Damn...Fastest Supercomputer (NASA) uses Intel

[Cubeboy]

Sure!

Top-of-the-line P4's, Xeons, and even AMD chips are faster than any G5 to date. I'm not knocking the G5-like I said, I have one. But it is slower than any 3.2+ P4's I've used. (mostly determined by Maya render benchmarks, which is real world enough for me, since I use Maya all the time)

It's no big deal, its just no surprise

It depends largely on the software you'll be using. Some rendering programs like Maya and Lightwave will run faster on a P4/Xeon system while others (most notably, Aftereffects and Bryce if the benchmarks at Barefeats are any indication) will run faster on a G5 pmac. You'd also have to define how your comparing these chips; a single P4 might be faster than a single G5 in Photoshop (at least in regards to the PS7Bench) but a dual G5 powermac will almost certainly be faster than a comparable Xeon workstation due to much better scalability.

Originally posted by csubear
btw, the xeons (and p4, the p4 is a MESI, multiprocessor crippled Xeon), are not very good design. there pipelines where designed with one goal; Increase the speed of the processor so we can tell joe consumer that our processor is better.

Yes and I suppose thats why the P4 has been consistently outperforming the processors of it's generation (Athlon, G4) and remains competitive to this day with newer cpus like the Athlon64 and G5. Seriously, get a grasp on reality dude.

 

[agreenster]

It depends largely on the software you'll be using. Some rendering programs like Maya and Lightwave will run faster on a P4/Xeon system while others (most notably, Aftereffects and Bryce if the benchmarks at Barefeats are any indication) will run faster on a G5 pmac. You'd also have to define how your comparing these chips; a single P4 might be faster than a single G5 in Photoshop (at least in regards to the PS7Bench) but a dual G5 powermac will almost certainly be faster than a comparable Xeon workstation due to much better scalability.

All I know is that if you need to render from Maya, you're much better off with an Intel or AMD chip, and not a G5.

http://www.highend3d.com/tests/maya/testcenter/database.3d

 

[Cubeboy]

The first generation Itanium chips were indeed pigs, but the Itanium 2 is in the same ballpark as the G5 (62W is the worst case for I2, typical less).

Really though, these number are pointless. Apple simply do not build massive multiprocessing machines, they're simply not in that business. Apple can offer clusters which can take on some of the same jobs, but they simply aren't directly comparable architectures (that is, different at the system level, not even talking about CPU nitpicks).

Just thought I'd bring up this article for further comparative purposes.

Oh yeah, and whatever happened to the Vtech G5 Cluster? Why can't I find it on the top 500 list anymore?

 

[HiRez]

Oh yeah, and whatever happened to the Vtech G5 Cluster? Why can't I find it on the top 500 list anymore?

I think it got dropped off the last one because it was being upgraded from PowerMacs to Xserves at the time. The good news is it gained performance (up to 12.25 Tflops now I think), the bad news is that by the time it appears on the list again, it'll almost certainly be out of the top 5, if not out of the top 10. I just hope the BlueGene/Power 5 goodness trickles down and bears fruit for Apple. Also that new Colsa G5 cluster should be appearing on the list, I would think at least inside the top 10.

 

[virividox]

one day i want a cluster it will be my itunes server hehehe