even more benchmarks

[thies]

osnews.com posted this article about benchmarks involving Intel, AMD and Apple/Motorola:

http://www.queru.com/articles/Benchmarks.html

Just to slightly dispell all the "Apples are like a Porsche" posts as of late.

 

[Mr. Anderson]

Re: even more benchmarks

Originally posted by thies
osnews.com posted this article about benchmarks involving Intel, AMD and Apple/Motorola:

http://www.queru.com/articles/Benchmarks.html

Just to slightly dispell all the "Apples are like a Porsche" posts as of late.

its pretty much accepted that macs are slower - but he mentions one reason for the tests to show the extreme difference

Some zealots will say that the G4 can do better than that because gcc doesn't use Altivec. Well, now, it's not my fault if you don't have a decent compiler, is it? Do you think that someone with a mind would go spend some time hand-optimizing his/her code in assembly for a CPU that only has a few percent of market share?

i'm not a mac zealot, but for the test to show real comparisons the Altivec code should be used. Most applications (that'll you'll end up running on these machines) are coded to take advantage of it. That's why you get comparisons using photoshop filters.

However, I'd still love to see the day that a single Motorola chip in an Apple machine can go head to head with a single processor from the Intel/AMD world.

I know we'll all be waiting a while for that one.

D

 

[nuckinfutz]

Idiot PC Users

Bunch of Benchmark fanatics. I'll be laughing at your PC when MS clamps down on you with Palladium. Guess they'll need that speed to login to the Authentication Servers quickly so they can play their MP3s

 

[thies]

as a matter of fact I myself haven't used a Microsoft OS at home in about 6 years.

 

[big]

>as a matter of fact I myself haven't used a Microsoft OS at home in about 6 years.

I can honetsly say the last "PC" in my house (I owned) was an old Hyperion computer...basically Just a DOS machine that had no OS (some 12 years ago)

 

[szark]

I'm sure this particular Jaguar feature will help:

Developers will appreciate the inclusion of GCC 3.1, which offers 25% better code generation and compiles your code in as little as one sixth the time. Also, Apple engineers have optimized the standard suite of math libraries to use the vector instructions on the PowerPC G4 chip (also known as the Velocity Engine). That means you can get optimal performance for your applications without writing assembly or platform-specific code.

 

[tjwett]

not surprising. depressing, but not surprising. and the writer said exactly what i've always said about AltiVec...Apple will never catch up if it continues to rely on AltiVec for it's performance. the software developers simply do not and will not bother to write special code for such a tiny market share. it's time for Apple to start adopting some industry standards if they really want to get people to switch. those standards might mean a different CPU with high mhz. i cant' believe that the 1ghz performed like a 500mhz PIII. what does that say about my TiBook 550? it performs like a PII 250? i don't know but it sure feels like it. Apple should be literally ashamed by results like these.

 

[nuckinfutz]

Originally posted by tjwett
not surprising. depressing, but not surprising. and the writer said exactly what i've always said about AltiVec...Apple will never catch up if it continues to rely on AltiVec for it's performance. the software developers simply do not and will not bother to write special code for such a tiny market share. it's time for Apple to start adopting some industry standards if they really want to get people to switch. those standards might mean a different CPU with high mhz. i cant' believe that the 1ghz performed like a 500mhz PIII. what does that say about my TiBook 550? it performs like a PII 250? i don't know but it sure feels like it. Apple should be literally ashamed by results like these.

That guys an idiot. Altivec is a SIMD unit just like SSE2 on the P4 or 3Dnow on AMD. OSX has Altivec optimizations within the os and it doesn't affect the development of processors as much as some guessed. As for tiny marketshare Altivec is not that hard to code for and if developers don't think it's worth the time then should we really be using their apps. Lazy developers get on my nerves.

Apple needs to adopt industry standards?

1. OpenGL
2. ATA
3 . PCI
4. SyncML(iSync)
5. Zeroconfig(Rendezvous)
6. WebDav
7. Keberos
8. LDAP
9. Java

Anyone that would say Apple doesn't support Industry Standards is showing complete ignorance. The trend has been for Apple to adopt as many Standards as they can. Microsoft is the company that doesn't like non Microsoft Created Standards with their RECENT shelving of OpenGL and Java

 

[PrettyMan]

Apple needs to adopt industry standards?

1. OpenGL
2. ATA
3 . PCI
4. SyncML(iSync)
5. Zeroconfig(Rendezvous)
6. WebDav
7. Keberos
8. LDAP
9. Java

Anyone that would say Apple doesn't support Industry Standards is showing complete ignorance. The trend has been for Apple to adopt as many Standards as they can. Microsoft is the company that doesn't like non Microsoft Created Standards with their RECENT shelving of OpenGL and Java

10. MPEG4
11. BSD
12. Posix
13. USB
14. CUPS
15. IPv6
16. IEEE 802.11
17. Firewire
18. Bluetooth
18. ....
19. ...
...
18324. To hate M$

But also tons of non-standard technologies, we cannot forget it !! Great technologies, but no standards (aqua, quartz, Objetive-C, ColorSync, Quicktime, Quickdraw 3D...).

Ciao.

 

[thies]

Apples marketing is urging people to "switch". Those people won't give a rats ass about standards and most likely won't even know what "OpenGL" is. All they will see is that they could get a in MHz measured faster PC for a lesser price and if they try a Mac in a store it will also feel slower than a PC standing next to it.

 

[tjwett]

Originally posted by thies
Apples marketing is urging people to "switch". Those people won't give a rats ass about standards and most likely won't even know what "OpenGL" is. All they will see is that they could get a in MHz measured faster PC for a lesser price and if they try a Mac in a store it will also feel slower than a PC standing next to it.

that was my point exactly. all the average consumer knows to look for is the mhz and the price. beyond that they buy whatever comes with a free monitor and printer. this is the sad truth.

 

[tjwett]

Originally posted by nuckinfutz


That guys an idiot. Altivec is a SIMD unit just like SSE2 on the P4 or 3Dnow on AMD. OSX has Altivec optimizations within the os and it doesn't affect the development of processors as much as some guessed. As for tiny marketshare Altivec is not that hard to code for and if developers don't think it's worth the time then should we really be using their apps. Lazy developers get on my nerves.

Apple needs to adopt industry standards?

1. OpenGL
2. ATA
3 . PCI
4. SyncML(iSync)
5. Zeroconfig(Rendezvous)
6. WebDav
7. Keberos
8. LDAP
9. Java

Anyone that would say Apple doesn't support Industry Standards is showing complete ignorance. The trend has been for Apple to adopt as many Standards as they can. Microsoft is the company that doesn't like non Microsoft Created Standards with their RECENT shelving of OpenGL and Java

Okay, I was referring to the things that regular consumers consider standard. Mom and Dad looking for a family computer most likely cannot identify one of the things on your little list. Consumers look at mhz and price. And who has the most freebies thrown in. Try not throwing the word "idiot" around. It makes you sound like one.

 

[PrettyMan]

Okay, I was referring to the things that regular consumers consider standard. Mom and Dad looking for a family computer most likely cannot identify one of the things on your little list. Consumers look at mhz and price. And who has the most freebies thrown in. Try not throwing the word "idiot" around. It makes you sound like one.

Oh, your arguments are changing continuosly. Regular consumers consider "better" mhz and prize (and games, and piracy, and Napster and e-donkey, and internet and tons of things...). But sometimes, all that "standards" are based on real standars and I'm sure, Apple supports and creates standards.
And bussines, profesionals and lot of consumers look for real standards, and we find them in X.
And it´s really no neccesary to use bad words, I think.

Ciao.

 

[jadam]

Originally posted by tjwett


Okay, I was referring to the things that regular consumers consider standard. Mom and Dad looking for a family computer most likely cannot identify one of the things on your little list. Consumers look at mhz and price. And who has the most freebies thrown in. Try not throwing the word "idiot" around. It makes you sound like one.

freebies?? how many freebies does apple offer??

 

[thies]

I'd say that being standard compliant is a basic necessity which doesn't even need to be debated. Without that a system wouldn't be able to survive at the market at all. People will look at the price performance ratio. Macs are slower while being more expensive from whatever angle you want to look at it. The above benchmarks surely don't take a lot of things into account, but the gap is too big to be argued away by that. Earlier the real life use was mentioned. I can only point at the article being published in the last days how a Mac got smacked around in a Photoshop comparison with x86 machines.

 

[electricimage]

Hello.

I have been reading these forums for quite sometime and have never posted before. But, these results are just wrong and I would like to post our testing results.

For you that don't know my company, Electric Image, we are a 3D software company that creates two separate 3D packages. They are Amorphium Pro and EI Universe. We have been selling 3D software on the Macintosh since 1991 and have been developing for it since 1989. We have also been selling both of our 3D packages on Windows and the Mac since 1999. Our software is great at showing realistic performance of a computer system. The software uses every aspect of the system (HD, Mem, Proc) for nearly every second it is rendering. We do not support Altivec.

We unfortunately at this time do not have any "newer" Macintosh systems. We will most likely purchase some new systems once the powermacs arrive. I hope you find these stats interesting.

Base system to measure performance:

Athlon Slot A 900MHZ 200MHZ System Bus ATA 66

--------

Athlon Socket A 1.2 GHZ 200MHZ System Bus ATA 100

57% Faster

Athlon XP Socket A 1.5 GHZ 266MHZ System Bus ATA 100

92% Faster

Macintosh G4 533MHZ 133MHZ System Bus

25% Faster

This is just a few of the examples we have done on different systems. All tests are compared to the base system. All PCs are Gateway configured systems and running Windows XP/2000. All Macintosh systems were running OS 9.2. OS X tests will come soon. All computers have 512MB ram. With our tests we can pretty much conclude that a G4 500 without using Altivec is nearly identical to an x86 processor running at 1GHZ at the same system bus. The true issues we believe is the DDR ram with the PC systems. Because a rendering engine continues to seek out information in the RAM continually throughout a rendering process the DDR provides a greatly improved rendering time. The L3 cache in the new motherboards will help. But with the size of most 3D projects the DDR RAM will be much more beneficial then a small L3 cache.

Our conclusions and wishful thinking is this...

A G4 of 1.5GHZ and 266 or 333MHZ DDR and a 2MB L3 Cache will be competitive with a 2.8GHZ to 3.0GHZ x86 processor. This is without using the Altivec engine. The ability for the application to quickly access RAM will be a huge step forward for the Macintosh 3D community as well as everyone else.

As a very strong Macintosh supporter I am looking into providing these statistics on our website at www.electricimage.com in the near future. I would like to use a project that really pushes the system for a few hours to get a truly realistic test.


I believe that we are on the brink of something big from Apple. My gut feeling and from the hush-hush attitude in SF I believe we will see big things soon.

I hope you all find this useful.

Brad Parscale
VP Sales & Marketing
Electric Image

 

[thies]

It better be soon. And he better be right. Powermacs and Powerbooks badly need faster CPUs and DDR ram together with a pricecut to be competitive while Apple wants to go head to head with the x86 world.

 

[PrettyMan]

A G4 of 1.5GHZ and 266 or 333MHZ DDR and a 2MB L3 Cache will be competitive with a 2.8GHZ to 3.0GHZ x86 processor. This is without using the Altivec engine. The ability for the application to quickly access RAM will be a huge step forward for the Macintosh 3D community as well as everyone else.

I believe that we are on the brink of something big from Apple. My gut feeling and from the hush-hush attitude in SF I believe we will see big things soon.

And a dual G4 1.6 GHZ with Altivec engine and fasters bus/ram.

In two weeks, in your AppleStore, I think. I'm sure that something great, new, fast, amazing is being finished at Cupertino. Then all the pieces of the puzzle will be ready to make it.

Ciao.

 

[barkmonster]

I read something about the SPEC benchmarks before.

I can't remember where or the exact wording of what I read but I read that SPEC benchmarks are extremely suspect. A few reasons spring to mind.

Compiler Optimisation - obviously this is already mentioned.

Perfect Instructions - This is the big one, this is the one that means that the branch predictor handling that 19 stage pipeline on a pentium 4 NEVER misses an instruction! Hardly realworld.

Small Instructions - Helpfully for those CPUs with tiny amounts of cache RAM, the instructions used in the SPEC benchmark are designed to fit in those small amounts of cache, eliminating the bottleneck of RAM while giving another misleadingly high score to inefficiently designed cpus.

This means in effect that SPEC benchmarks are about as realworld as throwing 2 computers off a bridge and the one that sinks first is the winner.

In reality the Pentium 4 is held back by the lack of L3 cache, the lack of a barrel shifter (reverses numbers in 1 instruction, even the 386 had one!), the huge pipeline means that even with a highly efficient branch predictor the pentium 4 is spending more time waiting for instructions that executing them. I've generalised on this last paragraph by the way, some of the info is from emulators.com

Thanks for the info Electric Image

I've heard the name electric Image mentioned countless times when films with lots of CGI are being discussed. If such a high end package as you're suite of software shows more recent CPUs running rings around a 900Mhz Athlon, I'm sure we're in for a treat when new G4s are out. Most benchmarks I've seen put the G4 on a par with the Athlon MHz for Mhz. Infact if you work out the speed the G4 would need to be at to match the 1.2Ghz Athon, it comes to 1.2Ghz. I can only imagine what effect DDR and other technologies in the new powermacs might have on performance.

 

[theranch]

sounds good

Originally posted by electricimage
Hello.

I have been reading these forums for quite sometime and have never posted before. But, these results are just wrong and I would like to post our testing results.

<!--edited for space -->
I believe that we are on the brink of something big from Apple. My gut feeling and from the hush-hush attitude in SF I believe we will see big things soon.

I hope you all find this useful.

Brad Parscale
VP Sales & Marketing
Electric Image

Welcome to macrumors.com and thanks for the input. I look forward to hearing what might come from the hush hush in SF.

 

[Catfish_Man]

To give an example...

Originally posted by electricimage
Hello.

I have been reading these forums for quite sometime and have never posted before. But, these results are just wrong and I would like to post our testing results.

For you that don't know my company, Electric Image, we are a 3D software company that creates two separate 3D packages. They are Amorphium Pro and EI Universe. We have been selling 3D software on the Macintosh since 1991 and have been developing for it since 1989. We have also been selling both of our 3D packages on Windows and the Mac since 1999. Our software is great at showing realistic performance of a computer system. The software uses every aspect of the system (HD, Mem, Proc) for nearly every second it is rendering. We do not support Altivec.

We unfortunately at this time do not have any "newer" Macintosh systems. We will most likely purchase some new systems once the powermacs arrive. I hope you find these stats interesting.

Base system to measure performance:

Athlon Slot A 900MHZ 200MHZ System Bus ATA 66

--------

Athlon Socket A 1.2 GHZ 200MHZ System Bus ATA 100

57% Faster

Athlon XP Socket A 1.5 GHZ 266MHZ System Bus ATA 100

92% Faster

Macintosh G4 533MHZ 133MHZ System Bus

25% Faster

This is just a few of the examples we have done on different systems. All tests are compared to the base system. All PCs are Gateway configured systems and running Windows XP/2000. All Macintosh systems were running OS 9.2. OS X tests will come soon. All computers have 512MB ram. With our tests we can pretty much conclude that a G4 500 without using Altivec is nearly identical to an x86 processor running at 1GHZ at the same system bus. The true issues we believe is the DDR ram with the PC systems. Because a rendering engine continues to seek out information in the RAM continually throughout a rendering process the DDR provides a greatly improved rendering time. The L3 cache in the new motherboards will help. But with the size of most 3D projects the DDR RAM will be much more beneficial then a small L3 cache.

Our conclusions and wishful thinking is this...

A G4 of 1.5GHZ and 266 or 333MHZ DDR and a 2MB L3 Cache will be competitive with a 2.8GHZ to 3.0GHZ x86 processor. This is without using the Altivec engine. The ability for the application to quickly access RAM will be a huge step forward for the Macintosh 3D community as well as everyone else.

As a very strong Macintosh supporter I am looking into providing these statistics on our website at www.electricimage.com in the near future. I would like to use a project that really pushes the system for a few hours to get a truly realistic test.


I believe that we are on the brink of something big from Apple. My gut feeling and from the hush-hush attitude in SF I believe we will see big things soon.

I hope you all find this useful.

Brad Parscale
VP Sales & Marketing
Electric Image

...of how much we need DDR, here's a hypothetical example (with a single 1GHz G4):
1 billion cycles/second
3 instructions/cycle
1 64 bit instruction (DP floating point) and 2 32 bit ones. 128 bits/cycle total.
128/8 = 16 bytes.
16 bytes * 1,000,000,000 cycles/second = 16 billion bytes/second (about 1.56GB/sec).
so a 1GHz G4+ without Altivec can use 1.56GB/sec of memory bandwidth, PC133 ram can provide about 1.05GB/sec. A dual G4+ could use 3.12GB/sec. With Altivec it can use a LOT more.

 

[nuckinfutz]

U Failed to see my point

Originally posted by thies
Apples marketing is urging people to "switch". Those people won't give a rats ass about standards and most likely won't even know what "OpenGL" is. All they will see is that they could get a in MHz measured faster PC for a lesser price and if they try a Mac in a store it will also feel slower than a PC standing next to it.

This doesn't make sense. The "Switchers" in many cases have already decided that it's the frustrations with the OS that they can't handle. They know the megahertz are there.

People will give a "rats ass" about any feature that you can demonstrate as being a benfit to them.

Think about this now. Microsoft's advantage is what? Proprietary software.

• Office
• DirectX
• Visual Basic

They use this Tech to club competitors. What's the one thing Mac users are afraid of losing....Office.

Look at what Apple is doing. They are supporting Open Standards because they realize that while Microsoft can support them as well....Open Standards do not give Microsoft the leverage they need. Effectively leveling the playfield. That's why they scrapped Java.

Megahertz matters but in the end people just want things to work. A 10gigahertz computers won't help buggy software run right.

Okay, I was referring to the things that regular consumers consider standard. Mom and Dad looking for a family computer most likely cannot identify one of the things on your little list. Consumers look at mhz and price. And who has the most freebies thrown in. Try not throwing the word "idiot" around. It makes you sound like one.

I wasn't specifically talking about you or your statements. Many people seem to have this misconception that Apple is closed...sure they don't have clones but as far as Hardware and Software they're as open today as they can be for the size of their market. As far as what consumers look for I have enough experience with that selling both Macs and PC's. Consumers aren't fanatics like some of us...they have some misconceptions you just have to find out what is best for them. Sometimes Megahertz is it....some would be best off with a stronger focus on ease of use. Idiot? Not me....i'm a little arrogant but no idiot.

Macs are slower while being more expensive from whatever angle you want to look at it. The above benchmarks surely don't take a lot of things into account, but the gap is too big to be argued away by that

Yes indeed. Not worth it currently to argue about speed. PCs have the advantage right now. Apple simply needs to stay close. I expect OS X to remain in the lead Tech wise...Apple needs to shore up the Hardware. Luckily it's easier to upgrade Hardware than it is Software.

 

[iPat]

I was kidding when I asked in another thread if someone had Quake III benchmark results from an Xserve with the optional ATI card, but has anyone, just messing around before using it as a server, taken a look at how well it performs on desktop applications (suddenly this idea didn't sound all that stupid)? If someone did a few informal tests commonly done in benchmarking and assessing desktop Macs, couldn't we see the effects of DDR and ATA-100 on desktop apps? I see those other benchamrk results and they look great but it doesn't mean all that much to me in terms of how fast a DP 1Ghz would be with DDR in everyday use. Don't know if it's even possible but would be interesting to get a sense (right now) if DDR and ATA-100 is going to make that much of a difference?? Just thought that some magazine or website would have put together something by now using the Xserve like a workstation and testing it's performance as a workstation.

 

[nuckinfutz]

DDR I think is much more important

Only ATA drives in a RAID can saturate even ATA 66 so moving up to even ATA 133 wouldn't be likely to increase benchmarks.

However DDR is always important. Every time the Processor fails to get a Cache Hit it must go to main memory to get that data. Larger Level 2 and 3 caches help but the ideal thing is to get that piece of data to the processor ASAP so that it can resume processing. Therefore DDR would theoretically halve the time the processor would wait for data fetched from main memory. I'm no expert and if anyone else wants to chime in and clean up my slop please do so

 

[alex_ant]

Originally posted by nuckinfutz
That guys an idiot.

Eugenia Loli-Queru is actually not a guy.

Altivec is a SIMD unit just like SSE2 on the P4 or 3Dnow on AMD. OSX has Altivec optimizations within the os and it doesn't affect the development of processors as much as some guessed.

What do you mean by this?

As for tiny marketshare Altivec is not that hard to code for and if developers don't think it's worth the time then should we really be using their apps. Lazy developers get on my nerves.

Why should developers spend precious time re-tooling large amounts of their code so that it will run optimally on a platform used by 3.5% of the desktop market when they can write the same code in a manner that is both portable and platform-independent and have it run wicked-fast on what 95%+ of the mainstream desktop computing market uses? It should be obvious why developers don't tend to spend lots of time with AltiVec. Blaming developers is unfair - this is Apple's problem. Where is their auto-vectorizing compiler? Why did they choose to adopt a CPU whose maximum potential could only be harnessed by painstaking developer effort, and isn't even suitable for some tasks WITH painstaking developer effort (because AltiVec only supports single-precision FP)? All other CPUs get by fine with their solid compilers compiling platform-independent code - why should Apple's CPUs be any exception?

Alex