Quicksilver Benchmarks, etc.

[MacRumors]

xlr8yourmac.com has posted a few benchmarks sent in by users of both a G4 733 and 867. Not in-depth and extensive, but an interesting quick look. In short--the missing L3 cache on the 733 does not seem to hit its performance too significantly (vs. the "old" G4 733 w/ 1MB L3). An interesting snippit about the L3's on the 867 and dual-800 is...

...note as mentioned here before - the L3 cache is DDR, so the effective rate is 1/2 the CPU speed, not 1/4. I suspect the removal of the L3 cache on the new 733 is just a cost cutting measure...
I remember reading that they did away with a lot of chips in the new board related to the bus in an effort to reduce latencys, etc. in a interview done with one of the Apple higher ups at MWNY.
The DDR L3 cache may come as news to some. (DDR provides its namesake "double data rate" by allowing memory access on both the leading and trailing edge of the clock.) This mention of an optimized board design goes against recent news that the optimizations mentioned here yesterday were also present on the "old" G4 733.

 

[blakespot]

Confirm?

Does anyone have any solid data confirming that the new Quicksilver motherboards are indeed enhanced beyon the "old" G4 733's motherboard?


blakespot

 

[what]

so does this mean that the new 867 and dual 800's have a faster L3 cache then the old 733?

 

[blakespot]

Yes. The "old" G4 733 has a 244MHz L3 cache (1/3 CPU speed), so assuming the DDR info above is correct, the G4 867 has effectively a 433MHz cache and the dual-800 has a 400MHz effective cache.


blakespot

 

[prewwii]

G4 vs P4 using Filemaker

When I have run other than graphic software then the Px processor begins to sprout legs.

From what I have read the G4 has the edge in floating point while the Px series has the edge in integer because the G4 has more floating point processors and the Px has more integer processors.

That really shows up in Filemaker database operations. According to some of my "testing" with similiar clock rate boxes from HP and Apple. The Mac got it's lunch handed to it. The P3 I used was 3x faster running Filemaker 4.x and 5.x. In the strange department FMP 4 was faster than FMP 5.

My point in graphics or other software where the Altivec processor is used the G4 smokes. The G4 chokes on a heavy diet of integers compared to a P3.

 

[Kela]

the time has come

People, I think it is isnt processor speed which should be compared. I can assure all of you that a dual 800 MHZ QUIKsilver powermac eats the latest Pentium 4 processor for breakfast. Simply because of the other attributes, i.e bus speed, altivec capability and others. Basically the macintosh, as it is known to pc users, is superior in more ways. However having said that, PCs may indeed benefit from better integer processing so they are good for filemaker.

Ciao Max

PS. COREL BRYCE 5 is OUT!!!!!!!!!

 

[Chuck]

Dual pentium

One Pentium 4 may be slower than dual 800 mhz PowerPC chips, but to be fair you need to compare the dual 800 mhz to a dual 1.8 ghz pentium system. Plus, the Pentium 4 runs at the same bus speed, and uses rambus memory.

 

[blakespot]

There are no dual P4 systems. And no 1.8GHz single P4 systems are available at this moment. The memory buses are not the same speed--the Mac has a 133MHz memory bus while the P4 has a 400MHz RDRAM memory bus. Worth noting is the fact that while, in the PC world, the P4's memory is consistently about twice the speed of the Athlon 1.4's in benchmarks, the Athlon 1.4 system is the faster system.


blakespot

 

[ChrisWright]

URL is wrong

The link on the page on xlr8yourmac.com is wrong. The correct URL is:

http://www.xlr8yourmac.com/systems/quicksilver_benchmarks.html#storytop

 

[mymemory]

Process or not process...

I've been working with Macs since I have concience (my first computer was a holly Atari 520st). Actually I own a G4 400 AGP with 320Ram and the live of the computer is ram, lots of it. Actually computers are fast enough for lots of softwares, better yet, it is the first time that computers are going faster than the aplications requiremts.. except for 2D and 3D animation softwares and spacially in Macs where the 3D animation field is so overated.
Dual 800Mhz macs are not going to satisfy me for too long. If I'm going to jump from my G4 Apple wiil have to show me the money, 4 processors (in my dreams) or at list 2 x 1.2 Ghz but now, not in one year when the aplications are gonna eat that power.

But on the other hand... how far the actual aplications can go? What else can you add to Photosho that is turning to web design?... More of the same.

 

[chuck]

Blakespot, there are dual Pentium 4 systems they just don't sell them in retail stores because Windows ME doesn't support dual processors. You can custom config one or build your own. Test it against a dual celeron or dual athlon. You will get the same result, the PC is faster. Plus, the dual 800 mhz quicksilver is not out either. I'm not trying to say the mac is bad, but it will never be faster than a PC, but thats not why people buy them.

 

[blakespot]

Dual P4's

I'll take your word on the dual P4 motherboards. I've seen recently Tyan's come out w/ the dual Athlon motherboard (tho it wants Palomino's rather than T-birds). $550 for the board sans CPU's.

I agree, in general, PC's are faster. They have a better memory architecture, more efficient bus bridge hardware, etc. But...for some reason the "clean" aspect of the Unix based Mac is appealing to me. Apple makes the hardware. Apple makes the dual-processor aware SMP OS. It seems that things are in place to run in a very fine-tuned fashion. In the PC world, there's all kinds of boardmakers using all kinds of chipsets and then theres lots of other hardware thrown in, and there's a number of Windows OS's that will do multiprocessing, and you hope it all works out.

Unix based Macs feel much more like Suns than PC's from a hardware perspective. I quite like that.


blakespot

 

[prewwii]

Dual Pentium's

I did have the occassion to test a dual 500mhz HP box against a 500mhz single processor also HP. We used LabView for this test running on Windows NT in both cases. The results were less than expect, the dual processor was 4% faster.

I think there is more than just hooking up two processors and right now Apple seems to have a solution in their OS X that takes more advantage of the additional processors than the folks at Darkside Inc.

I have never seen any published results of multiprocessor testing so I am guessing that there isn't much to brag about or the marketing types would be flogging that hardware. Even Apple has been pretty guiet on the subject of dual processors. Apple seems to trot a new dual processor out whenever they need a faster box and Motorola is still sleeping at the drawing board. When Motorola gets more performance then the dual processor box is discontinued in favor of the finally quicker single processor.

The darkside is even quieter.....

 

[ChrisWright]

Multi-processors vs. single processor

Applications need to be optimised for multi-processing to produce significant speed gains on multiple processors. If they're not multi-threaded enough (or not at all) then the OS can't share the load between the processors effectively.

However, if you were running two (or more) applications on a multi-processor machine, the OS would schedule one to each processor. This would therefore give a significant increase in speed within the applications compared to a single-processor system.

There's a lot more to multi-processing than that, but I'm just trying to make the point that you can't expect miracle increases in speed with every application.

 

[Xistor]

Dual vs Single, P4 vs G4...

Remember the MacWorld keynote ? The P4 was put up against an 867, NOT a dual 800.. and the G4 still toasted the P4 by 100% faster on the MPEG video encoding.

Now, I realize in some areas, the PC is faster, but they aren't things that are significant to the majority of professional users of Macs, which sides heavily in graphics aps.. Graphics aps will always do better under current hardware on the Mac because of the AltiVec and the shorter pipeline stages in the G4. The P4 goes faster on repetitive meanial things like spell checking and directory sorting because the clockspeed is higher and when tasks are repetitive, the changes of pipeline clearing which bogs it down in video aps is lessened. . But like I said before, G4 has a superior edge for the complexity of graphics aps, and that's why the graphics professionals who have always used Macs will continue to covet Macs, not PCs, because clearly in this area, P4s totally lag, GHz or not.

 

[Luckster]

Most modern chips use what is termed as speculative processing to reduce downtime. When the P4 makes an accurate guess, the long pipeline does not matter, it is simply fast. However, if their is no data to be processed a bubble forms. If the speculation is wrong, all that work must be discarded, the channel cleared, and new data fetched. This make take upwards of 50 cycles! However, if a G4 makes a mistake, it costs about a quarter of that. Therefore, repetative tasks such as spell checking probably do go faster on a P4.

The Altivec superscalar unit allows for faster floating point calculations. The G4 is faster in floating point and P4 is faster in integer calculations, so I am told. Therefore, graphics and other tasks which rely upon floating point calcs will go faster where as business software, mainly integer calculations won't be able to use the Altivec as well and thus, the P4 probably faster.
- Anderw

 

[ChrisWright]

I'm waiting for the G5

I was thinking about replacing my G3/300 with a new G4/733. However, having done some research (mostly on rumours sites I'd add swiftly) it seems that it shouldn't be long before the G5 is launched. Some reports were suggesting it could be as soon as January 2002 (Macworld SF). This would also seem like a good time for Apple to introduce DDR memory, 8x AGP, ATA-100 and various other logic board improvements. So I think my G3 will have to soldier on until then.

The first Power Mac G4 was released in September 1999, so the G4 processor is not exactly new. Its design isn't as advanced as the AMD Athlon (or even the Pentium 4 in some respects). The latest Athlon processors absolutely crush even the latest 867MHz G4 in comparable benchmark tests (such as Dhrystone and Whetstone).

However, the G5 is rumoured to be 4-5 times faster per clock cycle than the G4. It's a 64-bit processor with a vastly more advanced architecture than the G4. I would hope Apple is currently working as hard as it can on G5 development for as early a release as possible.

I must stress again that all of this is speculation and rumour, but it all seems like the only way Apple can close the performance gap sometime soon. If they can't, they're not going to survive.

 

[Luckster]

G5

You might be waiting for a while. Although the term "G4" has been around for a while, the actual chips 74xx series are different. It is analogous to the 68k series (and that lasted a while). Apple uses the 7400, 7410, and 7450. However, other 74xx processors, such as the 7440, have been made. While I agree that there are some simply incredible chips being designed (Motorola holds some patents for a new type of eching technology which will allow for smaller and faster processors than ever believed possible), the G4 has had serious production problems which were just recently resolved. Production may limit a more advanced design.

 

[odie]

hey guys, sorry to bust up the little conversation but i was just wondering where a motherboard capable of holding 2 pentium 4's can be found. it's disgusting the price drops that intel has done lately, P4's cost less than P3's. i intend on building a 3.2Ghz computer but i need the appropriate motherboard. i'd appreciate the help guys...

 

[snowman]

Tsss... Macs have been faster than PeeCees for so many years! It's just recently that the PeeCees have run past the mac. Back in -97 -98 the mac was far faster, but after that the progress in the mac development stalled quite a bit and the PeeCee processors started taking giant leaps. I remember back in the days of Doom and Duke when I could play those games on the DOUBLE resolution than the PeeCee and get the same fps, and that was without a 3D-accelerator. Of course those games back then depended strongly on the VRAM built in on the motherboard and luckily Apple were kind enough to pack with 4 MB of VRAM!! It doesn't take that much of a miracle from motorola and IBM to run past the PeeCee as they've done it before.

Originally posted by chuck
Blakespot, I'm not trying to say the mac is bad, but it will never be faster than a PC, but thats not why people buy them.

 

[snowman]

Re: Multi-processors vs. single processor

You might all think that it's such a jolly easy thing to make a game multi-threaded. IMO if you make a game for example you might not want the paint-function to be called before a thread have calculated all it's statements. The only thing which is easy here is to make the paint-function and a sound-function run in different threads. This however takes much load from the main processor if you have high quality sounds, but far from doubles the speed.

 

[spikey]

Yeah, those were the days eh snowman. When macs where either beige or black and kicked arse. and to some extent they still do.
Although i did only get a mac when the performa 450 came out. otherwise i used old BBC micro and zx spectrum for fun.
I do believe apple was first to 300 Mhz aswell, although my memory is not too good.
The trouble which mac will always have is marketing, cos even when they were on top of hardware they just werent selling as good as their microsoft/pc competitors. I remember a simpsons scene when bart asked who apple computers were after homer mentioned it.
I have no idea what the relevance of this post is so plz dont ask.

 

[Kela]

i concur

I must admit as I stated in some post a while ago, those beige or black macs were pure and awesome. Something about them had class. I mean, today they are ofcourse superior. BUT if someone offered me a G4 with todays configuration but an old beige hull, no prob. I would choose it over the new hi-tek one anyday.

 

[Capt Crunch]

Re: i concur

Originally posted by Kela
I must admit as I stated in some post a while ago, those beige or black macs were pure and awesome. Something about them had class. I mean, today they are ofcourse superior. BUT if someone offered me a G4 with todays configuration but an old beige hull, no prob. I would choose it over the new hi-tek one anyday.

Bah. With my funkadelic cinema display, dual 800 and iSticks I always get the envy factor. The style of the computer is so awsome that my friends just break down and cry. Then I give them a nickle and tell them to buy a better computer.

I like the styling, to me it also has a professional look.

 

[MrMacMan]

So.

A Quad 1.5 is a year wouldn't be so bad would it?
The 1.5 g5 is coming!!