faster than the old?? Yeah, okay..... A dual G5 would never work in the imac, the imac had heat and loudness issues with one G5 in there.

[kainjow]

If MS decides not to pursue VPC, then I think that, between QEmu, GuestPC, and Bochs, at least one of them is going to be a usable alternative.
Don't forgot about VMware (http://www.vmware.com/), which is quite popular on current x86 machines.

[rhashem]

The Imac could have been bumped with dual core G5, and it would have been faster than the "new" core duo.


In an alternate reality... The heatsink/fan assembly on my DC G5 is about half the volume of an iMac 17".

[MrCrowbar]

No it is now simulating a G4 including AltiVec.

Right. So the real winner is the MacBookPro that goes from G4 directly to core duo. The actual PowerMacs are still great mashines, but the G5 won't really improve in the future. They are already water cooled in the PowerMac... But 64 bits still has advantages on the 32 on the core duo. Do do the math: the Quad G5 has 4x64 bits while a Quad core duo would only have 4x32 bit. So for complicated computations which are based on 64 bit, the G5 will win.

But Steve promised us to fulfil the prophecy... errr the switch until the end of this year. So I wonder what the PowerMac (or MacPro) will have. A 64 bit version (yet to come) of the core duo chip would be right. But honestly when using a PowerMac I wouldn't care for "performance per Watt". I mean, it's not a PowerSavingMac, it's a PowerMac. It is meant to be hot, loud and fast. So I guess (hope) they will put some cranked up Intel chip in there and keep the water cooling that surpass the G5 in every discipline. And why not put 8 Cores in that baby? Dual G4, Quad G5, Octa intel... it doubles at every new chip, right? :) I'm expecting to see a quad core chip from Intel for the end of the year... Octa MacPro sounds quite sexy to me. :D

[revfife]

I never quite get the gripping. If you want a dell buy a dell. If you want a mac buy a mac. I guarantee that 80% of software will be universal binary before the end of the year if Apple has anything to say about it. (with free or discount upgrade to the universal binary)

[mkrishnan]

Don't forgot about VMware (http://www.vmware.com/), which is quite popular on current x86 machines.

Mmmm, good point. Yes. :)

[lssmit02]

Note also that MacCentral loaded each with only 512 MB of ram, which likely has a bigger impact on the Intel iMac running programs in Rosetta - much more likely to need to page out/in to VM. We all know that OS X loves ram, so to run one program on a processor running natively, while the other runs the program in emulation, neither of which has much ram, heightens the difference. That's not to say it isn't real-world, because many people may only buy the stock iMac. It would be insteresting to see if running the test on both systems having 2 gig of ram has an impact.

[uaaerospace]

Guys, don't forget that the switch to Intel is about more than outright speed. It's about performace per watt.

[shawnce]

But Steve promised us to fulfil the prophecy... errr the switch until the end of this year. So I wonder what the PowerMac (or MacPro) will have. A 64 bit version (yet to come) of the core duo chip would be right. But honestly when using a PowerMac I wouldn't care for "performance per Watt". Intel's road map is fairly clear.

In late 2006 Intel will be shipping a processor they call Conroe that is a high-performance multi-core derivative of Merom. The Merom is a enhanced revamp of Yonah (aka Core Duo) targeted to replace the Yonah in Q3 (possibly Q4). In other words the Merom is a laptop CPU.

The Merom will out perform the Yonah in likely every metric (estimates of 20-30% better clock for clock over the Yonah). The Conroe will out perform the Merom by removing the low power requirements of a laptop chip. In other words the Conroe is a desktop CPU. Both the Merom and Conroe support 64 bit (among other technologies).

Of course Apple could surprise us by using a Pentium D relative in a PowerMac if the don't want to wait until near the end of the year... I personally hope not.

Finally Woodcrest (server version of Conroe supporting multiple packages in a system) could also show up in a high-end PowerMac (replace the Quad).


...but to sum things up... Apple isn't putting a laptop chip into the PowerMac replacement, it will be a true desktop/workstation class chip from Intel.

[spencecb]

Going off of what Arn said on the first page about Transitive technology, this leads me to think that if you never turn off one of the new Intel Macs (which most of us never turn off our Macs anyway) you would eventually not even notice the speed lag of Rosetta, because it will have compiled all the neccessary code it needs to make the PowerPC apps run on the Core Duo. I assume this plays into how much RAM you have, as I am (again) assuming that some of this code is stored on the RAM for fastest access possible.

Overall, not bad at all. This is shaping up to be an awesome year for Apple (and us).

[dr_lha]

I dont give a crap about the finish. I give a crap that its got a 2+ghz processor and a GeForce 6800 or 7800 graphics chip in it and runs Maya today. (well, months ago really)
I wasn't being that serious!

I don't really care what a computer looks like either! However I must say that what I really care about, and the biggest flaw that that Dell has, is whether a machine runs Mac OS X. :)

[HiRez]

The rosetta scores really are not all that bad considering that its all being emulated for an entirely different chip. I don't know if it shows the real speed of the intel chip or the skill of the Apple programers for creating a fairly decent emulation software.

All in all I'm not to upset, on the contrary I'm pretty impressed.Agreed. That's not terrible for emulation, and 1/3 to 1/2 native speed is not out of line with what's been seen previously since WWDC. As for me, I think I'll be waiting until most of the apps run natively on Intel before I buy a new Mac so I don't have to deal with the problem.

[MrCrowbar]

Intel's road map is fairly clear.
[...] Apple isn't putting a laptop chip into the PowerMac replacement, it will be a true desktop/workstation class chip from Intel.

Right. We won't be disappointed on the new pro mashines, I think. Apple let us a bit down on speed bumps recently, so the next should be a "giant leap for Mac kind" (nice one huh?).

By the way, I like the ballmer videos. I bet Bill is paying a lot to get this guy out of the sanatorum after the keynotes. :rolleyes:

[VanNess]

Macintouch also has an "early" review (http://www.macintouch.com/imacintel/review.html) of the iMac Core Duo which doesn't sound quite as ominous as Macworld's. One thing Macintouch mentioned about Rosetta that I don't remember seeing being alluded to at all in Macworld's G5/Core Duo Rosetta bake-off was this kind of interesting tidbit:

"Rosetta (i.e. Transitive's QuickTransit) works by translating PowerPC machine language code into an intermediate form, which it then can analyze and optimize, then converting this back to the foreign Intel machine language. Any speed penalty in this intermediate step is paid back in the next feature, code caching. QuickTransit doesn't have to convert code each and every every time it encounters it (the Achilles Heel of Apple's original 68000 emulator); it caches recently translated code for reuse, and when that cached code is called repeatedly, QuickTransit spends time further optimizing the code, so the most frequently used parts of a program become faster and faster as you use them."

From what I've read so far, there seems to be a general consensus among those who have actually had hands-on use is that the new iMac feels lightning fast when dealing with the OS and it's now-native apps and iLife. Rosetta impressions vary, but all seem to acknowledge that, while apps under Rosetta obviously aren't as fast as G5 native counterparts, Rosetta aint no slouch either. If you're using an app that's mostly pegging your G5/G4 system and it hasn't been released as a universal app yet, you pretty much know what to expect.

[HiRez]

Steve Balmers the CEO of Microsoft... Dance Mokey, Developers!, The remix, The adHilarious videos, I hadn't seen the "ad" one before. I think you meant to spell Monkey though?

[shawnce]

Hilarious videos, I hadn't seen the "ad" one before. I think you meant to spell Monkey though? Oops yeah, I will fix that.

[andiwm2003]

Note also that MacCentral loaded each with only 512 MB of ram, which likely has a bigger impact on the Intel iMac running programs in Rosetta - much more likely to need to page out/in to VM. We all know that OS X loves ram, so to run one program on a processor running natively, while the other runs the program in emulation, neither of which has much ram, heightens the difference. That's not to say it isn't real-world, because many people may only buy the stock iMac. It would be insteresting to see if running the test on both systems having 2 gig of ram has an impact.


i also feel that rosetta maybe needs more than 512 mb ram. i can't really understand why they did the review with only 512 mb ram on both machines. for one most users will have 1 GB of ram or more anyway. and my pb got much faster after upgrading to 1.25 GB of ram. in addition it runs a lot more stable.
with ram at the lower limit i doubt the test results are really representative for both machines. well lets see what barefeats.com comes up with.

[AidenShaw]

Do do [sic] the math: the Quad G5 has 4x64 bits while a Quad core duo would only have 4x32 bit. So for complicated computations which are based on 64 bit, the G5 will win.
"Doo doo" describes the logic here.... :D

The Yonah does 64-bit arithmetic - it has 64-bit floating point (like every other 32-bit CPU chip in desktops), and it has 64-bit integer support in SSE.

But that's more or less irrelevant - there are very few uses for 64-bit integers where performance is important!

Adding the bit widths is no more meaningful than trying to say that two 2GHz cores give you a 4 GHz CPU.

OSX is a 32-bit operating system, even on the G5. (Cocoa, Carbon, GUI apps can only be 32-bit.) Although the chip can do 64-bit, Apple is only using it in 32-bit mode.

A terminal app on 10.4 can use 64-bit addressing, but almost no applications actually do that - so few that Apple shipped a 10.4 update that completely disabled 64-bit. It took a while before anyone even noticed....
_____________

But, Apple should have waited and gone 64-bit only for the Intel chips.... Intel chips are faster running 64-bit (20% is a general rule of thumb).

[shawnce]

OSX is a 32-bit operating system, even on the G5. (Cocoa, Carbon, GUI apps can only be 32-bit.) Although the chip can do 64-bit, Apple is only using it in 32-bit mode.

Mac OS X frameworks, etc. are using 64 bit integer capabilities of the G5.

[MrCrowbar]

[...]
OSX is a 32-bit operating system, even on the G5. (Cocoa, Carbon, GUI apps can only be 32-bit.) Although the chip can do 64-bit, Apple is only using it in 32-bit mode.

A terminal app on 10.4 can use 64-bit addressing, but almost no applications actually do that - so few that Apple shipped a 10.4 update that completely disabled 64-bit. It took a while before anyone even noticed....
[...]


Well, I know, you can't say double bits = double power. But I've done some assembler programming for a 64 bit mashine and know the advantages of larger words. Didn't know OSX actually disabled that... Hope they let the intels go 64 bits.

[bankshot]

one test coming in slightly slower (.91x) than the G5 iMac.

That one test was iPhoto (export to files). This is most likely a very disk-heavy operation, negating any advantage in the Intel CPU. According to this post (http://episteme.arstechnica.com/groupee/forums/a/tpc/f/174096756/m/396006927731/r/686004037731#686004037731) at Ars Technica, the newer iMacs (recent G5 and Intel) use Western Digital disks, while older G5 iMacs use Maxtor disks. Apparently the Maxtors are faster. I'll bet anything that's what happened here: the G5 had a Maxtor while the Intel had a Western Digital. Intel gets beat on a disk-heavy test.

[shawnce]

Didn't know OSX actually disabled that... Hope they let the intels go 64 bits. It doesn't disable it for the G5... really nothing to disable on the PPC. You can use the G5's 64 bit integer capabilities in any application as of Mac OS X 10.2.8 (and related tool chain). It is just that 64 bit addressing support isn't universal in Mac OS X 10.4 (confined only to libSystem using processes, no higher-level framework... i.e. no UI).

[MacNemesis]

...Though the early benchmarks on Rosetta would explain my experience with PhotoShop at MWSF - it felt like I was trying to run the CS2 suite on a Pismo. Thank goodness Adobe's promised universal updates by March.

Not to be a doubting Thomas, but care to post a link substantiating Adobe's promise? I don't recall seeing such an official promise.

[bankshot]

Apple shipped a 10.4 update that completely disabled 64-bit. It took a while before anyone even noticed....

Really? I don't recall hearing about this. Source? I'm curious.

[RichCoder]

When did Steve Jobs ever say that applications would be 2-times faster? This MacWorld article implies that he said exactly that. Steve actually said that was the processor performance and did not reflect other hardware such as disk, etc.

If MacWorld ran the same benchmarks that Apple did and got much slower results then they would have a story.

-rich

[shawnce]

Really? I don't recall hearing about this. Source? I'm curious.

A Mac OS X update that Apple shipped at one point didn't include the 64b version of libSystem so applications that linked against would fail to run.

[kainjow]

Really? I don't recall hearing about this. Source? I'm curious.
http://www.macminute.com/2005/08/18/apple-security-update/

[boombashi]

Right. So the real winner is the MacBookPro that goes from G4 directly to core duo...

You are soooo right!

From the Macworld article:

"The speed of applications running under Rosetta will be something to keep in mind, especially when it comes to the forthcoming release of the MacBook Pro. The users of that professional-level laptop are far more likely to demand serious speed from their applications; if there’s no Universal version of Photoshop available at the time, professional photographers may balk at the idea of running Photoshop at a fraction of its speed."

So what's this guys point if Rosetta runs half the speed of a G5 on a MacBookPro. If the current iMac G5 is twice as fast as the iMac Core Duo running Rosetta, and the new MacBook Pro (similar specs) is 4x faster than the G4 PowerBook, wouldn't that lead you to believe that performance should be much more tollerable (possibly close to the same as the recent G4) considering it's predecessor? Of course lets not forget Universal compiled programs!

Ignore the numbers and be happy that Rosetta performs at close to G4 speeds, I know I am. Apple will improve on Rosetta AND OS X 10.4.4 in the near future, expect an update soon. Sounds like iLife will need some updates as well, but that's typical from Apple's iLife apps.

***I don't know if any of you actually "used" Classic through OS X 10.0, but if you did you know what it takes to make something emulate to native speed. I haven't used Classic for several years, but I remember it improved with leaps and bounds in 10.1

[Edit] Not to mention you had to boot the freaking operating system to run Classic - what a pain. This transition feels like nothing compared to that, and we all survived ;)

[nagromme]

Remember the reason why Rosetta running slower than native is perfecly OK as a transitional measure:

Because most people buying an Intel Mac are not sidegrading from a G5 Mac... they upgrading from a G4!

Anybody who is working now on a recent G5 and then switches to Intel with non-multiprocessing Rosetta apps and is "disappointed" by the speed is in the minority. Most of those people are keeping their G5 until a later date when it makes more sense to get a new machine.

Likewise switchers are probably not switching from a very recent fast PC. Normally you buy a new machine when your old one gets, well... old :) (But for people who do switch from a fast PC, hopefully they aren't running out in droves to buy non-Universal speed-intensive apps like Photoshop. Best to wait a bit on that.)

[MrCrowbar]

Photoshop runs ok on the G4 Powerbooks. So it will through Rosetta on the MBP. Then comes the universal version (hope it's a free update, else I will download it, I swear. Cmon, a licence for CS2 is a licence for CS2!) and we will be "thrilled with it".

Let's all wait for April when they show off the full line of MBP (I mean the small and the big one).

[nagromme]

Photoshop runs ok on the G4 Powerbooks. So it will through Rosetta on the MBP. Then comes the universal version (hope it's a free update, else I will download it, I swear. Cmon, a licence for CS2 is a licence for CS2!) and we will be "thrilled with it".
What has Adobe said on this? I thought we weren't expecting Universal Pshop until CS3.

[RichP]

Everyone quit whining about intel. The majority of computer sales is, and will be, laptop sales. Intel chips are getting more efficient and faster. The G5 and G4 are dead for useful portables. Case closed.

[digitalbiker]

Nice to see that once everything gets Universal Binaries, that the apps will really (or at least, should) fly. I'm guessing that the pressure is really going to be on developers this year to re-compile. Rosetta is only (hopefully) temporary for a lot of major apps, and it might turn in to a PPC "classic" environment for apps that are never re-compiled in the future - presumably at which time the overall speed of the chips on the Intel roadmap will compensate for the emulation performance hit.

Though the early benchmarks on Rosetta would explain my experience with PhotoShop at MWSF - it felt like I was trying to run the CS2 suite on a Pismo. Thank goodness Adobe's promised universal updates by March.

Where did you hear that Adobe would have Universal Binaries by March? The last thing I heard was from the CEO who said not to expect Universal Binaries until late 2006 or early 2007.

[aussie_geek]

This is another good reason to hang on to what you have now and update your Mac's when you are forced to do so. Anyone with a G5 of any kind should hang out for at least 6 months AFTER the whole transition has been completed. That means start looking for a new mac in mid 2007.

This way, there will be a good chance that most apps will be universal. Some Intel only ones will start popping up too.

aussie_geek

[JackAxe]

The Yonah does 64-bit arithmetic - it has 64-bit floating point (like every other 32-bit CPU chip in desktops), and it has 64-bit integer support in SSE.

Ok, if you're only refering to SSE 3, then yes, but the Yohan when it comes to Integer and FPU is only 32-bit. Intel's 64-bit version is the Merom, which will be out later this year. I guess you forgort that AltiVec is 128-bit. :p It will be sad to see this go, if Intel doesn't come up with a comparable alternative. Hopefully the Conroe will compensate enough in other areas to off balance this downgrade, which it should without a problem.


But that's more or less irrelevant - there are very few uses for 64-bit integers where performance is important!

Yep, in the consumer arena. :) But for the peeps that do need it, 32-bit falls way short. I do lots of heavy rendering through Maya, to the point that it keeps my G5 and 2 other PCs busy for hours at a time. 64-bit rendering could easily mean the difference between hours and minutes.


OSX is a 32-bit operating system, even on the G5. (Cocoa, Carbon, GUI apps can only be 32-bit.) Although the chip can do 64-bit, Apple is only using it in 32-bit mode.

Leaving the GUI at 32-bit is a good thing, since not everything needs 64-bit and switching it over now would break practically everything. I would like to have it as an option in the near future though.


A terminal app on 10.4 can use 64-bit addressing, but almost no applications actually do that - so few that Apple shipped a 10.4 update that completely disabled 64-bit. It took a while before anyone even noticed....

Funny, the apps I use daily are all benifiting from 64-bit. CS2 and Apple's pro apps all support 64-bit addressing. Even my other apps, which are still 32-bit, run much better now, since they can each have their own 2 gig address space, if available. After Effects showed the biggest gaing by far, since it no longer goes into a swap frenzy when it hits its celing. (I look forward to AE 7, I'm pretty sure it will suport 64-bit addressing, if it does, I'm adding 4 more gigs.)

If Apple did disable 64-bit with one of its updates, I would like ot see a link stating that they had? I upgraded to Tiger day one and my system still saw and used all of my 5-gigs, with every update. So I'm not sure what you're refereing to, unless they temporarily disabled 64-bit addressing for applications, which was new to Tiger.

Anyways, it's almost time to upgrade my Ti-Book. If I ended up with a 32-bit MacBook, I would still be "extremely" happy.

<]=)

[SiliconAddict]

And quieter, too. Remember folks, lack of fan noise is more important than pure speed.


Umm NO. No^50

[swingerofbirch]

Count me among the nonplussed masses.

I shall wait for the SuperMac. Or perchance to dream, the SuperMacBook Pro Extreme Ultra Homemakover Edition. Yes, that is what I need.

[Ulfhednar]

Heck, why didn't they just swap out that chip with 128mbs. Let's really have some fun!

. . . let's see . . . who do I know that runs OSX Tiger with 512mbs of memory . . . hmmmmm . . . ummmmm . . . gee, all I can think of is those idiots at Macworld! What a great real-world test! Great job guys! I'm so excited! I can't what to open up my MacIntel and rip out all that memory I ordered it with. What in the world was I thinking?

[SiliconAddict]

Don't forgot about VMware (http://www.vmware.com/), which is quite popular on current x86 machines.

VMWare workstation kicks the SNOT out of VPC. I have both on my now defunct desktop and I can say without hesitation the feature set on the VMWW is just plain better then VPC. Might I suggest a campaign to blanket VMWare with requests?

[AidenShaw]

Really? I don't recall hearing about this. Source? I'm curious.
No problem!

http://www.macworld.com/news/2005/08/17/64bit/index.php?pf=1

"A security update released on Monday by Apple rendered 64-bit optimized applications for Mac OS X unusable.
...
“Due to an error on the part of Apple, this update prevents any 64-bit-native application from running,” said Wolfram in the note to customers. “In particular, this means that Mathematica 5.2 will not run on any G5 system if it has installed this Security Update.”"

Mac OS X frameworks, etc. are using 64 bit integer capabilities of the G5.
Using 64-bit integers is minor - SSE has 64-bit integers.

"32-bit mode" means 32-bit addressing.

Floating point has been 64-bit on every desktop chip in the last 20 years - but nobody has called those 64-bit chips. Doing 64-bit integers is no different.

It's only 64-bit addressing that most people use to define a 64-bit system - and Apple's 64-bit implementation is very lame.

Ok, if you're only refering to SSE 3, then yes, but the Yohan when it comes to Integer and FPU is only 32-bit.
The FPU is 64-bit, and has been on every Pentium. Where does this crap come from?

And it's not SSE3 - SSE (before SSE2 and way before SSE3) had 64-bit integer support (http://arstechnica.com/articles/paedia/cpu/pentium-2.ars/3) It was improved in SSE2 and SSE3, but it was present in SSE. (And to a limited extent in MMX, but too limited for me to claim that it really supported 64-bit integers.)


I guess you forgort that AltiVec is 128-bit. :p
So is SSE. Your point?

64-bit rendering could easily mean the difference between hours and minutes.
I was unable to find any posted benchmarks comparing Maya 32-bit to Maya 64-bit on the same hardware.

I would be very surprised to see a 60-fold improvement (hours to minutes), however. :eek:

Leaving the GUI at 32-bit is a good thing, since not everything needs 64-bit and switching it over now would break practically everything.
You should try Windows 64-bit then, all the old Windows 32-bit applications run just fine.

The 32-bit applications run as fast as on a 32-bit system, and 64-bit applications run even faster (typically 20% faster than 32-bit applications on the same hardware).


CS2 and Apple's pro apps all support 64-bit addressing.
Umm, CS2 is a GUI app - it's completely 32-bit. Same with Apple's apps.

(Don't you think that someone would have noticed that an Apple security update broke Photoshop and all of Apple's own apps?)

This claim is 100% BS, maybe 200% if you use 64-bit. :rolleyes:


Even my other apps, which are still 32-bit, run much better now, since they can each have their own 2 gig address space, if available.
Just like any other 32-bit virtual memory OS. (Windows 32-bit supports up to 64 GiB of RAM - 32 applications can each have their own 2 GiB of physical memory.)


If Apple did disable 64-bit with one of its updates, I would like ot see a link stating that they had? I upgraded to Tiger day one and my system still saw and used all of my 5-gigs, with every update. So I'm not sure what you're refereing to, unless they temporarily disabled 64-bit addressing for applications, which was new to Tiger.
Look above for the links - they definitely screwed up and posted an updater that killed all 64-bit apps.

But, like a Windows 32-bit system that can support 64 GiB, your 32-bit OSX system could still support 5 GiB of RAM.

A 32-bit 10.3 system, which nobody would claim had any 64-bit addressing support, could also support your 5 GiB. 'nuf said about needing 64-bit to support more than 4 GiB in a system.

[bhirt]

Anybody else get the feeling that M$ either has abandoned, or will be abandoning VPC in the near future? I have this eerie feeling that VPC 7.0.2 is the last version we'll see on PPC-based Macs, and perhaps may go the way of Internet Explorer and Windows Media Player...


Hopefully the rumors are true that vmware will come out for OS X. If that's true, who cares about VPC. vmware is an incredible product that i use every day, and I'd much rather give them money than M$. If i could get it on OS X i could finally ditch my linux server.

[Photorun]

But it's not "34% to 48%" slower. It's 52% to 66% slower used under Rosetta!

May as well be using Virtual PC :eek:

Put down the crack pipe and slowly back away.

[macosxuser01]

maybe its signs of the year 2038 problem:eek:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2038_problem

[ncoffey]

I would imagine that 10.5 will probably improve on the 64-bit transition. Maybe they'll extend the universal binary concept to include 32-bit and 64-bit apps.

[shawnce]

Using 64-bit integers is minor - SSE has 64-bit integers.

"32-bit mode" means 32-bit addressing.

Floating point has been 64-bit on every desktop chip in the last 20 years - but nobody has called those 64-bit chips. Doing 64-bit integers is no different.

It's only 64-bit addressing that most people use to define a 64-bit system - and Apple's 64-bit implementation is very lame.

Yes I know all of that... I was clarifying to others that you can use the 64b integer aspects of G5 and the way you worded things could easily be misunderstood... It also isn't minor for several types of integer based processing (yes SSE has it but I was confining discussion to G5).

[powerbook911]

maybe its signs of the year 2038 problem:eek:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2038_problem

Is this why our Mac calendars go only through December 2037?

[gugy]

I am glad I purchased my G5 Quad. I hope to keep it until rev.b for the Powermac with Intel. Hopefully then All pro apps will be Intel native.

[FaasNat]

Rosetta emulation scores look terrible!
Haven't really looked into it too much, but I wonder how Rosetta emulation on x86 compares to x86 emulation on PPC....

[BakedBeans]

256mb per core - when will these people do a fair test?

[Marvy]

Rosetta emulation scores look terrible!

Not for me! I'm upgrading from an iBook G3 500 MHz. For me those scores flyyyyy :D .

[ksgant]

I think this shows that Intel is all hype.

The Imac could have been bumped with dual core G5, and it would have been faster than the "new" core duo.

This is also the reason why the powermacs has not been switched to Intel.
There is still no X86 machine that can touch the dual dual G5.
Shure. I can build a AMD dual dual system, but it costs at least 30% more than the G 5 system.

For powerbooks.
The 2 ghz G4 performs at the same as a 2 ghz Intel. If Apple had put some time into freescale and got the dual core G4ors instead?

The switch to X86 is only about money for Jobs/Apple. Not to give us the best computer they can deliver. I think it's sad.
Apple is mediocre now.

What are you talking about? There are systems out there today that kick the crap out of the dual-dual G5 (call the Quad btw). Also, where are you getting this "30% more than the G5 system" figure from? Also, we already have other tests out there (do a search) and you'll see that the new core-duo keeps up with a dual-core G5 PowerMac. Go ahead, do a search.

The G5 is going buh bye. IBM isn't interested in making better and better chips to actually compete or else they would have brought something good out by now. Dual-core G4s? zzzzzz. Give me a break. Apple was a slave to IBM and they waited....and waited....and waited....(still no 3Ghz G5) and waited for them. Now Apple has some choice. They went x86 now so that means that if Intel starts dragging their feet or if they're relationship goes sour, AMD is there to help out.

Also, the reason the PowerMacs haven't switch to Intel yet is because they just haven't switched. Remember, we weren't even suppose to SEE the first Intel Macs until this June or July of this year. There are rumors out there of a 4 dual-core PowerMac in the works (8 processor). Rumor yes, but it can be done. Could you imagine the cooling or even what the frickin case would look like if they tried 4 G5's in the PowerMac?

These numbers look great in this test. Macworld put a negative spin on them for some reason. I'm sitting there looking at the numbers and saying to myself "wow, nice speed up". Yet Macworld spun it as "not very impressive". Guess they were looking at different numbers than I was. Not to mention that OSX is probably still not 100% optimized for Intel...yet.

Meh...if it got me, a dyed in the wool PC user that builds his own systems to order a new iMac, it can't be all that bad.

[Marvy]

When did Steve Jobs ever say that applications would be 2-times faster? This MacWorld article implies that he said exactly that. Steve actually said that was the processor performance and did not reflect other hardware such as disk, etc.

If MacWorld ran the same benchmarks that Apple did and got much slower results then they would have a story.

-rich

Agreed, but even then they wouldn't really have a story. Apple said "up to two times faster". To prove their assumption all Apple would need to do is find some process in which the CPU performance would temporarily be twice the speed of the G5. Q.E.D.

[EricNau]

What are you talking about? There are systems out there today that kick the crap out of the dual-dual G5 (call the Quad btw). Also, where are you getting this "30% more than the G5 system" figure from? There are systems out there that kick the **** out of Intel computers also. (I think one of them is called "Blue Gene"). Fact is, not very many Personal Computers are as good as the Quad G5, and very few of them allow up to 16 GB of RAM.

[ksgant]

There are systems out there that kick the **** out of Intel computers also. (I think one of them is called "Blue Gene"). Fact is, not very many Personal Computers are as good as the Quad G5, and very few of them allow up to 16 GB of RAM.

The Quad G5 isn't really a Personal Computer. I mean, if you want to call it that, then an 8 processor Opteron system is a good Personal Computer also!

Boxx Technologies makes one that has up to 64GB of RAM. Yes, you pay quite a price for all that RAM as you do if you had 16GB, but you can still get it! With all that RAM about 3/4's of the entire computer's price is taken up. :eek:

To be fair though, the high end systems from companies like Boxx are more for 3D workstations...something that Apple just wasn't cut out for a while ago. I mean, it was only just last year that Apple made availible high end OpenGL cards for their systems. It's good that they did that and all, but they kinda came to the show a little late. Also, the future of Maya on the Mac is in question now that Mac-unfriendly Autodesk bought them up. Autodesk "says" they will keep going, but who the hell knows. My gut feeling is that Maya will keep chugging along just fine, but again, who knows.

[adrianm]

Funny how Steve downplayed the poor performance of Rosetta.

Well, I only expect it to get better.
He didn't, and rosetta performance is pretty good considering what it's doing. It's certainly better than I expected.

[bobbyMACbear]

I just purchased a 20 inch intel imac, and let me tell you, it is a "steamer." I actually had a G5 purchased from Apple, but cancelled the order after reading that article on Apple Insider back in October. I have yet to thank them...

However, I was wondering about this 32-bit/64-bit debacle. I'm not really worried about speed so much, but I'm worried about the next OS, 10.5. Should I expect any problems with the new OS with a 32-bit processor? I want to take full advantage of all of Leapord's new goodies...

With this in mind, do I have any need to worry? Any info would help me sleep better!

[BakedBeans]

I just purchased a 20 inch intel imac, and let me tell you, it is a "steamer." I actually had a G5 purchased from Apple, but cancelled the order after reading that article on Apple Insider back in October. I have yet to thank them...

However, I was wondering about this 32-bit/64-bit debacle. I'm not really worried about speed so much, but I'm worried about the next OS, 10.5. Should I expect any problems with the new OS with a 32-bit processor? I want to take full advantage of all of Leapord's new goodies...

With this in mind, do I have any need to worry? Any info would help me sleep better!

these intels should be supported for a long time yet

[jacobj]

While I certainly understand the tests they chose, but many of them (iPhoto exports to files and to web and whatnot, zipping files) are largely limited by other factors - the disk and whatnot. So, it's not terribly surprising to see limited speedup. I think it's all good - native apps won't lose speed in the short term, and we're much better off for the long term.


Has anyone else made reference to this comment, because it is a good one? Generally, where HD or RAM would not be a limiting factor the Duo destroyed the G5 or at least I am assuming that it did. Look at the iMovie effects, am I the only one that thinks that 2GB in both machines would have made a huge difference. I know that they are comparing like-for-like, but we want to know about the processor speed increase, not the basic configuration speed increase. Or at least that's what I want to know.

Do we know if Rosetta uses much RAM? If it takes 256MB of RAM to do its job in a 512MB RAM machine with the OS taking another 256MB then the apps themselves are going to run like pigs. Has anyone else thought of this and if so do we have any info?

I really do wish that people would gear these tests towards the chip and not the basic config.

Edit: I have just made the same rant to a colleague at work and he quite rightly points out that many potential switchers will want this info, i.e. they want to know what they get when they pop into a local store and buy an iMac Duo. I accept his point, but it leads me to thinking that most magazines tell us RAM will make a difference but in their tests they fail to give us benchmarks to indicate by how much performance will be increased. MacWorld is a great magazine (Mac Format is better), but it is time that they gave us a suite of benchmarks with clear explanations as to how things would be different.

I want to see these kind of benchmarks(see attached thumbnail)(these are fabrications):




Not much to ask is it?

[kugino]

I think this shows that Intel is all hype.

The Imac could have been bumped with dual core G5, and it would have been faster than the "new" core duo.

This is also the reason why the powermacs has not been switched to Intel.
There is still no X86 machine that can touch the dual dual G5.
Shure. I can build a AMD dual dual system, but it costs at least 30% more than the G 5 system.

For powerbooks.
The 2 ghz G4 performs at the same as a 2 ghz Intel. If Apple had put some time into freescale and got the dual core G4ors instead?

The switch to X86 is only about money for Jobs/Apple. Not to give us the best computer they can deliver. I think it's sad.
Apple is mediocre now.
couldn't tell if this was said tongue in cheek...methinks you're serious. are you serious?! what you been smokin', man?

[illegalprelude]

But Steve promised us to fulfil the prophecy... errr the switch until the end of this year. So I wonder what the PowerMac (or MacPro) will have. A 64 bit version (yet to come) of the core duo chip would be right. But honestly when using a PowerMac I wouldn't care for "performance per Watt". I mean, it's not a PowerSavingMac, it's a PowerMac. It is meant to be hot, loud and fast. So I guess (hope) they will put some cranked up Intel chip in there and keep the water cooling that surpass the G5 in every discipline. And why not put 8 Cores in that baby? Dual G4, Quad G5, Octa intel... it doubles at every new chip, right? :) I'm expecting to see a quad core chip from Intel for the end of the year... Octa MacPro sounds quite sexy to me. :D

Hell yes. I dont care how quiet my PM is (my PM G5 that is what, 2 years old? its the 1.6 is so much quiter then my brand new build PC and that bastard almost cost me $2200 so its quality built). I just want my next PM (I wish I had money to get the dual core g5's right now..*drools*) but I want my next PowerMac to bust balls. Hell, I wanna get home and it has my project edited and rendered for me. Thats the kind of power I want from it :D

[inkswamp]

I haven't seen this discussed yet but I wonder how some PPC games run under Rosetta. Or if it's even possible.

[jacobj]

I haven't seen this discussed yet but I wonder how some PPC games run under Rosetta. Or if it's even possible.

Most reviews have said don't bother. That said it all depends how intensive the game is.

[nagromme]

I haven't seen this discussed yet but I wonder how some PPC games run under Rosetta. Or if it's even possible.
Good news:

Some PowerPC games--even 3D games that require a G4--do run in Rosetta and run well. (Note that the new iMac has a better 3D board than the G5 models too.) It will vary a lot from game to game of course.

The recent Wall Street Journal review of the Core Duo iMac says that Doom 3 runs well despite Rosetta. This is clearly only a casual quick impression--I simple CANNOT believe a recent game as demanding as Doom 3 truly performs similarly to a G4 Mac. Nonetheless, if it even made a CASUAL impression of good performance, then it wasn't a "slideshow" and that's enough to impress me.

More realistically, older games that run well on a G4 (which Doom does not) are likely to run well on Core Duo even with Rosetta. (Plus not all games are in detailed 3D, and not all demand much speed from a computer anyway. Some games run fine on a G3! Depends on the genre.)

The programmer behind the Mac version of Alice (great game!) posted at InsideMacGames that they were not going to patch it to a Universal Binary: it's not worth it because Alice runs really well with Rosetta anyway. And that was on the 2005 devkit Macs, which didn't have the nice 3D board these iMacs have.

Alice is a Quake 3 engine game (and a pretty high-end/detailed one). There are many other such games (Start Trek games come to mind). If Alice runs well in Rosetta, they should too.

Meanwhile, over at IMG, various companies have committed to Universal Binary patches, even for some popular older games. So games that do NOT run well in Rosetta may well be updated soon anyway.

Several more recent games, like UT 2004, which have enough detail to take advantage of today's hardware, have been announced as Universals--expected very soon.

And upcoming games will certainly be Universal; Quake 4 will be, and it's officially due soon as well. (And a Doom 3 Universal patch is likely: Quake 4 uses the Doom 3 engine.)

UT 2007 on Intel Macs is a near certainty too: the UT 2007 editing tools have been announced for Mac, and so has the physics engine for the game. It would be weird to not see the game make it to Mac given all that--and when it does, Intel Macs will be the norm.

Core Duo is looking like a Mac gamer's best friend already, even if you don't want to install Windows--and things will only get better :)

[BakedBeans]

Most reviews have said don't bother. That said it all depends how intensive the game is.

didnt WoW run at 100fps under rosetta?

[generik]

But 64 bits still has advantages on the 32 on the core duo. Do do the math: the Quad G5 has 4x64 bits while a Quad core duo would only have 4x32 bit. So for complicated computations which are based on 64 bit, the G5 will win.

Erh... do you know what you are talking about? Even if it were 100 cores it is still 64 bits, and not 64000 bits like you are trying to put it.

[skunk]

Late to the thread, but in what practical way exactly are the new machines as much "faster" than before as claimed by a certain SJ?

[jacobj]

didnt WoW run at 100fps under rosetta?

Did it?

[BakedBeans]

Late to the thread, but in what practical way exactly are the new machines as much "faster" than before as claimed by a certain SJ?

THE INTELIMAC HAD 256MB PER CORE - THE TEST IS W@£K

We will see some real world speeds when both has 2gb - the 256 per core will be really bottlenecking that dual core processor and rosetta

Did it?

http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=173200

http://media.arstechnica.com/journals/apple.media/mw_06_r_bz2.jpg

[a1291762]

You can't compare Rosetta's performance to VPC or Apples 68k emulator. You really need to compare it to another product that lets PowerPC apps run on x86 chips. Something like PearPC which as I recall was getting less than 10% speed.

The thing is that emulating a PowerPC on an x86 is *very* hard due to the lack of registers on x86. It impacts performance in a way that you just can't avoid. When going the other way, it's easier. Even the 68k to PowerPC transition was easier (though the original PowerPC chips didn't have enough cache to run the emulator properly).

Rosetta doesn't emulate a CPU but rather translates the instructions and then runs them. This is why it's so fast. The fact that it can run PowerPC binaries on an x86 chip at 50% speed is totally awesome. Not since the x86-on-Alpha days (FX!32 was based on the same idea as Rosetta, possibly even the same code) has such a thing been possible.

The recent Wall Street Journal review of the Core Duo iMac says that Doom 3 runs well despite Rosetta. This is clearly only a casual quick impression--I simple CANNOT believe a recent game as demanding as Doom 3 truly performs similarly to a G4 Mac.

Id was going to start writing it's game engines in Java at one point. In fact, you can get a Quake2 Java port. The thing that drives 3D games these days is your video card. I'm not saying that a G3 with the latest card could run DOOM3 because obviously there's still quite a lot of CPU activity. It's just that the amount of CPU required is quite a bit less than your average system has today.

[Hattig]

http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=173200

http://media.arstechnica.com/journals/apple.media/mw_06_r_bz2.jpg

That image was from the Universal binary of the game, it is 100fps running natively on the core duo. It was being run to show off a native game.

[Burai]

I'm not too concerned. Rosetta is only an interim technology. If you're that worried, buy a G5 now and get a Mactel in a couple of years when Universal binaries are... well, universal.

In order to move forward, sometimes you have to take a couple of steps backward. Any platform transition has shortcomings to begin with. OS9 to OS X is a good example. Yet here we are 5 years on with most people having no need for Classic and I don't know anyone who'd even want to go back to OS9.

Rosetta is Classic for the new transition. It's not perfect, but it's a neccessary step to get away from PowerPC. The only way to avoid it is to keep waiting for that G5 PowerBook and 3GHz PowerMac.

And wait.

And wait.

[a1291762]

64-bit does not make anything faster. It actually makes things slower and more importantly, bigger. A 64-bit app might not fit in the processor cache where a 32-bit one would.

However, there's something special about x86_64 (Intel calls it EMT64). You see, when AMD designed this they did some tweaks to the ISA as well. The most significant of these is that they doubled the registers available to a 64-bit program.

The increased register count is the principle reason that some "64-bit" programs are running faster on x86_64 systems. The compiler can avoid memory accesses (which are really slow) and just use registers instead. It's a luxury that the PowerPC has enjoyed since it was designed.

Notes:
Yonah (Core Duo) does not have x86_64.
The next generation of Intel chips will have x86_64.
Not all applications are written in such a way that the compiler can make them 20% faster using the extra registers.

SIMD stuff (Altivec/SSE) has absolutely nothing to do with 64-bit. The SSE stuff you can do with Intel chips is almost as good as what you can do with Altivec. It's probably not as elegant or as efficient as what the G4 had but the G5 showed that doesn't matter if you have a faster clock speed.

Until Apple has fixed their GUI code to allow 64-bit operation (it's not currently 64-bit clean) then no apps with a GUI can be 64-bit.

[bigandy]

yeah, usually for emulation, I always picture an order of magnitude speed decrease. 30-50% isn't that bad.


just what i was thinking when i read the post..

[BakedBeans]

This is one post from a person testing the 17inch intelimac v the isight version



RIGHT TIME FOR THE RESULTS

The Intel Mac arrived today at lunch. It is a 17 inch 512mb dual core. Compare to my G5 with 512mb - i took out the additonal stick to make the tests fairer.

First impressions are the Intel machine boots a fraction faster than the G5, I would conservatively put it at around 5 seconds faster, however not as fast as shown on a video doing the rounds on the net but indeed it is faster.

The first test I applied to the machine was to open photoshop and see how long it took each machine to fully open it.

The G5 machine opened this program in around 25 seconds
The intel machine opened this program in around 11 seconds.

Ilife 06 was placed on both machines and run.
The G5 machine opened this program in around 18 seconds
The intel machine opened this program in around 06 seconds.

I decided to test the machine using illustrator and a brochure I had put together which was 56 pages long with some very high res images in it.
The G5 machine opened the file after 16 seconds, and the Intel machine did this in 5 seconds, however the Intel machine allowed me to grab and scroll the document with no delay whilst the G5 machine was a bit more jerky.

I enjoy watching quicktime movie trailers on my Imac and found that whilst I could watch hi- res trailers there. I ran a test on The Xmen 3 HD trailer. The G5 Imac played up to 720p with no slowdowns or problems at all. When going to the next level 1080p trailer the G5 had problems even with 1gb system ram installed, the sound played but lost synch with the video as a lag slowly crept in. The intel machine played the 1080p with 512mb without a single hitch, the playback was fluid and uninterrupted.

Back to photoshop, and Indesign CS2 I found that Intel machine was on a par with the G5 but weirdly in certain functions the intel machine would blow the G5 away, certain brush and effects when applied suing the Intel would speed through instantly, where as the G5 would be 3-10 seconds behind in some cases.

Office proved to be very interesting as in my tests there was no difference at all, the load times varied by a second or two but nothing massively, and these would change around each instance, the only program I found to have what i would consider a noticable effect was Word. When a word docuemtn laden with images was opened on the Intel machine it did so with no delay, in the past there had been a 1-5 second delay but i had attributed this to down to the hard drive. Could this be due to the original powerpoint presentation being created on a Pc who knows.

One thing that is for sure is that the Intel machine comes with some nicer packaging, the manual, remote and documents come in a sexy slide box which was a plastic bag affair with my G5.

I cannot say enough about Rossetta, its like omni-present. If it is there and working you certainly dont notice, I will be interested to see how some of my game slike Roller Coaster Tycoon 3 run on the machine but generally across the board the Intel is either the same or faster. When native universal versions of the core mac programs appear like Adobe CS3 and Office I think we will see a huge speed jump!

[aegisdesign]

And this is why I have ZERO interest now in getting a MacBook. For real digital content creation (animation, video editing, etc) the MacBook is a waste of time until software is available (Maya in my case) I just dont want to wait 8 months for Alias to release Maya Universal Binaries

Im looking hard at an XPS M170...


All laptops are a waste of time for digital content creation. They're always a compromise compared to a desktop. If speed is really important for you and you need it now, the Quad G5 can't be beat.

THE INTELIMAC HAD 256MB PER CORE - THE TEST IS W@£K


No, it doesn't work like that. Memory isn't split up by how many cores you have. It had 512MB available to BOTH cores.

VMWare workstation kicks the SNOT out of VPC. I have both on my now defunct desktop and I can say without hesitation the feature set on the VMWW is just plain better then VPC. Might I suggest a campaign to blanket VMWare with requests?

Huh? VMWare doesn't emulate X86 on PowerPC. VirtualPC does. How does VMWare 'kick snot'?

[ksgant]

didnt WoW run at 100fps under rosetta?

I think that was Blizzards still-in-work Universal Beta they were showing on some machines at Macworld. I've heard other reports that under Rosetta it is playable, but not 100fps at the moment. But it doesn't matter really as Blizzard has said that the UB will be out in 2 to 3 weeks.

[aegisdesign]

Umm, CS2 is a GUI app - it's completely 32-bit. Same with Apple's apps.

Not strictly true.

The GUI side of the app is 32bit but CS2 will access 8GB on 64bit systems running Windows XP64 or later versions of OSX 10.3 for large image manipulation and to use as a scratch area instead of hitting the disk.

http://www.adobe.com/support/techdocs/320005.html

I would imagine that 10.5 will probably improve on the 64-bit transition. Maybe they'll extend the universal binary concept to include 32-bit and 64-bit apps.

Great - 3 binaries in each app bundle. Let's hope we've all got faster broadband by then or Software Updates are going to be huge. :eek:

[amin]

I'd like to know how Photoshop emulated on a MacBook Pro runs compared with Photoshop run natively on a G4 Powerbook. Has anyone made those comparisons?

[AidenShaw]

Huh? VMWare doesn't emulate X86 on PowerPC. VirtualPC does. How does VMWare 'kick snot'?
Both VMware and VPC do "x86 virtual machines on x86". (Remember that Microsoft sells "Virtual PC for Windows".) I assume that the "snot" remark refers to "VMware Workstation" vs "Virtual PC for Windows".

Microsoft also sells "Virtual Server", a high end VM system comparable to VMware GSX. (Except for price - VS for a quad CPU system is $99, GSX is $2800.)

If people say that MS is losing interest in VPC, that's probably true. VS is more capable, and cheaper.

With VT technology, add-on virtual machine environments like VMware/Virtual Server are going to disappear. Microsoft will be embedding VT in the operatiing system core, so that a default system would actually be a single VM running on top of the VT layer. If you add an application, say a web server, you'll add a second VM that runs IIS.

(Microsoft has also made licensing VMs much easier. If you're running Virtual Server on a Windows Server dual-dual with 4 Windows Server virtual machines running - you only one Windows Server dual license. 5 systems on a quad for the price of one dual.)

[BakedBeans]

No, it doesn't work like that. Memory isn't split up by how many cores you have. It had 512MB available to BOTH cores.

Which heavily restricts the second processor.

[bugfaceuk]

Rosetta, Intel Core Duo, G5... How are the new iMacs compared to my little Mac mini and its G4? :confused:

And do you think we'll see iBooks and Mac mini updated at the same time? Will they offer a "Mac mini Pro" with a Core Duo or will the iBook and Mac mini be stuck with single-core processors?

I have to admit I would also like to see a round about against the whole mac range. It's not much use to me comparing it to the previous iMac, as I have never used one!

I know, I'm selfish!

You can't compare Rosetta's performance to VPC or Apples 68k emulator. You really need to compare it to another product that lets PowerPC apps run on x86 chips. Something like PearPC which as I recall was getting less than 10% speed.

The thing is that emulating a PowerPC on an x86 is *very* hard due to the lack of registers on x86. It impacts performance in a way that you just can't avoid. When going the other way, it's easier. Even the 68k to PowerPC transition was easier (though the original PowerPC chips didn't have enough cache to run the emulator properly).

Rosetta doesn't emulate a CPU but rather translates the instructions and then runs them. This is why it's so fast. The fact that it can run PowerPC binaries on an x86 chip at 50% speed is totally awesome. Not since the x86-on-Alpha days (FX!32 was based on the same idea as Rosetta, possibly even the same code) has such a thing been possible.

Agreed, and they should have run repeat tests, how fast was it the second time the performed that operation?

The reason Doom may run well may have more to do with Id's coding style and the faster 3d card, games often have tight inner loops, so level loading might be much slower, but in game tightloop code is probably cached.

50% is a great result, and that probably means that the iMac would run PPC apps faster than they run on my Mini for example, which would be a good result for people like me considering upgrading the Mini we bought to dip our toe in "Ocean Mac".

Generally however, this looks like a crap comparison, compared to the ars review. Not trying to be a fan boy here, but the review left me cold, I didn't feel I had learned much.

[AidenShaw]

Not strictly true.

The GUI side of the app is 32bit but CS2 will access 8GB on 64bit systems running Windows XP64 or later versions of OSX 10.3 for large image manipulation and to use as a scratch area instead of hitting the disk.

http://www.adobe.com/support/techdocs/320005.html
Thanks for the link, but to me it confirms that CS2 is 32-bit only.

"If you have more than 4 GB (to 6 GB (Windows) or 8 GB (Mac OS)), the RAM above 4 GB is used by the operating system as a cache for the Photoshop scratch disk data.

Data that previously was written directly to the hard disk by Photoshop, is now cached in this high RAM before being written to the hard disk by the operating system."

So, it's taking advantage of the operating system's file cache - not actually addressing more than 32-bits of memory. It has the same capability on both OSX and XP64.

But Adobe itself indirectly squashes the idea of true 64-bit support. This capability (using the OS file cache) is in OSX 10.3, which didn't have any 64-bit addressing available to the user !! (Also the statement by Adobe that "Photoshop CS2 is a 32-bit application." in that link doesn't hurt my case... ;) )

ps: There's also no notion of "high RAM" in a strict sense - the OS cache is scattered all over physical memory, it's not in a dedicated place on the last two DIMMs ;)

[iGary]

Remember when everyone acted like I was riding the short bus to school when I asked "What software do you all plan to use on these machines."

"What, are you stupid - Rosetta!!!"









So, what software are you going to run on these machines?














I'll wait till Creative Suite and Aperture are native till I get my MacBook, thank you very much. ;)

[aegisdesign]

Remember the reason why Rosetta running slower than native is perfecly OK as a transitional measure:

Because most people buying an Intel Mac are not sidegrading from a G5 Mac... they upgrading from a G4!

However, if you're tooling along at native speeds on your new Intel Mac and then come up against an emulated app, it'll be like driving a Porsche into treacle. Suggesting that that doesn't matter because people will be used to slow speeds on their old computer is naive. People will quickly get used to full speed native apps and demand the laggards are ported asap.


Anybody who is working now on a recent G5 and then switches to Intel with non-multiprocessing Rosetta apps and is "disappointed" by the speed is in the minority. Most of those people are keeping their G5 until a later date when it makes more sense to get a new machine.


True. Although you've got to way up which of your apps you need native and which are ok as emulated and where speed really matters. I'd imagine anyone who just used iLife, iWork, the net and Word would be more than happy to switch now. Anyone relying on Photoshop - not yet.


Likewise switchers are probably not switching from a very recent fast PC. Normally you buy a new machine when your old one gets, well... old :) (But for people who do switch from a fast PC, hopefully they aren't running out in droves to buy non-Universal speed-intensive apps like Photoshop. Best to wait a bit on that.)

Many people don't understand what's inside their computer and really shouldn't need to. If a new user buys an iMac but it runs Mac software really slowly then they aren't going to get a good impression of the Mac. Let's hope applications get ported quickly.

I really wish in this test they'd shoved more RAM in though. Nobody runs Photoshop seriously in 512MB and Rosetta would be taking up a load of RAM translating. If you can mitigate against Rosetta by using 2GB RAM and get acceptable performance out of Photoshop then a lot more pro users would switch. If I was getting say 80% of the performance of my 1.8 G5 iMac from the 2Ghz Core Duo then I'd be happy enough to switch now for the blazing performance outside of Photoshop. Since most of my time it's only web resolutions I deal with, I don't need Quad G5 performance which is why an iMac is usually enough for me.

I'd also have hoped they'd have tested the iMac against a Dual 2.0 PowerMac. Then we'd really have seen if the Dual Core Intel is faster than a Dual Core PPC and ended the silly arguments. (yeah I can dream)


But Adobe itself indirectly squashes the idea of true 64-bit support. This capability (using the OS file cache) is in OSX 10.3, which didn't have any 64-bit addressing available to the user !! (Also the statement by Adobe that "Photoshop CS2 is a 32-bit application." in that link doesn't hurt my case... ;) )

As I said. 'Not strictly true'

The app will take advantage of 64bit features of the OS which were introduced with the PowerMac G5 in OSX 10.2.8. Adobe require 10.3 however so I'd guess there were later fixes to the 64bit subsystem.

[jacobj]

http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=173200

http://media.arstechnica.com/journals/apple.media/mw_06_r_bz2.jpg

I want proof ;)

[aegisdesign]

Which heavily restricts the second processor.


NO. Not true. A dual core or dual CPU machine lets both cores or CPUs address the same memory space with the same restrictions on each core. ie. none.

They don't get half the RAM each. The second core doesn't get any less access than the first.

[kyeblue]

Rosetta emulation scores look terrible!

I would say: Rosetta sounds pretty good.

[skunk]

THE INTELIMAC HAD 256MB PER CORE - THE TEST IS W@£KNo need to shout...:o

[Sunrunner]

No need to shout...:o

No kidding... the forum shouldnt even allow font sizes that big

[nospleen]

NO. Not true. A dual core or dual CPU machine lets both cores or CPUs address the same memory space with the same restrictions on each core. ie. none.

They don't get half the RAM each. The second core doesn't get any less access than the first.


I have no clue about this either way. But.... If core one is using lets say 400mb of ram, how can core two access anymore than 112? I am not arguing, just using the common sense approach.:p

[MrCrowbar]

Can't we all be happy apple gave us the Intel Macs so soon? The software companies did not expect the switch to be so soon, so the universal binaries are not ready yet.

So I say:
If you got a G5, stick with it until your apps go universal and get the intel mashine then, when they get a hardware update.
If you have a G4, get the intel now. Your old apps will be about as fast as on your G4 but will double in speed when the universal binary comes out. But iLife and stuff will run fast right out of the Box.

Actually, I don't care what's really inside of a Mac as long as it runs at a decent speed and the cas design is good. Although I like the G4 iMac more than the new one for the design, the Core Duo is faster.

[AidenShaw]

I have no clue about this either way. But.... If core one is using lets say 400mb of ram, how can core two access anymore than 112? I am not arguing, just using the common sense approach.:p
"cores" don't have memory, processes (running applications) have memory.

If the 400 MiB process is scheduled on core0, no process with more than 112 MiB (minus whatever the system is using) can run on core1.

A millisecond later, however, the system may be running the 400 MiB process on core1, and core0 can't run anything over 112 MiB.

Scheduling is dynamic, changing microsecond by microsecond depending on what processes have work to do.

All the talk about dedicating "one core for this, and the other core for that" ignore the reality of dynamic scheduling. You don't want to dedicate anything to either core - let the OS decide each microsecond where things should run.

There's a valid point that the iMacIntel was handicapped because it has to take care of both the application's memory needs (presumably about the same on both systems) plus the memory needs of Rosetta.

Repeating the test several times on larger and larger memory configurations would be very useful.

[BakedBeans]

No kidding... the forum shouldnt even allow font sizes that big

How about removing the non listening users so that people dont have to repeat themselves 20 times (therefor have no need to shout)

i was only doing it so people listening (no at the poster quoted)

NO. Not true. A dual core or dual CPU machine lets both cores or CPUs address the same memory space with the same restrictions on each core. ie. none.

They don't get half the RAM each. The second core doesn't get any less access than the first.


well they share the same 512mb - i maintain 512 will bottleneck a dual core system more than a single core one.

[KindredMAC]

So when did Adobe make this announcement of Universal by March????
Someone on Page 1 said this.... I haven't heard anything yet and I just checked this weekend past.

[BakedBeans]

So when did Adobe make this announcement of Universal by March????

As far as i know that was apple and the pro apps - in march.

chances are that PS wont be UB until PS CS3

[AidenShaw]

Can't we all be happy apple gave us the Intel Macs so soon?
Yes, but it's annoying to see all the comments (even in mainstream news reports) that the MacIntels are "six months early".

When Jobs said "by next WWDC" last June, lots of people were posting "we'll see the first ones at MWSF'06". (Like this right-on prediction from 9 June (http://forums.macrumors.com/showpost.php?p=1519324&postcount=2))

He said "by", not "at". That's come true.

[Bonte]

Rosetta doesn't emulate a CPU but rather translates the instructions and then runs them. This is why it's so fast. The fact that it can run PowerPC binaries on an x86 chip at 50% speed is totally awesome. Not since the x86-on-Alpha days (FX!32 was based on the same idea as Rosetta, possibly even the same code) has such a thing been possible.

50% speed compared to a 2 ghz G5 but probably around 20-25% compared to a native app on a dual core Intel. Still not bad at all but we're making dubious comparisons here regarding rosetta's power.

[DakotaGuy]

It would be interesting to see a Core Duo 2Ghz versus a G5 970MP 2Ghz. Most would say the Intel will blow any G5 out of the water, but I am not completely sold. This would be a great test to see which is the better processor at the moment.

[seamuskrat]

Aiden;

Bad boy. You quote the article as providing proof or at least pointing towards Apple's soon abanodonment of the 64 bit platform in OS X. If you look at your very link, you will see that the broken 64 bit update was soon patched merely a few days later. That does not sound like it was hardly noticed, or an intentional move by Apple to remove support for 64 bit computing.

Please, in the future, the proper way to quote a source is to use the intent of the entire available information correctly. Not out of context.
No problem!

http://www.macworld.com/news/2005/08/17/64bit/index.php?pf=1

[AidenShaw]

Aiden;

Bad boy. You quote the article as providing proof or at least pointing towards Apple's soon abanodonment of the 64 bit platform in OS X. If you look at your very link, you will see that the broken 64 bit update was soon patched merely a few days later. That does not sound like it was hardly noticed, or an intentional move by Apple to remove support for 64 bit computing.
I guess you're right - I assumed that the reader was already aware of the patch that disabled 64-bit until it was reissued. If one hadn't seen that story, my statement could have been read as you suggest. I should have qualified the word "disabled" with "accidentally" or "temporarily"....

My point was to show how little Apple 64-bit is being used. That patch managed to make it through development and testing without anyone trying *any* 64-bit application.

Of course, after it was released, at least one app was discovered to have a 64-bit component - and the patch was quickly reissued to restore 64-bit functionality.

[TheMasin9]

Rosetta emulation scores look terrible!
emulation is usually slower than native, but to have it run even slightly faster is totally awesome. the puddle of drool on my desk keeps on growing cuz of these intel macs.

[shawnce]

didnt WoW run at 100fps under rosetta?

No that was an prototype Intel version of the game, is was running native not being emulated.

[digitalbiker]

So the average app receives a 20 to 30% increase using the Duo Core Intel even though it is being compared to a single core G5. The very best app received an 80% boost.

So where is the 2x faster boast that SJ and Apple are claiming?

Rosetta actually sounds impressive. To run native PPC apps at 30 - 40% the speed of the native G5 speed is not bad at all considering what it is doing.

Too bad IBM and Apple gave up on the G5. A low-power dual core G5 variant would have been a Yonah killer!

[shawnce]

well they share the same 512mb - i maintain 512 will bottleneck a dual core system more than a single core one.

This isn't really true... at least not universally for all task flows.

It would bottle neck a single core system as well... the amount of memory in the system is an issue for the task flow you are trying to execute and its data needs.

For example say you are using photoshop to edit a large image that can fully fit in RAM while still having enough to satisfy photoshops needs. Also lets say the editing tasks you use in photoshop are multi-threaded (many filters can divide an image in two allow two threads). Finally lets say you have a single core and dual core system that are the same except for one has a single core with the other having two (both systems with the same type of core).

If you ran your edit job on a single core system it would run without memory starvation (paging). If you ran your edit job on a dual core system it would run without memory starvation but it would run nearly twice as fast because the task can be divided between the two cores. The amount of memory in this situation didn't affect anything.

Now lets change your image size to one that is larger then available memory.

If you ran your edit job on a single core system it would run with memory starvation, slowing the edit task because of having to page in data from disk (much much slower then RAM). If you ran your edit job on a dual core system it would run with memory starvation as well, however since you have two cores one of the cores could handle the memory paging (faulting) while the other core could work on any available image data (again all cores would be utilized to maximum that the could given the task and available data). In other words the dual core system when memory starved could actually be a little more efficient and faster then a single core system under the same situation.

It is likely in a bad memory starved situation that you may not be able to feed both cores sufficiently and your performance would rapidly approach that of a single core system under the same conditions (but as I said slightly better than because of page fault offload).

[skunkworks]

Well my hats off to apple for coming out earlier than expected with these machine and they didn't scimp on features either, thank god! Its safe to assume according to various websites that the speed is still not there and will take time. All you imac G5 owners can rejoice, your machines are quite competitive still. I think the best time to buy the new macs will be by june - september time frame and will see much improved chips as well, 64 bit here i come!

[guez]

I wonder how fast Rosetta will run on a single core Intel chip (I'm assuming that is what they put in the iBook and Mac mini). Although these are not Pro machines, many users will occasionally use Photoshop (or at least Photoshop Elements) as well as Office. Scrolling on Word has never been great on OS X and a Rosetta-crippled mini/iBook would probably feel like a dog to a Windows user/potential-switcher.

I don't think this is the end of the world, but I do think this transition may be rocky both at the top end AND at the bottom end. It will be very interesting to see what will happen to Apple's sales. A lot of contributors to this site have pointed out how attractive the Intel iMac is to programmers and to people who primarily use iApps. But how many people fall into one or both of these categories AND are willing to shell out $1299? Someone who uses Office and makes light use of the iApps does not stand to gain that much from upgrading from a G4. Yes, Safari and the Finder will run better, but how much?

[ncbill]

IBM gave up on Apple.

Apple never had any power in the relationship.

Apple's business, at best, represented a tiny fraction of IBM's revenue stream.

There was never any incentive for IBM to deliver that 3GHz G5.

>Too bad IBM and Apple gave up on the G5.

[TBi]

I wonder how fast Rosetta will run on a single core Intel chip (I'm assuming that is what they put in the iBook and Mac mini). Although these are not Pro machines, many users will occasionally use Photoshop (or at least Photoshop Elements) as well as Office. Scrolling on Word has never been great on OS X and a Rosetta-crippled mini/iBook would probably feel like a dog to a Windows user/potential-switcher.


I think this could be the reason that the dual core's came out first. Rosetta might have a bigger hit on single core processors. Now programmers have a reason to make universal applications so there will be more out by the time the single core products are released. It's like the chicken and the egg problem. People won't fully focus their energy on making universal apps until the intel's come out, now that they have there is more onus on getting them going.

[john123]

And quieter, too. Remember folks, lack of fan noise is more important than pure speed. I wish these tests looked at the whole computing experience rather than how fast an app launches.

Uh, that is your *opinion*....certainly not a statement of fact, nor a statement that can be applied to even a majority of users. I would suspect that *MOST* users would take speed over fan noise, in fact.

Sheesh.

[shawnce]

So where is the 2x faster boast that SJ and Apple are claiming? It comes from the benchmarking Apple outlines on the following pages which are likely true benchmarks but obviously benchmarks only benchmark... well what they benchmark... so you have to be careful with extrapolating out from those.

iMac: http://www.apple.com/imac/intelcoreduo.html

MacBook: http://www.apple.com/macbookpro/intelcoreduo.html

So far all of the external benchmarking published has been relatively poorly done... allowing to many variable in the mix and or not targeting say just CPU performance or outlining enough of how the testing was done.

[skunkworks]

speed is a very important factor considering what amd has out. Intel is way behind amd in this respect, and really needed the exposure from apple. I'm sure steve got a good deal on those intel chips. Waiting patiently for june updates on imacs with 64 bit chips.

[TBi]

Uh, that is your *opinion*....certainly not a statement of fact, nor a statement that can be applied to even a majority of users. I would suspect that *MOST* users would take speed over fan noise, in fact.

Sheesh.

That is true, but if you could have the same performance on a quieter system. Would you pick the louder or the quieter one?

[opq]

Has anyone brought up the fact that Universal binaries (even on the PPC platform apps are affected) take up almost twice the space now? iWork went from ~800MB to well over ~1.7GB.

[AidenShaw]

It comes from the benchmarking Apple outlines on the following pages

iMac: http://www.apple.com/imac/intelcoreduo.html
MacBook: http://www.apple.com/macbookpro/intelcoreduo.html
Note that those are SPEC "rate" numbers, so they're specifically designed to measure multi-processor scaling. They're multi-threaded, without much sharing between threads. An ideal case for multiple CPUs, unlike most applications.

It's also funny that Apple calls them "estimates", with a footnote pointer even though the page has no footnotes.

ps: The SPECrate integer number that Apple quotes (32.9) is close the the number for a dual CPU 2.8 GHz Xeon (33.4 - IBM HS20). The IBM PPC970 2.2GHz JS20 dual CPU is rated at 20.2.
http://www.spec.org/cpu2000/results/rint2000.html

[agreenster]

All laptops are a waste of time for digital content creation. They're always a compromise compared to a desktop. If speed is really important for you and you need it now, the Quad G5 can't be beat.

That's BS. Total and utter BS. Laptops AREN'T a waste of time for content creation. I take a train every single day to work, so thats 2.5 hours roundtrip of commute time of me with my laptop using Maya. I get tons of work done

However, because my laptop sucks, I can only model and rig, but not animate. My coworker, however, has the XPS and it runs better and faster than most desktops, especially G5's. Dont give me this Quad G5 crap. For straight up FPS in Maya, its all about the processor, not the graphics card or anything else (because of the enveloping and deformation of the mesh is all CPU intensive). But thats a seperate debate.

My point is not to be bitchy, but Apple has YET to give me a laptop that I can buy, and they wont for months because Rosetta is a pathetic solution. Apple is so secretive, that they had to wait until the public release to reveal Universal Binaries. Why couldnt they have clued Adobe or Autodesk or (your fav software name here) in a year earlier? Why cant I get a universal binary version of Maya in March? Because Apple dropped the ball, thats why.

I want a new Apple laptop. They are just hell-bent on not getting me what I need.

[shawnce]

Note that those are SPEC "rate" numbers, so they're specifically designed to measure multi-processor scaling. They're multi-threaded, without much sharing between threads. An ideal case for multiple CPUs, unlike most applications.

Who would have thunk that Apple would show a benchmark that showed off multicore capabilities... :rolleyes:

You do realized most of Apples iLife application (iMovie, iDVD, iPhoto in particular) and well as many of Apple frameworks (Core Image, QuickTime, etc.) are fully capable of splitting streaming work across multiple cores when multiple cores are available.

It's also funny that Apple calls them "estimates", with a footnote pointer even though the page has no footnotes.

You don't see the foot notes??


1. Get more information on Rosetta supported Apple software. Contact the manufacturer directly for 3rd party software.
2. Testing conducted by Apple in December 2005 using preproduction 15-inch MacBook Pro units with 1.83GHz Intel Core Duo; all other systems were shipping units. All scores are estimated. SPEC is a registered trademark of the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation (SPEC); see www.spec.org for more information. Benchmarks were compiled using the IBM compiler and a beta version of the Intel compiler for Mac OS.
3. Times faster than 15-inch PowerBook G4 with 1.67GHz PowerPC. Testing conducted by Apple in January 2006 using preproduction 15-inch MacBook Pro units with 1.83GHz Intel Core Duo; all other systems were shipping units. All of the MacBook Pro and PowerBook systems ran beta Universal versions of Modo application. All other applications were beta versions.

...and...


1. Get more information on Rosetta supported Apple software. Contact the manufacturer directly for 3rd party software.
2. Testing conducted by Apple in December 2005 using preproduction 20-inch iMac units with 2GHz Intel Core Duo; all other systems were shipping units. All scores are estimated. SPEC is a registered trademark of the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation (SPEC); see www.spec.org for more information. Benchmarks were compiled using the IBM compiler and a beta version of the Intel compiler for Mac OS.
3. Testing conducted by Apple in December 2005 using preproduction 20-inch iMac units with 2GHz Intel Core Duo; all other systems were shipping units. All of the iMac and iMac G5 systems ran beta Universal version of Modo. All other applications were beta versions.

Apple is so secretive, that they had to wait until the public release to reveal Universal Binaries. Why couldnt they have clued Adobe or Autodesk or (your fav software name here) in a year earlier?
I really don't understand your statement above...

Apple informed all developers within a couple of month of Apple deciding that they would be doing the Intel transition. Those couple of month Apple spent designing, documenting and implementing tools so that developers could transition their products. Your typical developer has known about universal binaries since WWDC 2005 (June 2005) and some specific developers knew before then.

Apple has had the following site up since WWDC 2005 (enhanced as time passed with better and more complete documentation).

http://developer.apple.com/transition/

Also review the revision history for the primary document on Universal Binary Programming for a timeline...

http://developer.apple.com/documentation/MacOSX/Conceptual/universal_binary/universal_binary_revhx/chapter_11_section_1.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP40002217-CH214

[nagromme]

However, if you're tooling along at native speeds on your new Intel Mac and then come up against an emulated app, it'll be like driving a Porsche into treacle. Suggesting that that doesn't matter because people will be used to slow speeds on their old computer is naive
I never suggested that--I said it made Rosetta "OK" as a transitional step, and this is true: if I get an Intel Mac this week, it will run even Photoshop about the same speed or faster than my 2-year old PowerBook. That's acceptable--it's enough to get me to buy, and it gives me something perfectly useable while Universals arrive over time.

From all reports, though, I think your "Porsche into treacle" analogy is exaggerated: people won't be running native Photoshop and going to Rosetta Photoshop, they'll be switching between DIFFERENT tasks. And even Rosetta apps have a faster UI because of the native OS.

And alghouth Photoshop is a great example to keep an eye on, it's not the main consumer app. Office runs great in Rosetta, and iLife is native.


This is one post from a person testing the 17inch intelimac v the isight version
I don't know which G5 he was testing on, but those Rosetta results sound great! We'll need to see a variety of reports before a really solid trend can emerge, but if Rosetta is doing ANYTHING faster that (or even equal to) a G5, that's good in my book.

[MacinDoc]

Two thoughts regarding these real-world benchmarks:

1. There is little reason for current iMac G5 owners (myself included) to upgrade at this time.

2. Single-core Yonahs would not be sufficient to run most apps at a reasonable speed under Rosetta, so I think the iBooks and Mac Minis will still get dual core chips, at the lowest clock speed available (1.66 GHz if I remember correctly), since the price difference between single and dual core Yonah chips is negligible.

[nagromme]

That's BS. Total and utter BS. Laptops AREN'T a waste of time for content creation. I take a train every single day to work, so thats 2.5 hours roundtrip of commute time of me with my laptop using Maya. I get tons of work done
Agreed. Flexibility (and yes, noise) trumps raw speed for me. Raw render speed isn't the only measure of productivity in a creative field. Desktops are the way to go for top speed, but laptops are great as well--especially with the MacBook Pro.


Rosetta is a pathetic solution. Apple is so secretive, that they had to wait until the public release to reveal Universal Binaries. Why couldnt they have clued Adobe or Autodesk or (your fav software name here) in a year earlier? Why cant I get a universal binary version of Maya in March? Because Apple dropped the ball, thats why.

Autodesk, like Adobe and everyone else, HAS known for a year. They may CHOOSE to wait for their next major release (which they surely have had in progress for a while) instead of porting the old release and then RE-porting the next one. Makes sense to me. Or, they may simply be delayed by the complexity of their products. That's life. Rosetta pathetic? It's an outstanding solution--but it's only a transitional measure. This transition WILL have some rough edges. Nothing could prevent that--but Apple's good at smoothing the way as best they can. They (and Transitive) have done better than expected in my view.

Some things to note:

* Apple does developers no favors by making them start programming for a transition too early: the details aren't final enough, the tools aren't final enough... it leaves the developer working towards a moving target and wasting tons of cash and time. Once the details of the transition were mature enough to reveal, and Universal Xcode was ready to deliver, Apple did so.

* Letting developers know, say 2 years ago in "general" terms, "this transition is probably coming but we don't have details yet" doesn't really help push apps out the door a year earlier. All it does is clue Microsoft in on Apple's plans and harms sales of highly productive G5 Macs for 2 years.

* But Apple DID clue developers in MORE than 2 years ago in the one USEFUL way: they told developers that Xcode is the future, in no uncertain terms, and to get their apps transferred to Xcode. They've repeated that all along--long before last June. That is key to delivering Intel support, and developers who listened to what Apple told them could get a head start and be in much better shape to deliver Universal apps.

I know you're frustrated that IBM and Freescale didn't deliver on the promise of PowerPC. It was a great architecture. But those companies don't want to BE in the personal computer processor business. It's not where their profits come from. So that leaves us where we are today--and if you ask me, Apple and Intel have really come through in response.

The transition is NECESSARY, is is WORTH it, and it is being handled very WELL. It's still a transition, and we have no choice but to try to survive the temporary inconveniences that can't be avoided.


Has anyone brought up the fact that Universal binaries (even on the PPC platform apps are affected) take up almost twice the space now? iWork went from ~800MB to well over ~1.7GB.
A necessary evil, but note that only the executable binary needs to double, not the support files (even if they're within the app package): that increase in iWork is probably more due to new features and templates than anything else--you're comparing iLife 05 to 06.

Extreme example: My Unreal Tournament app is 17.5 GB!!! But if you Show Package Contents, the actual executable binary is 1/1000 of that. Making UT Universal won't double it to 35 GB. (Plus a lot of that 17.5 is add-on maps and things.)

Excluding games, may apps folder is 6 GB--including templates and tutorials and the works. That includes Final Cut Pro, LightWave 3D, Photoshop, and dozens of others. Double ALL my apps to Universal and I've only lost 6GB of space. But only the binaries will double, not the rest of the data--and many of my apps I'll keep running in Rosetta because they just aren't speed-intensive anyway. So I'll lose less than 6 GB in fact.

As necessary evils go, this one's not that bad. Download times for updates will increase--but you don't update your apps on a daily basis anyway.

Two thoughts regarding these real-world benchmarks:

1. There is little reason for current iMac G5 owners (myself included) to upgrade at this time.

2. Single-core Yonahs would not be sufficient to run most apps at a reasonable speed under Rosetta, so I think the iBooks and Mac Minis will still get dual core chips, at the lowest clock speed available (1.66 GHz if I remember correctly), since the price difference between single and dual core Yonah chips is negligible.
1. Agreed for sure. Your machine's still new :)

2. A lot of apps don't make heavy use of dual CPUs, and if they run OK in Rosetta with a Duo, they'll run OK with a Solo--especially if low-end Mac buyers are less demanding, and since Rosetta is merely a transitional measure. Most importantly, vital apps ARE native: iLife, Safari, Mail, and the rest of OS X. That's enough to make a Core Solo Mac very useable as a low-end consumer system for a LOT of people's needs.

All-duos would be cool, I agree, but every little bit helps in keeping low-end machines cheaper. I'm expecting Core Solo on the low-end. If I'm pleasantly surprised, then all the better.

[robbieduncan]

Has anyone brought up the fact that Universal binaries (even on the PPC platform apps are affected) take up almost twice the space now? iWork went from ~800MB to well over ~1.7GB.

Are you comparing iWork '05 with iWork '06? I assume so as there is no Universal version of '05. Of the 900Mb almost all is taken up by more/new templates that are shared between the Intel and PPC version (i.e. there is a single copy). The only bit that gets bigger is the executable itself. On most apps this is a very small proportion of the total size.

I don't have iWork installed but using iWeb as an example:
My install of iWeb is 98Mb (after stripping out all the non-English languages). The executable but of iWeb is 3.6Mb. For a PPC only build it would be around half of that (1.8Mb). So a PPC only build of iWeb would still be around 96Mb, basically no saving at all.

[jennysbelly]

Remember the reason why Rosetta running slower than native is perfecly OK as a transitional measure:

Because most people buying an Intel Mac are not sidegrading from a G5 Mac... they upgrading from a G4!

Anybody who is working now on a recent G5 and then switches to Intel with non-multiprocessing Rosetta apps and is "disappointed" by the speed is in the minority. Most of those people are keeping their G5 until a later date when it makes more sense to get a new machine.

Likewise switchers are probably not switching from a very recent fast PC. Normally you buy a new machine when your old one gets, well... old :) (But for people who do switch from a fast PC, hopefully they aren't running out in droves to buy non-Universal speed-intensive apps like Photoshop. Best to wait a bit on that.)

I agree. I just bought an Intel Imac and I was switching from a P3 PC as I'm looking to take some graphic design classes . . . I'm sure even in Rosetta, any apps will be faster than what i'm used to, especially when I load it with RAM . . .

[917press]

So the average app receives a 20 to 30% increase using the Duo Core Intel even though it is being compared to a single core G5. The very best app received an 80% boost.

So where is the 2x faster boast that SJ and Apple are claiming?


A 100% boost is 2x faster. 80% is 20 points shy. There is no such thing as 1x faster.

All this talk of X% boosts and 2x, 3x faster are meaningless without an agreed upon baseline. Most of the benchmarking is coming from different "baselines"

[skunkworks]

I have not heard autodesk coming out with mac versions and why would they if microsoft can provide an emulator for windows. I think this is a major reason some of the big players aren't porting, just no customer base yet! If anything I predict a couple of years before you see autodesk and solidworks ported (at least 2 years). Until then, no reason to jump into intel macs as yet.

[agreenster]

nagrome: Good points.

By the way, render speed isnt what Im concerned about. It's straight up interactive animation speed in the view panel. Renders are a nighttime thing and I dont care about em really.

[nagromme]

I just think Apple probably knew long before WWDC, and should have gotten developers on board long before June of 2005. Because NOW, there are very very few options for digital content creators.
As I see it, Apple did get developers on board long before June 2005:
http://forums.macrumors.com/showpost.php?p=2072764&postcount=170


A 100% boost is 2x faster. 80% is 20 points shy. There is no such thing as 1x faster.

All this talk of X% boosts and 2x, 3x faster are meaningless without an agreed upon baseline. Most of the benchmarking is coming from different "baselines"
Well technically, "1x faster" IS a 100% boost, the same as "2x as fast." Which is what Apple claims, "up to." Apple doesn't claim "up to 2x faster"--that would mean "up to 3x as fast." Clear? ;)

And yes, all pretty meaningless. Just marketing--which any company has to do. Real-world tests of what YOU do are all that matter.


If anything I predict a couple of years before you see autodesk and solidworks ported (at least 2 years). Until then, no reason to jump into intel macs as yet.
No reason if those particular apps are the main use you have for a computer ;) But yes, a growing market will bring the apps!

BTW, in discussing Autodesk above I assumed he was really talking about Maya, which IS on Mac (Alias is being bought by Autodesk IIRC).

[plinden]

A lot of contributors to this site have pointed out how attractive the Intel iMac is to programmers and to people who primarily use iApps. But how many people fall into one or both of these categories AND are willing to shell out $1299?
Waves hand ... that's me ...

[cait-sith]

I say cheers to Apple for getting an emulation layer running so smoothly. Anyone remember the headaches of using Classic?

That said, I think I will stick with my G4 1.5 PB for another couple of years.. I love it too much.

(P.S., how do the iMacs look when they boot up? is it the same grey apple screen, with a chime? or do you see a character-cell POST?)

[guez]

A lot of contributors to this site have pointed out how attractive the Intel iMac is to programmers and to people who primarily use iApps. But how many people fall into one or both of these categories AND are willing to shell out $1299? Waves hand ... that's me ...

Okay: you want to buy a new shiny Mac. My point was that contributors to this site are not necessarily representative of the market as a whole. A bunch of people who are more or less committed to buying the latest, greatest Mac product would make for a very bad focus group.

[917press]

Well technically, "1x faster" IS a 100% boost, the same as "2x as fast." Which is what Apple claims, "up to." Apple doesn't claim "up to 2x faster"--that would mean "up to 3x as fast." Clear? ;)

And yes, all pretty meaningless. Just marketing--which any company has to do. Real-world tests of what YOU do are all that matter.



1x is not faster just as 1x3 is not larger than 3, it is 3.

Without an accepted benchmark not only is the marketing useless, but so is the chatter here and elsewhere.

[morespce54]

...Remember folks, lack of fan noise is more important than pure speed.....

well, I guess I'm different... ;)
I, personally, need speed not silence...

[MrCrowbar]

Well, I'd like some silence. My laptop (Win XP :( ) is running all night and the vents and the hard drive are pretty loud. I got used to it now (actually, I can't sleep so good whithout it when I'm alone :o ). But I expect an iMac to be silent so I can watch movies on low volumes at night without the neighbor wanting to kill me. I got a nice radio station in iTunes (/electronica/Beatblender) that is perfect for working and for active bed time. But when streaming it live the computer is just too loud for my taste. Had to burn it to MP3CDs, girlfriend likes that better, too btw.

Can you play the iTunes radio stations with front row? I heard you can't play network libraries...

Actually, I'd love an option where I can switch between "slow and silent" and "fast and loud". So when I'm home, I can set it to silent, and when I'm away, it goes to max speed. Even cooler would be some intelligent software that knows when you're in the room (movement detection with iSight) and sets the Mac to silent mode and switches on the display when you're in the room. So I would't have to change settings all the time.

How's that huh? :)

[weldon]

Has anyone brought up the fact that Universal binaries (even on the PPC platform apps are affected) take up almost twice the space now? iWork went from ~800MB to well over ~1.7GB.
This has a lot more to do with the size of the new HD themes in Keynote than the size of the Universal Binary.

[morespce54]

...I guarantee that 80% of software will be universal binary ...with free or discount upgrade to the universal binary

I most certainly would not bet on the "free" upgrade... :(

Well, I'd like some silence. My laptop (Win XP :( ) is running all night and the vents and the hard drive are pretty loud. I got used to it now (actually, I can't sleep so good whithout it when I'm alone :o ). But I expect an iMac to be silent so I can watch movies on low volumes at night without the neighbor wanting to kill me.

Well you sure got a point. I was referring to working more than leisure time ;) :)

Nice idea about the movement detection...

[JackAxe]

The FPU is 64-bit, and has been on every Pentium. Where does this crap come from?

And it's not SSE3 - SSE (before SSE2 and way before SSE3) had 64-bit integer support (http://arstechnica.com/articles/paedia/cpu/pentium-2.ars/3) It was improved in SSE2 and SSE3, but it was present in SSE. (And to a limited extent in MMX, but too limited for me to claim that it really supported 64-bit integers.)

The SIMD(SSE) Is not a FPU you freak. :D Your link is refering to the SIMD, multimedia extension, MMX, which I figured you were talking about in the original post I replied to. Holy CRAP!!! :D

Now once again, a FPU is completely different than a SIMD. I apologies abou forgeting the "S," but at least I know the difference between the two, so maybe you should apologies for confusing the them. :p

The Pentium's FPU does share some registers with it, but it like the Pentium's integer, it is "NOT" 64-bit.

Read; :)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streaming_SIMD_Extensions


So is SSE. Your point?
I guess you forgort that AltiVec is 128-bit.
I stated this comment, because once again, you were refering the Pentium's 64-bit SIMD.


I was unable to find any posted benchmarks comparing Maya 32-bit to Maya 64-bit on the same hardware.

I would be very surprised to see a 60-fold improvement (hours to minutes), however. :eek:

I'm making assumptions about MR's 64-bit performance, since it's still new, but I'm basing my assumptions on other 64-bit renderers and I was only exaggerating a little-tiny-incy-bit. :p

If I'm rendering 24 frames, and it takes 10 minutes to render a frame, it will take 4 hours to render. 64-bit rendering on average is about 20% (No I didn't get this from you.) faster and for the much larger scenes, which are extremelely complex, the performance gap will grow. Anyways at a 20% saving, it would take 3.2 hours. Now increase from 24 frames to hundreds of frames, and the gap gets even wider. Blah. See, I was pretty close with my guesstimate.

Go here and read their blurb about 64-bit;
http://www.alias.com/glb/eng/products-services/product_details.jsp;jsessionid=XA4RPMLD3JNY5QCLCWSSM44AJMK0IJVC?productId=1900011

Go here to see what's possible with 64-bit rendering now;
(Note that this app requires a 64-bit GUI, so no OS X version is available. They could've taken the same approach as Mental Ray/Maya, but I think Maxxon is trying to make a play for market share.)
http://www.maxon.de/pages/products/c4d/64bit/64edition_e.html



You should try Windows 64-bit then, all the old Windows 32-bit applications run just fine.

******* no!!!. Windows 64-bit for the longest time lacked even basic driver support for perhiperals, which is another reason why OS X shouldn't move to a 64-bit GUI now. Telling me 32-bit apps work fine under it, is complete BS. My friend "was" running Win 64-bit and he ended up uninstalling it, do to the fact that most 32-bit apps don't run fine, and this was last year.


The 32-bit applications run as fast as on a 32-bit system, and 64-bit applications run even faster (typically 20% faster than 32-bit applications
on the same hardware).

LOL. That doesn't even make sense. If your statement were true, then walking would be faster than running. :CRAZY:

If the task at hand requires a larger than 32-bit integer, this is where a 64-bit proc excels. A 32-bit proc will need to cycle many times to do what a 64-bit proc can do in one pass.

64-bit addressing can be slow, but not as slow as a 32-bit system going swap crazy, or even worse, not being able to complete the task, because it exceeds its limits.


Umm, CS2 is a GUI app - it's completely 32-bit. Same with Apple's apps.

(Don't you think that someone would have noticed that an Apple security update broke Photoshop and all of Apple's own apps?)

This claim is 100% BS, maybe 200% if you use 64-bit. :rolleyes:


:rolleyes: Dude you're truly an ignorant sometimes. Yes the GUI is 32-bit, but that doesn't mean CS2 doesn't have access to 64-bit addressing. The GUI does not confine the applications memory limit.

CS2 supports over 3Gigs of RAM in the preferences. (3072mb) But if needed, it can and will use all of your available ram, so more than the preference limit. Apple's pro apps as already mentiond do this.

These peeps noticed it first;
http://www.barefeats.com/cscs2.html


Just like any other 32-bit virtual memory OS. (Windows 32-bit supports up to 64 GiB of RAM - 32 applications can each have their own 2 GiB of physical memory.)


WRONG!!!

OS X can give each 32-bit app 2 Gigs of "real" memory, not just virtual memory. It has been able to do so since Panther. I own PCs and have used them longer than Macs, so don't try and feed me this BS!!!

Windows does have the capability to give one app 3-gigs, leaving 1 gig for the system, which only AfterEffects supports that I know of, but this is different and part of a different discusion.


Look above for the links - they definitely screwed up and posted an updater that killed all 64-bit apps.


I saw a later post that mentioned there was a screw up, so you're correct, but I also saw the post stating Apple fixed it promptly. And it was an issue with applications, not the system.

You're really making something of nothing in this case.


But, like a Windows 32-bit system that can support 64 GiB, your 32-bit OSX system could still support 5 GiB of RAM.

A 32-bit 10.3 system, which nobody would claim had any 64-bit addressing support, could also support your 5 GiB. 'nuf said about needing 64-bit to support more than 4 GiB in a system.

You are truly the most "willing" ignorant peep I've encountered lately.

Let me fill you in on facts, not speculations and assumptions; I was an ADC developer and was given lots of material to read and watch. I paid my fee, so that I could use the developer store. :)

Panther could see larger than 32-bit since day one for the system. Both the system and apps had access to 64-bit computations. Tiger of course added support for the full 64-bit address range and application support for 64-bit memory addressing.

If your BS were true, then why bother moving to 64-bit at all? According to you, 32-bit is faster when running 64-bit apps and 32-bit OS's can address just as much memory.

And just to be anal like you earlier, it's "GIG," not GIB. :p

Do you even own a Macintosh?

<]=)

[avkills]

Mossberg just wrote an article stating that the new iMac Core Duo ran Doom3 with acceptable results.... unless it is universal I am calling a big fat BS on that one.

link (http://ptech.wsj.com/archive/solution-20060118.html)

[shawnce]

:rolleyes: Dude you're truly an ignorant sometimes.

Careful now...

Yes the GUI is 32-bit, but that doesn't mean CS2 doesn't have access to 64-bit addressing. The GUI does not confine the applications memory limit.

CS2 supports over 3Gigs of RAM in the preferences. (3072mb) But if needed, it can and will use all of your available ram, so more than the preference limit. Apple's pro apps as already mentiond do this.

The CS2 application uses 32 bit virtual addressing. This gives it a 4 GiB virtual memory space of which something around 3 GiB should be available for use by the application (likely largest contiguous allocation possible is around 2 GiB, assuming a clean virtual memory space... recently launched CS2 basically).

The CS2 application (and any application using standard file system APIs) use 64 bit offsets to index into files. The use of 64 bit offsets if VERY different then having a 64 bit virtual address space. The use of 64 bit offsets has been around since Mac OS 9.

Mac OS X from its early beginning has had a thing called the Universal Buffer Cache (UBC). This is a cooperative between the vfs layer (file systems) and the virtual memory system that allows them to share the physical page pool (RAM). The intent of the UBC is to cache all data read from disk (locally owned ones) and cache it in any physical page that is not needed by processes running on the system. In Mac OS X 10.2.8 and later when running on a PowerMac G5 the UBC can and will utilize all available physical memory which can be larger then 4 GiB, in other words the virtual memory system (and UBC) uses 64 bit physical addressing when on the G5.

So an application will gain a performance boost by being able to transparently load data from RAM instead of disk when the file data needed happens to be cached in the UBC. This caching happens for free and isn't anything special to CS2 (however CS2 may do some operations to pre-heat the UBC).

This however is not 32 bit virtual addressing, it is a purposeful effect of the UBC and happens without any work on the part of an application.

As a reference I suggest Apple 64-Bit Transition Guide (http://developer.apple.com/documentation/Darwin/Conceptual/64bitPorting/index.html) in particular review the Alternative to 64-bit Computing (http://developer.apple.com/documentation/Darwin/Conceptual/64bitPorting/indications/chapter_2_section_3.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP40001064-CH206-TPXREF102) that CS2 is possibly indirectly or directly following.

As an example...

[serickson@serickson-pmg5:~]
--- create 500 MiB file ---

[serickson@serickson-pmg5:~]
[0:505] > dd bs=1m count=500 if=/dev/random of=/tmp/500mbFile
500+0 records in
500+0 records out
524288000 bytes transferred in 44.254794 secs (11847033 bytes/sec)

[serickson@serickson-pmg5:~]
[0:510] > ls -lh /tmp/500mbFile
-rw-r--r-- 1 serickso wheel 500M Jan 19 15:33 /tmp/500mbFile

--- rebooted system to clear UBC ---

--- read the file the first time ---

[serickson@serickson-pmg5:~]
[0:507] > dd bs=1m count=500 if=/tmp/500mbFile of=/dev/null
500+0 records in
500+0 records out
524288000 bytes transferred in 9.315147 secs (56283383 bytes/sec)

--- read the file a second time ---

[serickson@serickson-pmg5:~]
[0:508] > dd bs=1m count=500 if=/tmp/500mbFile of=/dev/null
500+0 records in
500+0 records out
524288000 bytes transferred in 0.647901 secs (809209976 bytes/sec)

So in the above example the first time I read the file it was read at a rate of 53.68 MiB/s (just about as fast as the drive could support). The second time I attempted to read the file it was read at a rate of 771.72 MiB/s. The difference in read performance is a result of the file being cached in the UBC (my inactive memory increased by about 500 MiB and free memory dropped by about the same, this reflects the UBC caching of the files data). To be clear in the second attempt to load the file no IO requests went out to the disk.


...as to the rest of your post you are intermixing to many orthogonal and parallel concepts/issues that you really don't make much sense... so I wont even attempt to respond but I will say it contains many inaccuracies... and mischaracterizations of what AidenShaw was saying.

[TBi]

The Pentium's FPU does share some registers with it, but it like the Pentium's integer, it is "NOT" 64-bit.


The Pentium's FPU only shares registers with the MMX unit not SSE


Go here to see what's possible with 64-bit rendering now;
(Note that this app requires a 64-bit GUI, so no OS X version is available. They could've taken the same approach as Mental Ray/Maya, but I think Maxxon is trying to make a play for market share.)
http://www.maxon.de/pages/products/c4d/64bit/64edition_e.html

Programs shouldn't need 64-bit GUI's so this program could be designed to run on OSX. No GUI these days needs 64bit. All the 64-bit calculation can be done in a seperate thread in the back ground. If the program does actually need a 64-bit GUI then it's done wrong.



If the task at hand requires a larger than 32-bit integer, this is where a 64-bit proc excels. A 32-bit proc will need to cycle many times to do what a 64-bit proc can do in one pass.


A 32bit processor will only need 2 passes to do 64 bit calculations.



WRONG!!!

OS X can give each 32-bit app 2 Gigs of "real" memory, not just virtual memory. It has been able to do so since Panther. I own PCs and have used them longer than Macs, so don't try and feed me this BS!!!

Windows does have the capability to give one app 3-gigs, leaving 1 gig for the system, which only AfterEffects supports that I know of, but this is different and part of a different discusion.



All memory allocated by the system is "virtual" memory. The program will think it has access to 2GB ram but there might only be 512MB available. The other 1.5GiB's will be handled in the page file. Using real mode memory is dangerous and hasn't been used widely since the 386 days.




Panther could see larger than 32-bit since day one for the system. Both the system and apps had access to 64-bit computations. Tiger of course added support for the full 64-bit address range and application support for 64-bit memory addressing.

If your BS were true, then why bother moving to 64-bit at all? According to you, 32-bit is faster when running 64-bit apps and 32-bit OS's can address just as much memory.

And just to be anal like you earlier, it's "GIG," not GIB. :p
<]=)

Also all new 32bit intel processors can support more than 4GB's however the max memory allocated to each program can only be 2GB. This is why we need 64bit.

Oh and it is GiB :)

You should read up properly before you slate others who are actually right :)

[shawnce]

And just to be anal like you earlier, it's "GIG," not GIB. :p
Actually no he means GiB which specifically means 2^30 (1,073,741,824) while GB means 10^9 (1,000,000,000) in most fields (SI unit) however in the computer software/hardware fields GB is also used to mean 2^30.

Review http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gibibyte and learn...

In reality you buy memory in mebibytes (MiB) / gibibyte (GiB) units and disks in megabytes (MB) / gigabyte (GB) units... crazy world.

A 32bit processor will only need 2 passes to do 64 bit calculations. To be clear when operating on a 64 bit number on a CPU that only has 32 bit wide registers for that type of number the CPU will have to do 2 (or more) 32 bit operations to simulate the 64 bit operation (the compiler generates the needed instruction stream).

Additionally the instructions in that instruction stream have data dependencies between them, this prevents them from being in flight at the same time. So not only does the CPU have to do more but it has to execute them in a less efficient fashion.

To summaries "G#" capabilities...


The G3/G4/G5 family of processors have 64 bit wide registers for floating point numbers.
The G3/G4/G5 family of processors have 32 bit wide registers for integer numbers and addresses.
The G5 family of processors have 64 bit wide registers for integer numbers (doesn't require the use of 64 bit address for an application to use internally).
The G5 family of processors have 64 bit wide registers for addresses (requires 64 bit addressing support and 64 bit clean API).
The G4/G5 family of processors have vector registers (AltiVec) that are 128 bits wide that can be operated on as an array of 128 bits, an array of sixteen 8 bit integers, an array of eight 16 bit integers, an array of four 32 bit integers or floats. (see following diagram)


http://developer.apple.com/hardware/ve/images/image_043.jpg

One nice addition that SSE has over AltiVec is the ability to operate on two 64 bit integers or floats in an 128 bit register.

[MrCrowbar]

whooo lots of geek talk here...

Oh yea, in french, a "Mega Bit" means a huge wiener. :p

[shawnce]

Just like any other 32-bit virtual memory OS. (Windows 32-bit supports up to 64 GiB of RAM - 32 applications can each have their own 2 GiB of physical memory.)OS X can give each 32-bit app 2 Gigs of "real" memory, not just virtual memory. It has been able to do so since Panther. I own PCs and have used them longer than Macs, so don't try and feed me this BS!!!

God... sorry just couldn't let this stupid statement slide... :(

Ok you are wrong... on Mac OS X applications get a virtual memory space that is 4 GiB in size (addresses are 32 bits wide)... since the dawn of Mac O X. They do not get access to "real" memory, they operate in a virtual memory sandbox that the Mac OS X virtual memory subsystem maps into physical memory (RAM) as needed. Only when running inside the kernel can you potentially get access to physical memory addresses (usually only when you need to DMA to hardware). Windows acts the same way.

Additionally since Mac OS X 10.4 (when used on a G5) you can implement applications (ones without a GUI, using only libSystem) that have access to a 16 TiB virtual memory space (addresses are 64 bit wide).

Windows XP "32-bit" applications get a virtual memory space that is 2 GiB in size (addresses are 31 bits wide, the high order bit is used for kernel mapping). Windows XP "64-bit" applications get a virtual memory space that is 16TiB in size (actually 16TiB minus 2GiB IIRC).

Both Windows and Mac OS X support 64 bit addresses for physical memory (RAM)... of course the chipset and CPU in the system will often limit the physical address size to something smaller then 64 bits wide. So some aspect of the 64 bit physical address will go unused.

[nagromme]

1x is not faster just as 1x3 is not larger than 3, it is 3.

Without an accepted benchmark not only is the marketing useless, but so is the chatter here and elsewhere.
No need to sling insults :D I never said "1x" is faster. "But 1x faster" IS. Read my statement carefully re the difference between "as fast" and "faster" :) It's a minor point, but one I'm correct about. Remember that 1x is the same as 100%. 100% of something is no improvement. But 100% ADDED (key word) to something is--it's double. That's what 1x faster means--added speed--while 1x as fast does not :D Luckily Apple makes it clear: "up to 2x as fast." 200% as fast. Same thing as saying 100% faster.

20/20 now? :p

[MegaSignal]

Just got back from a local computer store which had the new iMac on display - and I must say - my overall impression with regard to basic menu/desktop navigation is that it is very responsive!

(But don't take my word for it - try one yourself!)

As for the benchmarks with regard to rendering, etc: I'm not too worried one way or another; in time, this thing'll smoke 'em!

Unfortunately, I can't say this about the new iPods (nano and video, with all the sluggishness and jitteriness); I will ABSOLUTELY be keeping my gen3 for the forseable future, no matter the battery...

[JackAxe]

God... sorry just couldn't let this stupid statement slide... :(

Ok you are wrong... on Mac OS X applications get a virtual memory space that is 4 GiB in size (addresses are 32 bits wide)... since the dawn of Mac O X. They do not get access to "real" memory, they operate in a virtual memory sandbox that the Mac OS X virtual memory subsystem maps into physical memory (RAM) as needed. Only when running inside the kernel can you potentially get access to physical memory addresses (usually only when you need to DMA to hardware). Windows acts the same way.

Additionally since Mac OS X 10.4 (when used on a G5) you can implement applications (ones without a GUI, using only libSystem) that have access to a 16 TiB virtual memory space (addresses are 64 bit wide).

Windows XP "32-bit" applications get a virtual memory space that is 2 GiB in size (addresses are 31 bits wide, the high order bit is used for kernel mapping). Windows XP "64-bit" applications get a virtual memory space that is 16TiB in size (actually 16TiB minus 2GiB IIRC).

Both Windows and Mac OS X support 64 bit addresses for physical memory (RAM)... of course the chipset and CPU in the system will often limit the physical address size to something smaller then 64 bits wide. So some aspect of the 64 bit physical address will go unused.

Thanks for clearing up a few things Shawnce.

I've honestly never seen GIB used, most of the peeps I know alway used Gig, or Gb. Shows my ignorance.

I should have also stated "physical" memory, instead of "real," since in geek speak everything has such a literal meaning.

Using a switch under WinXP SP2, will actually allow a 32-bit proc to see and use up to 3 Gbs, instead of just 2 Gbs. I've also learned that if you do have a 64-bit proc and more than 4 Gbs of RAM, CS2 under WinXP SP2 will use the extra ram as cache, just like CS2 under OS X instead of hitting the dreaded HDD.

Just to add more to why a 64-bit GUI is a bad idea, none of Adobe's products support Win64.

<]=)

[Peace]

Techie Techie Techie..bla bla :)

Logic Pro goes Universal February
http://www.macworld.com/news/2006/01/19/logic/index.php

[AidenShaw]

You do realized most of Apples iLife application (iMovie, iDVD, iPhoto in particular) and well as many of Apple frameworks (Core Image, QuickTime, etc.) are fully capable of splitting streaming work across multiple cores when multiple cores are available...
But almost never with the scaling embodied in the SPEC rate benchmarks....


You don't see the foot notes??
Holy Guacamole, Batman!

The footnotes were above the text with the footnote reference.

Apple is really innovative - putting the footnotes in the middle of the page.

My bad, I guess, for expecting to see a "footnote" in the "footer" of the page. (Or maybe the Apple webmeister should do a little more testing of the HTML code....)

*LOL* Do you belive your own BS?
I was going to reply, but others have done a very good job of countering your arguments....

I got my first 64-bit desktop 14 years ago - I really do have a bit of experience in these matters ;). Turn the flames down a little, and at least try to think about what's been written here.

[arkmannj]

I don't have time right now to read through all of the forum, although I did try to skim through to prevent a dup. type post here. but my apologies ahead of time if it has already been asked.

How does the performance of running a PPC app in Rosette Vs. on a G4 ?
example.
I have a duel G4 1.0GHZ (quicksilver) 1.5GB ram, 200GB Hard drive
Radeon 9800 Pro (128mb vram)

and a powerbook Titanium G4 667mhz. 512MB ram.
how will the apps running in rosetta on the new intel-mac stack up ?

(yes I've posted this in another forum before, but thought it would fit well here. as last time there were no actual benchmarks out yet)

thanks and cheers!

[JackAxe]

I was going to reply, but others have done a very good job of countering your arguments....

I got my first 64-bit desktop 14 years ago - I really do have a bit of experience in these matters ;). Turn the flames down a little, and at least try to think about what's been written here.

I do apoligize. When I get excited and I'm rushed, my judgement becomes clouded. I went back and read your original reply and realized that I had completely misread and also misunderstood some of your comments and If I had only taken a step back and waited until later this evening, I would not have replied in the manner that I had. :)

<]=)

[shawnce]

(Or maybe the Apple webmeister should do a little more testing of the HTML code....) Weird they show up near the bottom of the page and below the footnote tags inline.

[rayz]

IBM gave up on Apple.

Apple never had any power in the relationship.

Apple's business, at best, represented a tiny fraction of IBM's revenue stream.

There was never any incentive for IBM to deliver that 3GHz G5.

>Too bad IBM and Apple gave up on the G5.

It actually represented a tiny portion of IBM's PPC revenues (between 2 and 5%), let alone the countless billons that the rest of IBM drags in. I'm surprised that IBM stuck with it for as long as they did.

I'm not really sure that Apple has any greater power in this relationship with Intel, but at least they don't have to worry about paying for custom chip work.

[mandis]

Hello people!!

Does anyone know when universal binaries of programs like Adobe CS2, Cinema 4D, Maya, Sketchup and Microsoft Office will become available?

Cheers!

[AidenShaw]

Hello people!!

Does anyone know when universal binaries of programs like Adobe CS2, Cinema 4D, Maya, Sketchup and Microsoft Office will become available?
About 4 days after you give them your credit card number to pay for the fat binary upgrade ! :cool:

[ricardo1]

A number of replies discusses the benefits (or lack of) of upgrading from a iMac G5 to and Intel iMac. I assume that most replies refer to the current isight iMac. I have a first gen 1.8Ghz G5 iMac and wiondered if the same advice holds for me. I have already lined up a buyer for my existing Mac and was ready to bite the bullet for a new 20inch. So what shall I do wait, for a revision in August or go for it.

What improvement will I see?

[MrCrowbar]

Wait until your mostly used software comes in universal binary, then get an iMac. I guess there will be an update on the iMac on April, so this would be a good time. But I would keep the G5 iMac next to the new one, so if you need to run an app that isnt universal, your G5 will run noticably gaster than the Intel one. Maybe you can even figure out how to hook them together, so you can use the old iMac as second screen for the Intel :)

[slooksterPSV]

I don't agree with these tests to an extent. We're talking about processor speed running on Mac OS X. Not how fast files export cause that's due to processor and hard drive and RAM. There are a lot of test I don't think they ran correctly. I mean Steve was showing Integer and floating point specs - those were killer compared to PowerPC. They should do different tests rather than those that require hard disk. As soon as Adobe comes out with Universal CS2 or UCS3 then the test's may be up to par. It's like if I were to throw in an ATA-33 Hard drive in this, and an ATA-133 Hard Drive in an iBook G3 700MHz, which would win the tests? For those posted, probably the G3 700MHz, cause the Hard Drive performance is greater. ATA-33 vs ATA-133.

That's my 2 cents.

[MrCrowbar]

Correct. Besides, the things that slow our computers down are memory accesses. If everything would fit into a processors registers, everything would be fine. But actually, the processor spends a lot of time with waiting for data. Thus, your CPU is rarely effectively running on 100% even if it tells you it is (waiting is, in simple words, actually work for the cpu, too ).

I'm pretty sure the Core Duo blows the G5 away in terms of integer and floating point computation, as long as no memory is involved. The Intel iMac got a little boost in RAM speed, but that's all.

But I think the benchmarks only test how many simple operations the processor can do in a given time. The thing is, such simple operations rarely happen in real use. I.e you don't add 2 numbers to just throw the result away and add 2 other number.

[nospleen]

Did anybody have a look at this? http://barefeats.com/imcd.html

However, it does say that the other computers were running ilife 05. I am not sure how much of a difference that makes, but still pretty interesting. I went over to my father's yesterday and helped him get his dual 2.0 imac set up. It has 2Gb's of ram and it screamed!! I was very impressed!

[kyeblue]

I am waiting for my new intel iMac arriving (shipped this morning from Shanghai) and went to my local Apple store for a test drive this morning. I played google earth which is the only PPC application installed. WOW, the zooming is unbelievely fast. I am convinced that Rosseta is good enough for non-pro applications.

[cablecartman]

Other then that... Looks like the g5 can hold its own considering that you should expect at least this much of a gain just from the 2nd core alone

Ummm... No.. You do realize that it's really just testing the one processor. Very little software would be benefitting from the dual processor. And, I'd hazard a guess (without really knowing) that Rosetta might not itself benefit from dual cores.

So in a nutshell, the Core offers significant improvements over the G5. Just a pity that its not 64bit like the PowerPC. Steve was fairly quiet about that ;)

[topgunn]

Here (http://web.mac.com/handras/iWeb/Site/intel1eng.html) is a good set of benchmark results.