G5 Altivec Carbon Fractal Benchmark

[PaisanoMan]

Re: Re: Re: Translation from single to dual results

Originally posted by neutrino23
As I recall, from the bench marks released by IBM the 970 was expected to be 2 to 3 times faster than a G4 for some tasks (FP?), not orders of magnitudes...

Yeah, and even that's pretty impressive on paper (clock-for-clock). I think the expected "order of magnitude" came from the snowballing hype in these forums surrounding the new chips.

I think the most significant upgrades in the new PowerMac are ... everything. Apple's introduced a completely new foundation for their PowerMac line (not sure how the PCI-only variant fares), which should yield improved performance in every category -- disk (slightly faster with SATA), memory (both capacity and speed), CPU, I/O (depending on their super-south bridge).

I'm not surprised that the G5 "scales linearly" in CPU-level tasks ... but I think it's okay, since we probably would never have seen a 2.0 GHz G4 to test it against.

 

[fred]

Re: Re: Re: Re: Translation from single to dual results

Originally posted by PaisanoMan
Yeah, and even that's pretty impressive on paper (clock-for-clock).

Impressive compared to what ??? Given the fact Apple's so far behind in the clock speed war, yeah it's impressive...overall a linear scaling is quite disappointing given they're only at 2 Gigaherz and charge a hefty premium for their machines.... Let's hope that real world performance makes up for things...and by all indications that seems to be the case as the overall architecture seems to kick serious butt what with the impressive bus and memory bandwidth these machines display ...


I'm not surprised that the G5 "scales linearly" in CPU-level tasks ... but I think it's okay, since we probably would never have seen a 2.0 GHz G4 to test it against.

Not so sure....Motorola has a 2 Gig chip scheduled to come out which consumes very little power

 

[ffakr]

one point that I haven't seen mentioned yet. At the keynote, Adobe said that photoshop will be optimised for the 970 later this year.

The performance shown so far has been VERY impressive. The machines are running 10.2.7 which is essentially a hack to get them running for the show.

Apple is still optimising their dev tools for the G5, they don't have an OS that is optimised for it yet.. and the apps they've been demoing aren't optimised for the new architecture. The performance stats will only go up from this point.

Personally I haven't had a chance to benchmark the G5 yet, but I have played with one. They have a pretty bland out of the box software install on them so I didn't get to push it too much. My observations:
* it has a long pause before booting (screen black)... possibly 5 seconds.
* it spins the curson on the gray screen for a long time as if fsck'in the disk. Not sure why. This was about 10 seconds.
* when the blue OS boot screen comes up, it loads the system and all deamons in about TWO TO THREE seconds. It's startlingly fast.
* finder loads in under two seconds.
* traditionally slow loading apps like iPhoto and iMovie load in one Dock bounce.

I was unable to find any way to slow the machine down. Unfortunatly they didn't have anything interesting on the box I played on... no sample iMovie projects, no Mathematica...
The machine I was on was not hard wired to the network and that room was not getting wireless reception (another thing I noticed, changes to the Airport were instantaneous, much unlike my ibook which pauses)

The boxes are obviously pre-production demo models. Some had issues where the fans were not behaving as they should (spinning up for no reason...)
My machine went to sleep before I sat down at it and wouldn't wake up.. It needed to be power cycled.

Again, everyone needs to remember that these demos and benchmarks are done with tools compiled with compilers that don't know anything about the G5. Other tests are running on a Kludge of an OS... and it's all being done on demo hardware.

You'll have to trust me. The G5 is VERY fast, but we won't know just how fast for another month.
You won't be disappointed.

 

[illumin8]

Originally posted by ffakr
Some had issues where the fans were not behaving as they should (spinning up for no reason...)

I think this is due to the way they are controlling the fans to keep noise levels down. I work on Sun servers, and on our higher end servers, this is exactly what we do.

Basically, it works like this:

1. When the box is first powered on, the fans come on at maximum speed to ensure that nothing will overheat.

2. Once the OS is loaded, it starts an "environment monitoring daemon" that monitors temperatures of key components and adjusts the fan speed appropriately. (this is very scary the first time it happens, because it sounds like the fans just shut off, but actually they are just slowing down to a better level)

3. If the environment daemon crashes or stops running for some reason, the fans all spin back up to maximum speed just to make sure that nothing overheats. This is a failsafe method to make sure nothing will burn up.

I'm 99% sure this is how Apple is managing the heat on these boxes while making sure that everything stays quiet.

Another thing to consider with this is that variable speed fans tend to wear out a lot quicker than fixed speed fans because the speed is always changing. I would HIGHLY RECOMMEND purchasing Applecare if you buy one of these G5s because with 9 fans I'm sure you'll have at least 1 or 2 fan failures by the time you've had the box for 3 years or so. Hopefully the environment monitoring daemon will notify you of a fan failure and shut down the box if necessary. Most likely, the other fans will spin up to full speed if a failure occurs and keep the box running cool.

 

[newfeet]

I agree that many of these benchmarks are not optimized for the G5 (or for 64 bit) and are also being run on a 32-bit operating system 10.2. Until both the benchmarks and the operating system is optimized, the results can't be trusted completely.

What does anyone care what the benchmarks say, anyway, when the real-world tests (Mathematica, Photoshop, etc) are what matter. Who makes money rendering fractals? Personally, I'm not disapointed in the least at these speed results.

 

[luiss]

Bandwidth

Remember that the G5 system's greatest advantage is it's bandwidth. These tests are pure CPU intensive.

 

[SuzanneA]

Originally posted by illumin8
I think this is due to the way they are controlling the fans to keep noise levels down. I work on Sun servers, and on our higher end servers, this is exactly what we do.

Basically, it works like this:

1. When the box is first powered on, the fans come on at maximum speed to ensure that nothing will overheat.

2. Once the OS is loaded, it starts an "environment monitoring daemon" that monitors temperatures of key components and adjusts the fan speed appropriately. (this is very scary the first time it happens, because it sounds like the fans just shut off, but actually they are just slowing down to a better level)

...

Oddly enough, this is exactly how my MDD dual G4 seems to work. When I power on the fans are running full speed, and LOUD. About 1/4 of the way into the boot, they sound as if they just stop, when in fact they are just slowed down. If I do something REALLY intensive (which is surprisingly hard to do, but divx encoding can do it) they start to become a bit more noisy again.

I have never, however, gotten them back to the inital boot level.