Apple Makes the Switch: iMac G5 vs. iMac Core Duo

[superbovine]

http://anandtech.com/mac/showdoc.aspx?i=2685&p=8

My apologize if this a double post, but I couldn't find it.

When Johan did his No More Mysteries article, he found that as a processor, the G5 is quite competitive with modern day x86 CPUs. In fact, he found that it offered floating point performance on par with that of the fastest x86 processor - the Athlon 64/Opteron.

Separately, I looked at Core Duo performance and found that clock-for-clock, it was a pretty solid competitor to AMD's offerings. Intel had effectively created a performance equal to AMD's Athlon 64 at lower clock speeds, without the use of an on-die memory controller.

But now it's time for judgment day, how does the Core Duo stack up to the G5? Let's start at one of the G5's weakest points - memory speed.
.
.
.

 

[Scarlet Fever]

very interesting...

On the issue if the iTunes encoding, I believe a lot of the G5 speed comes from the fact that the program has been written and refined for the PPC chip with Altivec, and when it looses that, even with two Intel cores, it still doesnt run as fast as we would like it to.

The iWeb results were interesting as well. I guess they would have been written for Intel architecture and them compiled to PPC chips.

Looks like the switch to Intel was a positive one. And as time goes by, the results can only get better!

 

[Josh396]

I wanna see where were at in a year or so to see if the switch will really pay off.

 

[bigfib]

I wanna see where were at in a year or so to see if the switch will really pay off.

Depending on the comparison you look at it already did pay off ;-)

http://web.mac.com/handras/iWeb/Site/intel1eng.html

Much more representative of how mine feels anyway (intel 17")

 

[superbovine]

I wanna see where were at in a year or so to see if the switch will really pay off.

I think after 2-3 years will give enough time for software developers to fully implement x86 software that takes full advantage of the hardware etc.

 

[tivoboy]

nice

nice article, anandtech always does a nice thorough job!

 

[asencif]

This was an awesome review and also shows that the iMac G5 at this moment is no slouch and great for most people. If Apple lowers it's price another $100 then it's an even better deal then now, especially if one has many apps not uni yet.