G4/G3 Equivalants To PC Proccessors

[maraczc]

I think that it would be very helpful to many people to compare Apple's proccessors with "PC processors"*. If you know a reasonable answer, post the equivalant speed for that "PC proccessor"*.

ie. G4 1 GHZ equivalant Intel Penitum 4 Mobile: 1.6 GHZ (Note: Totally made up).

G3 800 MHZ
Intel Pentium 4: ? GHZ
Intel Pentium Mobility: ? GHZ
Intel Centario: ? GHZ
Intel Celeron: ? GHZ
AMD Athlon: ? GHZ
AMD Opteron: ? GHZ

G4 1 GHZ
Intel Pentium 4: ? GHZ
Intel Mobility: ? GHZ
Intel Centario: ? GHZ
Intel Celeron: ? GHZ
AMD Athlon: ? GHZ
AMD Opteron: ? GHZ

*Term "PC Proccessor(s)" was used for a lack of a beter term.

[Catfish_Man]

I'm afraid it's not possible to compare them that way. For RC5 a G4 will beat down any other processor (except a 970). For some other tasks (most of them), a 3.06GHz P4 will beat the crap out of it. I suppose you could do an average.

[maraczc]

Originally posted by Catfish_Man
I'm afraid it's not possible to compare them that way. For RC5 a G4 will beat down any other processor (except a 970). For some other tasks (most of them), a 3.06GHz P4 will beat the crap out of it. I suppose you could do an average.

Well that is what I meant. Just generally speaking which is the faster proccessor and the equivalants of both. Which is also why I said just a reasonable answer not an absolute comparision.

[patrick0brien]

One comparison could be made with FLOPs - Floating Point Operations per clock cycle.

Even though there are still other factors to Computer Performance, I feel that FLOPs comparisons are a better measurement than Hz as irt show how many calculations are being done per clock cycle. It's the other half of the MHz myth.

Here are the comparisons:

PIII: 3.2 FLOPs/Hz
PIV: 1.8 FLOPs/Hz
G4: 7.5 FLOPs/Hz

[ZildjianKX]

None of the G4s can even be compared to P4s... they're not even in the same ballpark.

http://www.digitalvideoediting.com/2002/11_nov/reviews/cw_macvspciii.htm

[mac15]

hehe in some personaly tests

my 700imac with 512MB ram was the same a HP 2.4ghz pentium 4 with 384mb ram though (but it was DDR)

this is personal, so take it how you wish

[AmbitiousLemon]

barefeats has a good recent benchmark with Dual 1.4Ghz pMac 3.06Ghz P4 and Dual 2.4Ghz Xeon. As you can see no one processor wins in all tests and all processors win at least one of the benchmarks. They are all pretty close to one another, anyone who says different doesnt know what they are talking about.

here is the quote from the analysis:
When we averaged 9 cpu intensive tests, the Xeon was 34% faster than the G4 and 17% faster than the P4. So I guess you can say it's the "king of desktop cpu crunch."

[ZildjianKX]

http://www.barefeats.com/pentium4.html

I'm pretty sure they were referring to the two P4s as fighting for the king of the hill... The P4 is 17% faster on average than the G4... and the Xeon is 34% faster than the G4... I'm not sure how you got they were pretty close, since your quote speaks for itself.

A 3 Ghz P4 is about 34% faster than a 2 Ghz P4... I don't consider that pretty close either. Even the most hardcore mac addicts, including me, agree that Apple needs a better processor (*cough* 970, *cough*).

[AmbitiousLemon]

i don't see that as a huge difference. At least not the huge difference people try to make it out as. Also the G4 does beat the dual xeon and p4 in some tasks, so its not a shut out. Thats why I say its pretty close. I'm not saying we don't need a new processor. Moto's G4 has crippled Apple for years now, and its embarassing. Apple has historically always been the fastest. These last few years have been disgusting. But some people make out the Gap to be much greater than it is.

[ZildjianKX]

True, but one of the other most important factors is price. You'll still pay $700 more for a new G4 tower when its slower than a P4. I just wish apple would either bump their speeds for such a premium price, or lower the price to reflect the speeds... as of right now I'm not going to pay more for a slower machine... just doesn't make sense.

[AmbitiousLemon]

Originally posted by ZildjianKX
True, but one of the other most important factors is price. You'll still pay $700 more for a new G4 tower when its slower than a P4. I just wish apple would either bump their speeds for such a premium price, or lower the price to reflect the speeds... as of right now I'm not going to pay more for a slower machine... just doesn't make sense.

well i disagree. i don't think the powermacs are more expensive. if you build a pc from scratch you might be able to get something cheap. but if you go buy a dell with the same specs as a powermac they come out pretty close to one another. the pc's just sound cheap because they entice people into their stores with promises of $500 computers. then they get people to add all the extras and drive the price up. apple just offers the fully loaded machines to begin with.

and dont sweat it. seems like new g3s with altivec and 400mhz fsbs are on the way and of course the ppc 970 is also on the way. cheaper chips and faster. apple will be on top of the performace heap once again.

[patrick0brien]

-ZildjianKX

I've been over this ad nauseum in other threads. When it comes to Video Editing, a PowerMac with FCP is the best thing you can buy for the money.

$7,000 for the PowerMac and extra HD's w/ FCP.

$50,000 for a comparible PC system.

You don't have to believe me, there's plenty of info around the web.

[ZildjianKX]

Originally posted by AmbitiousLemon
well i disagree. i don't think the powermacs are more expensive. if you build a pc from scratch you might be able to get something cheap. but if you go buy a dell with the same specs as a powermac they come out pretty close to one another. the pc's just sound cheap because they entice people into their stores with promises of $500 computers. then they get people to add all the extras and drive the price up. apple just offers the fully loaded machines to begin with.

and dont sweat it. seems like new g3s with altivec and 400mhz fsbs are on the way and of course the ppc 970 is also on the way. cheaper chips and faster. apple will be on top of the performace heap once again.

Well, in the benchmarks done here (http://www.digitalvideoediting.com/2002/11_nov/reviews/cw_macvspciii.htm) the PC was faster and $700 cheaper... so that's where I was getting my point from.

And as the 970 chips go that I've been patiently waiting for... well, it doesn't look like they'll be on top...

http://thetechnozone.com/macbuyersguide/editorials/Editorial-PPC970.htm

[topicolo]

There's also a difference between PC processors of the same family. For example, a P4 with a 400Mhz bus will be dramatically slower than a p4 with the new 800Mhz bus and hyperthreading. The same goes for Athlons--the ones running on a 266Mhz bus will be markedly slower than the 3000+ running on a 400Mhz bus.

[o187em]

I believe that a G4 is about 50% faster than a comparable GHZ Pentium 4. Thus a 1ghz imac would perform roughly equivalent to a 1.5ghz P4. Clock for Clock a G4 is faster than a P4 but the slower G4 clock speed is what allows PC to take the edge. all this of course is my assumption based on several articles i've read and from personal use of both Mac's and PC's.

[Vlade]

Originally posted by patrick0brien
$7,000 for the PowerMac and extra HD's w/ FCP.

$50,000 for a comparible PC system.

You don't have to believe me, there's plenty of info around the web.

Really? what about a top of the line PC system with some SCSI drives and Avids video software, thats not 50000 bucks! It is probably still way more expensive than the mac, but not 50K

[patrick0brien]

Originally posted by Vlade
Really? what about a top of the line PC system with some SCSI drives and Avids video software, thats not 50000 bucks! It is probably still way more expensive than the mac, but not 50K

-Vlade

Actually, an Avid system, comparable to FCP4 is the Avid DS Nitris Editor and that costs $78,995 USMSRP.

I was being nice before.

One thing that's interesting is if one reads the marketing for the DS Nitris System, they use words like "best in the industry" and "most accuracy of any HD product in the industry". This is true.

But only because FCP4 isn't shipping until next month.

[ac2102]

Originally posted by Vlade
Really? what about a top of the line PC system with some SCSI drives and Avids video software, thats not 50000 bucks! It is probably still way more expensive than the mac, but not 50K

The fella did say comparable system. Anyway, as far as im aware, a decent AVID system is predominantly hardware based, and that racks up the price. Plus, when video editing, you want an interface that you can work with for the hours needed to complete a project, a perk not offered by most PC systems. FCP rules the roost and should continue to do so.

[Raiwong]

FCP is just about the same as the competitors, it is much cheaper though. Arguably a PC is much more cheaper if you built it and probably only a little cheaper if you buy from branded companies.

Heres a bit of info and can someone do maths? I don't know about how much slower the G4 is to G3 Sahara in same mhz without altivector.

G4 No-altivec: ?mhz
G3 Sahara: 800mhz
Pentium: 1700mhz

G4 No-altivec: ?mhz
G3 Sahara: 900mhz
Pentium: ?mhz

This is from a review site I can't remember where search for ibook review. It was benchmarked on a engineering fansite I think ssing the floating point rule and other similiar engineerer's tests.

[markomarko]

Originally posted by ZildjianKX
None of the G4s can even be compared to P4s... they're not even in the same ballpark.

http://www.digitalvideoediting.com/2002/11_nov/reviews/cw_macvspciii.htm

Charlie's main beef was with the After Effects times. After Effects is only using ONE of the two processors available. For proof of this see http://www.creativemac.com/2003/04_apr/tutorials/aerender030408.htm.

I wrote Charlie and asked him if he used this technique in his benchmarks. He hadn't. Dave's technique sees a 55-65% decrease in render times. More than enough to see the mac compete with the P4 3.06.

[funkywhat2]

Personally, I think that it's impossible to correctly compare the processors the way ya'll are. I compare processors of similar ages. So, I would compare a G3 to a PII or early PIII/K62, etc. and the G4 to a PIII or a very early PIV, and an Althon from that period. The G4 could only beat a new PIV or Athlon in menial tasks, or tasks that not everyone does each day (think DNA sequencing).

[PyroTurtle]

to jump in head first...

waht about speed vs reliability? i know that comes up alot...
my mac is more reliable than my PC, period, that's just my experiance. even when they run the same OS, my powerpc machines are more reliable than my x86 machines...

or quality vs quantity...one thing the G4 does is quality control of the data going through the chip, the P4 just lets it all pass through, creating errors at times, all be it it recalculates but that adds time, power, and anoyance...not to mention crashes...

just my thoughts, flame me as you wish...

[G5orbust]

Originally posted by ZildjianKX
Well, in the benchmarks done here (http://www.digitalvideoediting.com/2002/11_nov/reviews/cw_macvspciii.htm) the PC was faster and $700 cheaper... so that's where I was getting my point from.

And as the 970 chips go that I've been patiently waiting for... well, it doesn't look like they'll be on top...

http://thetechnozone.com/macbuyersguide/editorials/Editorial-PPC970.htm


well...

your link says that the I/O is 6.4 GBps...

Thats the same as the new P4's that run the 800MHz bus. Just thought Id toss that into your little discussion.

[Cubeboy]

Flops is used to test the Floating Point performance of a processor at the core level this is primarily useful for scientific and engineering apps. If you look at the official flop results, you can clearly see that the Pentium 4 makes a very strong showing in this test, beating even Opteron and UltraSparc III server chips in most tests. The G4's FPU is relatively weak and it's system bus is quite slow. It won't make a strong showing here. Patrick O'Brian, could you please provide a link as to where you got those data and tell me why it's not listed in modules. I can't find any benchmark results for the G4 on this.

Known Flop Results
Pentium4@ 2.8 |Opteron@ 1.80|UltraSparc III@ 1.2
Module 1: 1138|Module 1: 1079|Module 1:0865
Module 2: 0461|Module 2: 0701|Module 2:0525
Module 3: 2058|Module 3: 1696|Module 3:1956
Module 4: 2299|Module 4: 1769|Module 4:1901
Module 5: 2022|Module 5: 1489|Module 5:1668
Module 6: 2330|Module 6: 1872|Module 6:1846
Module 7: 0324|Module 7: 0388|Module 7:0247
Module 8: 2265|Module 8: 1786|Module 8:1801

From SPEC CPU2000, you can get a good idea of G4 Floating point performance.

Motorola G4e 1.00 Ghz
Spec FP base:147
Spec FP peak:187

Motorola G4e 1.45 Ghz (estimate)
Spec FP base:240
Spec FP peak:300

AMD Opteron 1.8 Ghz
Spec FP base:1122
Spec FP peak:1219

UltraSparcIII 1.2 Ghz Cu
Spec FP base: 1074
Spec FP peak: 1344

Intel Pentium 4c 3.0 Ghz
Spec FP base:1213
Spec FP peak:1229

Now, it should be noted that the G4's compiler is pretty bad, but no compiler can excuse such poor performance. Even the best compiler won't get the G4 close to the performance of a Pentium 4 or Athlon in floating point. This is why many analyst predict that the PPC970 will absolutely trounce the G4 in floating point performance. Again the combination of a a weak FPU and slow bus simply means that the G4 won't perform well in floating point.

Dhrystone and Whetstone measure raw integer and Floating Point performance, they both display similar results.

As can be seen by the Barefeats benchmarks, a single Pentium 4 is faster than dual G4s in all but altivec optimized programs even though the G4 was using special configurations that aren't available to the public. The Dual 2.4 ghz Xeon was over twice as fast as the dual 1.45 ghz G4 in Cinebench. In games which are a very good measure of system performance, the Pentium 4 beats the G4 by large amounts in every benchmark. Combine this with the thoughts of reviews done by Aces Hardware and Digital video review and you've got a pretty good idea of how things stand right now.

In conclusion, processor to processor, a P4 or Athlon will beat a G4 pretty badly, the combination of weak FPU, slow system bus, low clock rates, and insufficient IPC to make up for it (Athlon is clock to clock superior to the G4 and it scales higher) means that the only applications the G4 might exceed in are Altivec optimized ones. With two G4s and well threaded applications, it depends on what application the Pentium 4 is running. A dual G4 system running FCP will be about even with a single 3.06 ghz Pentium 4 running Aftereffects, and be beat by a single 3.06 ghz Pentium 4 running Combustion.

[patrick0brien]

-Cubeboy

Interesting.

Right about now I wish I still had that research and could give you links, but I'm afraid I can't. They were NDA'ed at my old job so I had to turn it over. But if memory serves, this was based on total chip output as measured by the manufacturer and I had to do some weaseling to get them.

The project was kicked off to try to answer client's inquiries as to why the P4 performed less work than the P3 at comparable clock rates. The Motorola performance was thrown in as a bonus to that measurement.

As for Spec2000 measurements, I'm highly suspect of them as they measure aspects don't directly impact the user, and that was the point of the project I'm referring to above. The Spec2000 test may be accurate to the module and the numbers stated, but we couldn't use them because that actually hurt our conclusions by distracting the clients obsevation that the P3 was in fact faster in real world performance than the P4. It was counterinformative. While true in their own right, the Spec2000 numbers were not indicative of overall performance.

This, as they say is the crux of all of these speed discussions. If there were a clear leader, would we even be having this discussion?

<edit>

I just rememebred something else. You're probably not going to like it as it's not supported by Spec tests but if you may recall the Sawtooth G4 400mhz when introduced in 1999 was cedited as the "First Mainstream Supercomputer" because according to government (NSA I think) tests the computer produced a real-world performance of >1GFLOPs sustained and spiked to >4GFLOPs a second, thus Apple had a great marketing angle, but couldn't export the machines until they petitioned the goverment to up the bar of export. So if we do some dirty math on that we'd get 400/~1024=~2.56FLOPs/Cycle and 400/~4096=~10.24FLOPs/Cycle

I know it's not elegant, I know it's not Spec, but these were the legal and certified findings of the time.

[Cubeboy]

Originally posted by patrick0brien
-Cubeboy

I just rememebred something else. You're probably not going to like it as it's not supported by Spec tests but if you may recall the Sawtooth G4 400mhz when introduced in 1999 was cedited as the "First Mainstream Supercomputer" because according to government (NSA I think) tests the computer produced a real-world performance of >1GFLOPs sustained and spiked to >4GFLOPs a second, thus Apple had a great marketing angle, but couldn't export the machines until they petitioned the goverment to up the bar of export. So if we do some dirty math on that we'd get 400/~1024=~2.56FLOPs/Cycle and 400/~4096=~10.24FLOPs/Cycle

I know it's not elegant, I know it's not Spec, but these were the legal and certified findings of the time.

Ah so your refering to the GFLOPS used by Apple's Marketing department, unfortunately, I assure you, those scores have little value if any at all. To measure GFLOPS (billion Floating Point Operations Per Second), you divide the number of floating point operations in your program by the execution time in milliseconds. The problem with this however is that the number of floating point operation vary depending on the program being benched. Depending on the programs, the FLOPS rating can vary anywhere between a few hundred MFLOPS to several 1000 MFLOPS. Looking at their website Apple never provided the information of whether what program was used or any comparison to similarly benched Pentium 4 or Athlon systems, thus rendering their score essentially useless. Linpack, the sole entree into the Top 500 supercomputers list is one of the benchmarks that actually measures flops in a credible way, below I've listed the results for the G4 533, Athlon 600, and the first Pentium 4. I would put the current results but unfortunately, the Performance Database Server isn't updated very often so I've listed comparable processors to the 533 Mhz G4. Of course, back than, the G4 was far closer performance-wise to the Athlon and Pentium 4.

Official Linpack Results

Motorola G4 533
N=100: 231 Mflops
N=1000: 478 Mflops
Peak: 1066 Mflops

Athlon 600
N=100: 260 Mflops
N=1000: 557 Mflops
Peak: 1200 Mflops

Pentium 4@1.5 ghz
N=100: 326 Mflops
N=1000: 1311 Mflops
Peak: 3000 Mflops

[patrick0brien]

-Cubeboy

Not to sound pissy or argumentative, but you appeared to miss my point of "Sawtooth G4 400mhz when introduced in 1999 was credited as the "First Mainstream Supercomputer" because according to government (NSA I think) tests the computer produced a real-world performance of >1GFLOPs sustained and spiked to >4GFLOPs a second."

This is fact, and history.

I do listen to Spec2000 test and others, but I've learned to take them with a grain or salt as (even as you mentioned) the compilers differ, the tests differ. Will all of these differences on different machines. Not to mention what the different OS's those different tests, on those different machines are running and how they affect the outcome of measurement.

It's all too damn muddy, and ultimately not very useful.

No wonder there is no unified measure of performance, and ergo the need to read into these tests some sort of value.

Sadly, this pinnacle of computer performance measurement is quite a way off. Until then, arguments such as this one will continue to happen, with numbers being used to bludgeon each other with still no solution at the end.

This is why I find even the "vaunted" Photoshop tests, and render test more valuble. Because that is the stuff that users need - and users, are what computers are for.

Believe what you will. And I shall as well.

[Cubeboy]

Originally posted by patrick0brien
-Cubeboy

The project was kicked off to try to answer client's inquiries as to why the P4 performed less work than the P3 at comparable clock rates. The Motorola performance was thrown in as a bonus to that measurement.

Clock to Clock, the Pentium 3 is around 30% faster at general usage, the Pentium 4 is over 70% faster at SSE. Of course the Pentium 4 has also substantially increased it's IPC since then, at least 25% according to microprocessor report. As I've said before, Real world performance is not dictated by the CPU alone, mostly it's dictated by the design of the program being benched.

[Cubeboy]

Originally posted by patrick0brien
[B]-Cubeboy
As for Spec2000 measurements, I'm highly suspect of them as they measure aspects don't directly impact the user, and that was the point of the project I'm referring to above. The Spec2000 test may be accurate to the module and the numbers stated, but we couldn't use them because that actually hurt our conclusions by distracting the clients obsevation that the P3 was in fact faster in real world performance than the P4. It was counterinformative. While true in their own right, the Spec2000 numbers were not indicative of overall performance.B]

No Spec was not meant to reflect real world performance I don't think any benchmark or program can do that considering the vast amount variation in programs today. Spec was designed to compare different architectures and estimate the potential of a particuler architecture. This is what sets spec apart from the rest of the benchmarks for you see spec cannot be hand optimized, it's source code consists of large data blocks, not little snippets. It's a composite of hand picked benchmarks meant to test every aspect of the cpu, the scores are than weighted transformed into a final score to show the processors performance at different kinds of code (integer code and floating point code). This is why SPEC is so respected by much the industry (IBM, Intel, AMD, Alpha all endorse it as the standard) The only weakness I see in spec is that you can't have a accurate measure of performance unless you have a good compiler which for some reason right now, Powermacs don't have one, however looking at the variation in scores, it can't justify that the G4 simply can't compete in the current market (which would explain why current Powermacs use dual G4s).

[Cubeboy]

Originally posted by patrick0brien
-Cubeboy

Not to sound pissy or argumentative, but you appeared to miss my point of "Sawtooth G4 400mhz when introduced in 1999 was credited as the "First Mainstream Supercomputer" because according to government (NSA I think) tests the computer produced a real-world performance of >1GFLOPs sustained and spiked to >4GFLOPs a second."

This is fact, and history.

I do listen to Spec2000 test and others, but I've learned to take them with a grain or salt as (even as you mentioned) the compilers differ, the tests differ. Will all of these differences on different machines. Not to mention what the different OS's those different tests, on those different machines are running and how they affect the outcome of measurement.

It's all too damn muddy, and ultimately not very useful.

No wonder there is no unified measure of performance, and ergo the need to read into these tests some sort of value.

Sadly, this pinnacle of computer performance measurement is quite a way off. Until then, arguments such as this one will continue to happen, with numbers being used to bludgeon each other with still no solution at the end.

This is why I find even the "vaunted" Photoshop tests, and render test more valuble. Because that is the stuff that users need - and users, are what computers are for.

Believe what you will. And I shall as well.

No Patrick, I afraid your the one who's missed the point, as I've stated in my previous post gigaflops has no value unless we know the exact specifications of the program used. Unless we have a set program that all processors will be benched on (which is exactly what Linpack is) or the exact specifications of the program, we cannot determine the value of the gigaflop. It's like comparing a MDD running FCP4 to a MDD running Aftereffects, depending on the program, the scores can be vastly different. With the right program, I can easily have a Pentium III or Athlon with sustained performance over 1 Gigaflop. As can be seen from the Linpack benchmark, under equal conditions, the Pentium 4 and Athlon clearly surpass the G4 in terms of Flops.

[Ensoniq]

No one will ever win the "which processor is really the fastest" argument. It's as unprovable as the existence of God or life after death. People have their beliefs, and that's that. Even though it's theoretically based on specs and figures that seemingly can't lie, it's all completely subjective.

That said, I sat down one afternoon and did some research to compile a list of SPEC scores for a variety of processors. You can either choose to believe my numbers or not, but the link to them is here:

Spec Scores (http://www.pacificnet.net/~mryan/spec.rtf)

The table doesn't list every possible processor/speed combination. But it gives a good range of what's currently available. And of course, the numbers come under immediate criticism depending on whether or not you actually believe SPEC is a fair and valid cross-platform benchmark...maybe it's not.

But based solely on SPEC scores, here are some interesting points that my personal analysis of the numbers indicate:

1 - Clock per clock, the P4 averages 17% faster than a G4 in integer performance. Considering the P4 is 1 year old, and the G4 is 3 years old, that's a far smaller margin than you'd expect.

2 - Clock per clock, the P4 is 100% faster than a G4 at floating point operations. Definite winner there.

3 - Clock per clock, the PPC 970 will be at least 70% faster than the G4 in integer operations, and will more than TRIPLE the speed of floating point operations.

4 - Clock per clock, the Opteron could beat the PPC 970 by 15% at integer operations, but is identical in floating point operations.

What does this mean? Probably nothing at all in real world terms. It's a bunch of numbers that don't even remotely factor in the highly optimized OS X vs. the clunky Windows. It doesn't take into account vector processing on either platform. You could spend hours looking at the numbers (I did) and calculate any formula you like to make one platform look superior to the other. It's all in your point of view.

But if anything, it shows two big things:

1 - The G4 is not as "slow" as some claim. If not stuck at such low speeds from Motorola, it would fare much better against the Wintel competition.

2 - The PPC 970 will be as capable as any chip that currently exists, and those that will come to market over the next year. Given equal clock speeds, we'll have nothing to be overly concerned with on the Wintel side. And that is worth smiling about.

There will always be those who will say "my 3 GHz P4 beats your Dual 1.4 GHz G4". And if those few extra seconds saved really matter that much to them, nothing you can say will change their minds. :)

[Cubeboy]

Originally posted by Ensoniq
No one will ever win the "which processor is really the fastest" argument. It's as unprovable as the existence of God or life after death. People have their beliefs, and that's that. Even though it's theoretically based on specs and figures that seemingly can't lie, it's all completely subjective.

That said, I sat down one afternoon and did some research to compile a list of SPEC scores for a variety of processors. You can either choose to believe my numbers or not, but the link to them is here:

Spec Scores (http://www.pacificnet.net/~mryan/spec.rtf)

The table doesn't list every possible processor/speed combination. But it gives a good range of what's currently available. And of course, the numbers come under immediate criticism depending on whether or not you actually believe SPEC is a fair and valid cross-platform benchmark...maybe it's not.

But based solely on SPEC scores, here are some interesting points that my personal analysis of the numbers indicate:

1 - Clock per clock, the P4 averages 17% faster than a G4 in integer performance. Considering the P4 is 1 year old, and the G4 is 3 years old, that's a far smaller margin than you'd expect.

2 - Clock per clock, the P4 is 100% faster than a G4 at floating point operations. Definite winner there.

3 - Clock per clock, the PPC 970 will be at least 70% faster than the G4 in integer operations, and will more than TRIPLE the speed of floating point operations.

4 - Clock per clock, the Opteron could beat the PPC 970 by 15% at integer operations, but is identical in floating point operations.

What does this mean? Probably nothing at all in real world terms. It's a bunch of numbers that don't even remotely factor in the highly optimized OS X vs. the clunky Windows. It doesn't take into account vector processing on either platform. You could spend hours looking at the numbers (I did) and calculate any formula you like to make one platform look superior to the other. It's all in your point of view.

But if anything, it shows two big things:

1 - The G4 is not as "slow" as some claim. If not stuck at such low speeds from Motorola, it would fare much better against the Wintel competition.

2 - The PPC 970 will be as capable as any chip that currently exists, and those that will come to market over the next year. Given equal clock speeds, we'll have nothing to be overly concerned with on the Wintel side. And that is worth smiling about.

There will always be those who will say "my 3 GHz P4 beats your Dual 1.4 GHz G4". And if those few extra seconds saved really matter that much to them, nothing you can say will change their minds. :)

A very well done chart, I have only a few quarrels. Spec is designed to test the strength of a particular architecture, having Multiple processors, SMT, or CMP, will not help the spec score (multithreading is viewed as optimization which isn't allowed). Your comparing the score from the Pentium 4 to the percieved score dual processor G4 (which would really have the same score as the single G4) while comparing the IBM's estimate for the PPC970 to the single processor G4, needless to say, this hardly accounts for a very good comparison.

As I've mentioned before, Spec wasn't designed to test real world performance, programs can be optimized, environments can be changed, a million factors can affect real world performance. Spec was made solely to measure the performance of a processor and compare it to processors of other architectures, to provide a universal measure of absolute performance of a CPU.

Right now, Apple needs to put two G4s into a single machine just to keep competitive with a single Pentum 4 or Athlon (which it's not doing a very good job at). That alone should give us a good insight as to the state of how well a single G4 stacks up. G4 architecture is simply too old to compete well with the new designs we see today.

I have no doubts that the PPC970s will offer competitive performance to Pentium 5 and Opteron, with Motorola (who hasn't come out with a new cpu in three years) off our backs I don't think we'll have much trouble with performance. Most of the professionals believe that the PPC970 will be very competitive with the next Pentium 4 (Pentium 5) in Floating Point and Vector, but lag behind in integer code. This goes along rather well with the specmarks you've posted.

[g30ffr3y]

guys... this is a circular argument... we all choose to use macs becuase we love them... sure we'd all like faster machines... we'd all like to tout our fast processors to our PC molested friends, but its just not in our cards right now... you have to ask yourself if your mac does what you need it to do... if it does than its the great machine that you were willing to pay a premium for... if not... well the 970's are on their way... personally i dont give a damn if there is a P4 out there with twice the power of my quicksilver or my tibook... i love my mac... i look forward to loving more and more macs in the future... to hell with m$... i dont give a **** if they come out with a P10 at 420ghz...

just please put doomIII on the mac...

[Cubeboy]

Exactly, buy what you need, I've got the original Cube, 450 mhz G4, 128 MB ram, 20 gig hard drive, and a 16 MB ATI Rage 128 pro video card, it's nearly three years old and it still runs all my apps on OS 9.2 just fine. For the most part, speed has little value in todays software market, we have reached a point in time that the computer has to wait on the person instead of vice versa. Any extra speed is essentially useless in these conditions. When your going with Apple, you get all the speed you need with style, elegance, quality, reliability, and the best OS in the industry, thats something your not going to get with a Dell or Gateway or whatever other PC company their is.

[g30ffr3y]

im glad that benchmarks arent the bible of computing to all... osx is a pleasure to work in... i often regret even changing the wallpaper... though i do often... everything is just so beautifully designed... you dont get that with windoze, dell, gateway, etc...

[maraczc]

Just in case anyone cared on TheMacMind website one contributor places the 800 MHZ G3 as a bit faster than an 800 MHZ P3.

[praetorian_x]

Originally posted by Ensoniq

What does this mean? Probably nothing at all in real world terms. It's a bunch of numbers that don't even remotely factor in the highly optimized OS X vs. the clunky Windows. It doesn't take into account vector processing on either platform. You could spend hours looking at the numbers (I did) and calculate any formula you like to make one platform look superior to the other. It's all in your point of view.

...

There will always be those who will say "my 3 GHz P4 beats your Dual 1.4 GHz G4". And if those few extra seconds saved really matter that much to them, nothing you can say will change their minds. :)

Optimized OSX vs clunky windows? Have you tried to resize a window in OSX lately? I have yet to see *any* machine (including the dual 1.4's) that can resize an iPhoto window smoothly. The windows window manager is one giant hack for performance. Ugly as sin, but fast as hell.

OSX sacrafices speed for flexibility and appearance. NIBs/Services/Plugins/AlphaBlending/etc. are all cool as hell, but they sure aren't optimized for performance...

Regarding the "few extra seconds", I can see how, for professionals, it matters. That's why Pixar went with a cluster of dual xeons to render "Finding Nemo". Your average user will not likely notice much of a difference between x86 and ppc, given one crucial point:

The OS running on top of it is the same.

But this is not the case. OSX is much more resource intensive than Linux/Windows, and is much younger and hence less optimized. Window resizing is one of the primary stumbling blocks in OSX, and its something that Quartz does not, and cannot address. Another area where OSX falls down is program loading, especially in Cocoa based apps with NIBs. Launch Terminal.app on a top end mac, and then go run xterm on a Linux box from three years ago. The difference is startling.

Because of this, the *percieved* speed of the macintosh platform is much lower, although in raw number-crunching terms, ppc isn't quite as badly off as some make out.

Anyway, not trying to convert anyone, just pointing out my thoughts.

Cheers,
prat

[donigian]

Originally posted by maraczc
Intel Centario

Sorry, it's Centrino and a certification not an actual processor. The Centrino certification requires the use of the Intel chipset, the Intel Pentium-M processor, and an Intel WiFi radio. You want a comparison to the Intel Pentium-M processor.

And, topicolo, the AthlonXP 3000+ runs a 333 MHz FSB, only the 3200+ runs a 400 MHz FSB.

Ahh, but those are little points of clarification.