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Quad 3GHz Mac Pro vs Quad 2.5GHz PowerMac

ezekielrage_99 said:
This is a very dumb question but is Photoshop running under rosetta in this test?

If Photoshop is that is nuts.
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Yes...Photoshop can only run under Rosetta on the Intel machines...there's no universal version of it.
 
Lots of stuff on Anandtech about the poor memory performance on the Intel chipset.

Looks like the Xeons got killed by the G5 in Word in their tests.
Might be an interesting machine when/if the motherboard chipset/ memory performance issue is looked in to.

I think part 3 of their review will be telling, paring the machine up to XP machines in a variety of tests.
 
bretm said:
You're right. I'm extremely unimpressed that the fastest xeon only days old is actually slower mhz for mhz than a G5 that is pushing 4 year old technology. Really sad.

However it's bizarre that AE was actually faster under rosetta. I gotta think these tests were'nt very accurrate.
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Don't forget that these aps were recently ported to the Intel platform. we may see optimizations and speed improvements over time. Also, they only ran one test in FCP, they should have run many more.
 
CompUSA just got the Mac Pros in and we downloaded Quake 4 and ran it at the highest settings on the 30" ACD. Runs beautifully.
 
WildCowboy said:
Yes...Photoshop can only run under Rosetta on the Intel machines...there's no universal version of it.
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It was just the performance was dam quick I just wasn't sure if there was an Intel version out or not, either way that is killer performance.
 
I AM SOOOO HAPPY I ORDERED THIS MACHINE!!! Ordered it yesterday, custom with 2gb RAM, got shipping confirmation today, I'll have it tomorrow!!! If its ALMOST as fast as a quad G5, it will be MUCH faster than my Rev A dual 2.0 G5....
 
ezekielrage_99 said:
It was just the performance was dam quick I just wasn't sure if there was an Intel version out or not, either way that is killer performance.
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Absolutely...that's what's so impressive about the results for some of these non-universal apps. Just wait until the universal CS3 is available...the Mac Pro will destroy the Quad G5.
 
WildCowboy said:
A lot of folks are waiting for game benchmarks...bring 'em on!
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Yeah put up some World of Warcraft or Doom 3 results, that's what this is all about a Mac being the fastest gaming machine 😎
 
WildCowboy said:
A lot of folks are waiting for game benchmarks...bring 'em on!
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Does anyone seriously believe games today will show any significant improvement on a Mac Pro?

1. The video cards are underclocked compared to their PC equivalents on the Mac.
2. Generally, you are limited to a framerate of 60Hz anyway.
3. Most games are old ports, and need to run thru Rosetta.

When playing a game on a PC, you have DirectX to take full advantage of the hardware, and your processor is usually tagged consuming any and all cycles it can for the game. On a Mac, multithreading, and sharing the processor among apps seems to be the flow of the computing experience.

I'd predict a single Core2 Duo Extreme would still outdo a dual processor 3.0 Ghz Xeon Mac Pro when memory timings are nearly half of the Xeon on the Core2.
 
bretm said:
But it's not faster. Slower actually than the G5 at some apps. What's everyone looking at anyway? I'm pretty unimpressed. Other than Adobe's usage of cache (AE is a cache lover and will use all of it, hence the faster performance).

But the actual xeon processors are only as fast as the G5 processors. Look at the average specs... the 2.66 machines are only a teeny bit faster than the G5s except in a few apps like filemaker. But not in the biggies like Final Cut Pro where it actually appears that mhz for mhz the G5 is a faster machine hands down!
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I guess one extra thing to consider if you're taking that point of view is that the Quad 2.5GHz G5 costs US $3299 with 512MB RAM, and the Quad 2.66GHz MacPro only costs US $2499 with 1GB RAM, plus a superior case design. Even if the MacPro is only the same speed as the Quad G5, it's substantially cheaper.

And that can't be a bad thing.
 
ChrisA said:
I think movie editing depends a lot on the speed of the disk subsystem. After all Mini DV is 12GB per hour. That's a of data. When yo "scrub" a shot all that data has to move off the disk and onto the video card. Even with 16MB of RAM not much of the video data can be help in RAM. So the G5 and Intel machine have disks that are about the same speed. Speed of a disk is measured by how fast the bit fly under the read/write head not the interface speed. So I am not surprized the Intel Mac Pro is not hugly faster for video.
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Mini DV is 3,600,000 bytes per second. That is nothing. That is just slightly above what a wireless network will do.
 
jicon said:
1. The video cards are underclocked compared to their PC equivalents on the Mac.
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Could you give some evidence for that, except that they are underclocked on the MacBook Pro _when they are idle_?
 
jicon said:
Lots of stuff on Anandtech about the poor memory performance on the Intel chipset.

Looks like the Xeons got killed by the G5 in Word in their tests.
Might be an interesting machine when/if the motherboard chipset/ memory performance issue is looked in to.

I think part 3 of their review will be telling, paring the machine up to XP machines in a variety of tests.
Click to expand...

Anandtech has one big omission: They didn't look at the CPU usage at all. Word doesn't use more than one CPU. And may I say it is damned hard to do anything in Word where CPU usage is of any concern; how often do you export a thousand page Word document to HTML?

These machines can do many things simultaneously. So what would have happened if you were converting a DVD using Handbrake in the background while doing the Word test? On the dual core G5, one CPU would have been used by Word, so Handbrake slows down by 50%. On the Quad core Xeon, one core would have been used by Word, so Handbrake slows down only by 25%.
 
jicon said:
Lots of stuff on Anandtech about the poor memory performance on the Intel chipset./QUOTE]

FB Dimms are not designed to give maximum bandwidth to one chip, they are designed to give maximum bandwidth to _four_ cores. Instead of having _one_ program running to test memory bandwidth, they should have started four copies of it and see what happens. That is what you have doubled front side bus, buffered memory and two separate memory units for. The biggest criticism in the past against Intel multi-CPU systems was that the memory bandwidth didn't scale; in the Mac Pro, it does.
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bretm said:
But it's not faster. Slower actually than the G5 at some apps. What's everyone looking at anyway? I'm pretty unimpressed. Other than Adobe's usage of cache (AE is a cache lover and will use all of it, hence the faster performance).

But the actual xeon processors are only as fast as the G5 processors. Look at the average specs... the 2.66 machines are only a teeny bit faster than the G5s except in a few apps like filemaker. But not in the biggies like Final Cut Pro where it actually appears that mhz for mhz the G5 is a faster machine hands down!
Click to expand...

There were handful of benchmarks. If we disregard the non-universal apps, we get this:

Xeon is a lot faster in iMovie
In FCP it's a bit faster
in FileMaker it's A LOT faster
in Cinebench it's considerably faster

Are those really such a bad results? The apps that it was slower in (but not by much) were running through emulation, is that a fair comparison?

Looking at the other reviews around the net, it becomes quite obvious that apart from few apps, Mac Pro is considerably faster tham PowerMac. In compiling for example, it walks all over the G5
 
It's frustrating to see all the work that anandtech went through to make the benchmarks, for such a ****** comparison they decided to do in the first place.

They are comparing a 2 generations old G5 (Dual 2,5) versus a new Intel (Quad 2,6) which is not even the fastest out there. What kind of comparison is that? If the new Intels you are comparing against are all Quad based, the only reasonable G5 to compare against is the fastest one out there, the Quad G5 @2,5, because it is the fastest, and because it is even at core count. And they do not even mention it exists. And since you take the trouble to do so, compare fastest G5 against fastes Intel, gosh.

They could as well have compared any Mac Pro against an iMac DV…
 
Yes! But what about we musicians?

It's odd, seeing as Mac's are still the choice for many musicians that some kind of specs are never given that would be of interest to musicians. The released figures don't do much for me. I'd like to know the polyphony improvements say for Kontakt under both systems in Digital Performer 5. Other than, of course you can't because Mac have pulled the rugs out from the software developers feet again. Hence, the software doesn't exist yet. Anyway, the Intel should beat the G5. The Quad G5 is a year old and at the time of it's release it was considered disappointing because we'd had a 2.7 processor released 6 months before that ... so I think the expectation (And SJ promise) was for a Quad 3.0. Quad 2.5 was almost like a step back. Aren't these the results, more or less, that SJ promised 2 years ago? Only he's had to F about with our work flow yet again? Yeah great! In 18 months when everything has settled down and been revised a few times and the software has undergone some adjustments we'll all be coasting along and BAM .. Apple are switching again back to Freescale who are now world leaders. "The Freescale roadmap" say Steve Jobs " is very exciting...."
 
jicon said:
Does anyone seriously believe games today will show any significant improvement on a Mac Pro?

1. The video cards are underclocked compared to their PC equivalents on the Mac.
2. Generally, you are limited to a framerate of 60Hz anyway.
3. Most games are old ports, and need to run thru Rosetta.

When playing a game on a PC, you have DirectX to take full advantage of the hardware, and your processor is usually tagged consuming any and all cycles it can for the game. On a Mac, multithreading, and sharing the processor among apps seems to be the flow of the computing experience.

I'd predict a single Core2 Duo Extreme would still outdo a dual processor 3.0 Ghz Xeon Mac Pro when memory timings are nearly half of the Xeon on the Core2.
Click to expand...


Bootcamp???
 
gnasher729 said:
Could you give some evidence for that, except that they are underclocked on the MacBook Pro _when they are idle_?
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And the Macbook... Nearly 50% underclocked, like the 950 was so amazing that it could be crippled by half of its mindblowing performance...
 
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