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But how do they compare to a Raspberry Pi 4?

repairedCheese

repairedCheese

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Jan 13, 2020
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So it's been a little while since I've had too much to add, but the other day, a Raspberry Pi 4 just fell into my lap. A Pi 4 with all the bits to make it a full computer, too. After setting up Raspberry Pi OS, I realized something, the performance felt a lot like a G5 running Linux. To be honest? Maybe a little better. I'm not complaining about this, but I'm also not here to say that there's something wrong with these old PowerMacs. First up, the Pi has no hardware video acceleration, so like any PowerMac, it has to do that on CPU. Mine is doing it all without a fan at the moment, with nothing more than a tall heatsink, and 720p Youtube is only barely possible at all.

The only real difference is that I can do that in a current version of Chromium with h264ify, while my G5 has to use forked versions of Firefox and a lot more hacks to get anything like that to work. There's definitely more current ARM Linux 32-bit and 64-bit software out there than PPC Linux 32-bit and 64-bit Big Endian software, which is definitely a shame.

I was even able to throw it at geekbench 2, which gave me some interesting results: https://browser.geekbench.com/geekbench2/2726922

1635851600723.png

This is the headline, but it's worth looking at the individual scores as from what I can tell, PPC chips are good at wildly different things from this ARM soc. And, while it does have its own retro OS to play with, RISC OS doesn't exactly have the app library of the classic Mac OS, it's not even close.

I think the most meaningful difference is that the G5 Quad, a machine I would love to have, can't really touch a score like this, and uses 450 watts to get where it can, while this pulled this off at 5 watts, without even a fan to cool it. I haven't even started to overclock this thing.

If anything, this is making me wish that someone could make a PPC system on a chip with at least some sort of Mac OS compatibility. But, at the moment, I'm going to see where emulators can get me. I've heard that a Pi is the best Amiga, I'll have to see if the same is true for similarly aged Macs.

I realize this might be a bit of an odd post, but isn't this the dream? that one day, you could buy a computer for $30 that's as powerful as something 15 years old that cost $3000? And that it could fit in your pocket? I know it's what I always wanted to see, and now it's real, and I didn't even realize it.

We don't usually have a lot to compare our old hardware to. Modern x86 is too powerful, never mind high end Apple ARM hardware. But this thing definitely felt familiar to run, and I couldn't help myself.
 
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repairedCheese said:
I think the most meaningful difference is that the G5 Quad, a machine I would love to have, can't really touch a score like this, and uses 450 watts to get where it can, while this pulled this off at 5 watts, without even a fan to cool it. I haven't even started to overclock this thing.
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That's progress :) Now compare the Pi 4 to the dual dual-core Opteron or Xeon beasts of 2005 - I bet the results will be similar.

repairedCheese said:
And, while it does have its own retro OS to play with, RISC OS doesn't exactly have the app library of the classic Mac OS, it's not even close.
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I love RISC OS. It's a small, lightning-fast idiosyncratic British OS not many people have even heard of outside the UK. I used to own a heavily upgraded (233 MHz StrongARM, 133 MHz PC card, SCSI card) RiscPC and, well, it felt much faster than it actually was. So, having a tiny cheap platform that allows me to play around with this OS is great.
 
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Amethyst1 said:
That's progress :) Now compare the Pi 4 to the dual dual-core Opteron or Xeon beasts of 2005 - I bet the results will be similar.


I love RISC OS. It's a small, lightning-fast idiosyncratic British OS not many people have even heard of outside the UK. I used to own a heavily upgraded (233 MHz StrongARM, 133 MHz PC card, SCSI card) RiscPC and, well, it felt much faster than it actually was. So, having a tiny cheap platform that allows me to play around with this OS is great.
Click to expand...

Yes, but will it run TempleOS? :D
 
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repairedCheese said:
I think the most meaningful difference is that the G5 Quad, a machine I would love to have, can't really touch a score like this, and uses 450 watts to get where it can, while this pulled this off at 5 watts, without even a fan to cool it.
Click to expand...
I would disagree.

The last time I ran GB on my Quad was August 5, 2017. My Quad scored 3685. Now that's about 1000pts less to be sure and the Pi is much more modern. My Quad will never catch it.

But can't really touch? IDK.

As to wattage…absolutely the Pi beats it hands down. But a lot of keyboard punching has been spent over how much power these things use and I just don't see it in my electric bill.
 
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Amethyst1 said:
That's progress :) Now compare the Pi 4 to the dual dual-core Opteron or Xeon beasts of 2005 - I bet the results will be similar.


I love RISC OS. It's a small, lightning-fast idiosyncratic British OS not many people have even heard of outside the UK. I used to own a heavily upgraded (233 MHz StrongARM, 133 MHz PC card, SCSI card) RiscPC and, well, it felt much faster than it actually was. So, having a tiny cheap platform that allows me to play around with this OS is great.
Click to expand...
If I can find one of those 2005 pcs on Geekbench, i'll certainly do the comparison. And, i do mean to play with that retro OS eventually.
eyoungren said:
I would disagree.

The last time I ran GB on my Quad was August 5, 2017. My Quad scored 3685. Now that's about 1000pts less to be sure and the Pi is much more modern. My Quad will never catch it.

But can't really touch? IDK.

As to wattage…absolutely the Pi beats it hands down. But a lot of keyboard punching has been spent over how much power these things use and I just don't see it in my electric bill.
Click to expand...
I'm not making a value judgment here. The G5 certainly isn't worse.
It's just good at different things, and wildly so. A G5 Quad with the score of 3460 isn't quite as good as yours but it makes for a useful comparison. For me, the important part is that you can put it in your pocket. I have plenty of working retro hardware, but I didn't expect the $30 toy computer to be this good!

I do wish there was a way to do an apples to apples comparison between graphics hardware, but I can't think of any benchmarks that they both have access to that would give them both their best chances. Really, i was lucky there's a Geekbench2 build out for ARM Linux. I can't just stick more ram in my 2gb Pi, either, so if I want to do some of the more wild things you can do with one, I'd need to buy another one, which I'm pretty sure would cost more than the same amount of ram for a G5, especially in this economy.

It is much, much more "do it yourself" than a Mac, even a PPC one, and I'm currently trying to figuring out what it can even do.
 
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Amethyst1 said:
AMD: 2× Opteron 280 (i.e. 2× 2.4 GHz dual-core)
Intel: 2× Xeon "Paxville" 2.8 (i.e. 2× 2.8 GHz dual-core)

Those were the fastest dual-capable dual-core CPUs available in 2005 according to Wikipedia.
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And my Pi 4 at stock clocks can score better than all but two of the Opterons. Again, stock 1.5 Ghz clock speed, no fan. I'm gettin a fan and can bump it up to 2 Ghz. But, what I'm taking away from all of this is that the G5 was robbed. Those x86 systems aren't that much more powerful, but they have so much more software available to them. Apple sent out a PPC cpu knowing they were going to kill it in about 2 years, and they had to take a step back from 64-bit software just to do it. It worked out for them, but where was all the 64-bit PPC Mac software?

I'm fairly sure you can run Windows 10, and even Windows 11 on those x86 systems. Take that for what you will. It's not remotely supported, but since when did any of us care about that?
 
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Amethyst1 said:
With full Linux, macOS and Windows running on it, ARM might become the new x86 :)
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And Apple would absolutely love this, as current king of the ARM hill. But that does lead me to another question, what do you think would be needed to run the Mac OS on a Pi? As far as I know, no one has managed to run the Mac OS on any ARM devices other than Apple's own, but eventually, it's bound to happen. Even if it's just a matter of virtualization, that's already been pulled off for x86 Mac OS, so why not ARM Mac OS?

And maybe one day, Hackintoshes will be a lot smaller!

Edit: It looks like that general virtualization day may be sooner than I thought: https://mrmacintosh.com/you-can-now-virtualize-macos-on-an-m1-mac-with-macos-monterey/
 
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repairedCheese said:
what do you think would be needed to run the Mac OS on a Pi?
Click to expand...
If you mean natively, my fairly uneducated guesses would be that at minimum, the following three things are required to boot macOS:
  • a boot loader capable of loading the kernel from an APFS volume (looking at how virtualisation handles this might be interesting)
  • patches to remove dependencies on hardware and other things the Pi doesn't have, but macOS expects to be there
  • if macOS requires CPU instructions the Pi doesn't have, a way to emulate them or get around macOS' dependency on them
 
I used a Raspi 4 for a few months, in a platoon setup with a Power Mac G4 ("Sawtooth"). My experience with the Pi alternated between being impressed by how much such a small machine could do and being infuriated by its 'quirks'.

At running Linux, it might well be better than any/most PPC Macs, though that's apples to penguins. ;) The biggest catches I think you might run into are that the Pi 4's Wifi tends to be flaky, and it favors a microSD card for its boot drive. You can boot off of something else, but the Pi's default power supply only has so much wattage available, and you don't want to find out that you overloaded it when your external drive's plugged in. Besides, by the time you're done, you've got a rat's nest of cords plugging into various things.

For emulating Classic Mac OS, it's as good as the best emulators are; no better or worse. The last I checked, the top one was Sheepshaver, but Qemu was rapidly gaining ground. Neither are comparable to the real thing in terms of breadth of software compatibility, but they work well enough for enough old shareware-level programs that you might find this meets your usage case. (For running any version of OS X, my conjecture is that any real Mac that could run it will maul a Pi trying to do the same job.)

For running modern macOS, notwithstanding hardware incompatibility problems and license agreements, if you could somehow do it, I'm willing to go on record to guess it wouldn't make a very usable system. The Raspi 4 runs Raspberry Pi OS competently, and is sluggish with regular Ubuntu. Geekbench suggests it benchmarks similarly to the '09 Macbook Pro. The worst system Apple voluntarily allows you to run Monterey on is the late '14 Mac Mini. That's a bit of a gap! ;)

Over to the opposite extreme, RISC OS' system requirements are similar to System 7's, so there's reason to expect it will make a Pi 4 feel like a supercomputer!
 
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James Gryphon said:
Over to the opposite extreme, RISC OS' system requirements are similar to System 7's, so there's reason to expect it will make a Pi 4 feel like a supercomputer!
Click to expand...
RISC OS flies on a first-generation Pi so I can only imagine what it would be like on a 4. IIRC it can still only use a single CPU core though.

James Gryphon said:
The worst system Apple voluntarily allows you to run Monterey on is the late '14 Mac Mini. That's a bit of a gap! ;)
Click to expand...
People have run Monterey on a 2009 Mac mini. I’m sure “macOSPi” would be more of a “can it be done” type of thing, sort of like hackintoshing these dog-slow Atom netbooks back in the day. :)
 
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James Gryphon said:
I used a Raspi 4 for a few months, in a platoon setup with a Power Mac G4 ("Sawtooth"). My experience with the Pi alternated between being impressed by how much such a small machine could do and being infuriated by its 'quirks'.

At running Linux, it might well be better than any/most PPC Macs, though that's apples to penguins. ;) The biggest catches I think you might run into are that the Pi 4's Wifi tends to be flaky, and it favors a microSD card for its boot drive. You can boot off of something else, but the Pi's default power supply only has so much wattage available, and you don't want to find out that you overloaded it when your external drive's plugged in. Besides, by the time you're done, you've got a rat's nest of cords plugging into various things.

For emulating Classic Mac OS, it's as good as the best emulators are; no better or worse. The last I checked, the top one was Sheepshaver, but Qemu was rapidly gaining ground. Neither are comparable to the real thing in terms of breadth of software compatibility, but they work well enough for enough old shareware-level programs that you might find this meets your usage case. (For running any version of OS X, my conjecture is that any real Mac that could run it will maul a Pi trying to do the same job.)

For running modern macOS, notwithstanding hardware incompatibility problems and license agreements, if you could somehow do it, I'm willing to go on record to guess it wouldn't make a very usable system. The Raspi 4 runs Raspberry Pi OS competently, and is sluggish with regular Ubuntu. Geekbench suggests it benchmarks similarly to the '09 Macbook Pro. The worst system Apple voluntarily allows you to run Monterey on is the late '14 Mac Mini. That's a bit of a gap! ;)

Over to the opposite extreme, RISC OS' system requirements are similar to System 7's, so there's reason to expect it will make a Pi 4 feel like a supercomputer!
Click to expand...
If there's one aspect that is just utterly unfair, ARM just has so much more support than PPC and PPC64 in the Linux space. Yes, I was able to add another 2000 onto my Geekbench score by overclocking my Pi, but if a G5 Quad can't even run half the software, does the power comparison even really matter? I did order a drive enclosure for a spare SSD I have lying around, so we'll see how well that works, and I got a stock case fan for it, so my little adventure into Pi activities isn't done, but Linux is unquestionably where it has won out compared to what I've seen.

I do have better hardware for most emulation, and if it's not going to be a handheld, I don't really need to emulate a Mac. At the moment, I'm a tourist, and I have no idea what I'm going to end up using this nice little computer for. I'd be lying if I said I wasn't having fun, though.
Amethyst1 said:
People have run Monterey on a 2009 Mac mini. I’m sure “macOSPi” would be more of a “can it be done” type of thing, sort of like hackintoshing these dog-slow Atom netbooks back in the day. :)
Click to expand...
But if anyone ever manages to pull it off, I'm certainly going to try it out. I'm already going to at least see how Windows runs on it, how could I resist the Mac OS?
 
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repairedCheese said:
But if anyone ever manages to pull it off, I'm certainly going to try it out.
Click to expand...
I’m hoping that a way to emulate macOS-on-ARM on x86 is discovered. QEMU, I’m looking at you…

repairedCheese said:
If there's one aspect that is just utterly unfair, ARM just has so much more support than PPC and PPC64 in the Linux space.
Click to expand...
ARM devices running Linux are practically everywhere. Ignoring Android for a moment, there are all kinds of embedded devices and even servers. And those hobbyist boards of which the Pi is just the most well-known.
 
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There actually are ways of getting hardware accelerated video to work on a Pi 4. The progress and commands needed for enabling it seem to change nearly every month though lol.
I did actually enable it on Ubuntu 21.04 a few months ago (together with overclocking the pi) and YouTube playback was really smooth. It handled 1080p with ease (I don't remember if I had 60fps enabled though)
Ubuntu is generally a better option for the Pi anyways because the packages are way more up-to-date than in Raspbian.
 
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Heindijs said:
There actually are ways of getting hardware accelerated video to work on a Pi 4. The progress and commands needed for enabling it seem to change nearly every month though lol.
I did actually enable it on Ubuntu 21.04 a few months ago (together with overclocking the pi) and YouTube playback was really smooth. It handled 1080p with ease (I don't remember if I had 60fps enabled though)
Ubuntu is generally a better option for the Pi anyways because the packages are way more up-to-date than in Raspbian.
Click to expand...
Well, right now, I'm running Windows 11 on mine, and there isn't even a graphics driver for Windows, so it's falling back to the Microsoft Basic Render driver. Being able to run an OS only works so well when barely any of it has support. It's not actually as annoying as not having Quartz Extreme in OSX, but there goes any chances of running Steam through ARM Windows for a laugh.
 
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repairedCheese said:
If I can find one of those 2005 pcs on Geekbench, i'll certainly do the comparison. And, i do mean to play with that retro OS eventually.
Click to expand...
See my result with a dual Xeon 5140 running Windows 10: https://browser.geekbench.com/geekbench2/2673707
Regarding the performance of these machines: a few months ago the mainboard of my i7-4790K died and I didn't have the money to buy a new one. So I put my GTX1080 in this HP Workstation, replaced the power supply, upgraded to 12 gigs of 667 MHz DDR2 FB-DIMM memory and used this machine to play Age of Empires 2 Definitive Edition! Multiplayer was slow at times and it took me a while to understand why, as neither CPU nor memory bottlenecked the performance: PCIe x16 Gen1 is soooooo slow :D
BUT: Intel machines of this age are able to run a modern OS and run modern games (albeit at lowest graphics quality in 1440p)! Now put your G5 and Raspbi in the ring ?
IMHO at the time Apple did the right thing switching to Intel as that architecture was massively superior. It took me quite some years to realize that and I was reminded of that just a few months ago
 
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