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AMD Businesses Hardware Apple

G5 vs Opteron, Finally 650

Posted by timothy from the gracies-v-japan dept.
metfoo writes "It's been months since the G5 and Opterons have been available for purchase. When the G5 systems were first released, many Mac bashers and AMD nuts discredited the G5's performance. They always ended their comments with 'Wait until its compared to an Opteron, then we'll talk.' Well, it's finally time to talk. Barefeats has posted an article comparing the two systems. The G5 line was compared to a Dual 2GHz Opteron and the results are impressive. In gaming, the Opteron system proved to be superior, which is partly due to the superior 9800XT over the base Radeon 9800. The G5 spanks the Opteron in many of the non-gaming tests, except for the Photoshop tests."
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G5 vs Opteron, Finally More

G5 vs Opteron, Finally

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  • Except (Score:3, Insightful)

    by andrewl6097 ( 633663 ) * on Sunday December 28, 2003 @12:46AM (#7820233)
    That since they are running the Opteron in 32-bit mode, it's not taking advantage of it's full potential. Guess we'll wait until "round 2" like he says, but it still looks bad that he kind of dodges this. If it were me I'd be running the benchmarks on 64-bit linux versus 64-bit linux.(gentoo?)

    • Re:Except (Score:5, Informative)

      by DiscoOnTheSide ( 544139 ) <ajfili&eden,rutgers,edu> on Sunday December 28, 2003 @12:48AM (#7820240) Homepage
      same could be said for the G5, as OS X is not fully 64-bit yet, and neither are many of the programs (with the exception of a few high-level apps, like Photoshop, etc)

      • Re:Except (Score:5, Insightful)

        by andrewl6097 ( 633663 ) * on Sunday December 28, 2003 @12:51AM (#7820251)
        I'm sorry, but doesn't everyone know by now that the opteron is tangibly faster in x86-64 mode due to a doubling of GPRs in a register-starved ISA? Besides, I suggested running 64-bit linux on both, just to be supremely fair, but I think that it wouldn't be much different from 64-bit amd64 and 32-bit darwin.

        • Re:Except (Score:3, Informative)

          by mattjb0010 ( 724744 )
          I suggested running 64-bit linux on both, just to be supremely fair, but I think that it wouldn't be much different from 64-bit amd64 and 32-bit darwin.

          It should be noted that 32-bit darwin runs 64 bit apps just fine (and fast! :)

          • Re:Except (Score:3, Interesting)

            by andrewl6097 ( 633663 ) *
            I'm geniunely curious - how? A 64-bit application can't do much without 64-bit system calls. Does mach-o let you dynamically load 64-bit code in a 32-bit program (all the 64-bit code would be able to do is computation, given the lack of system calls). Or is there a windows64-on-windows-like 64-bit wrapper over libc?

            • Re:Except (Score:3, Informative)

              by mattjb0010 ( 724744 )
              More here [apple.com]. I suspect that Apple's developer pages have more info on the trickery.

              • Re:Except (Score:4, Interesting)

                by be-fan ( 61476 ) on Sunday December 28, 2003 @02:21AM (#7820568)
                That page doesn't explain anything. The real question is whether you can pass 64-bit pointers to system calls. Like, can I do a write() from a memory buffer that's above the 4GB limit? Otherwise, its more of a Windows NT PAE-type hack rather than actual support for 64-bit apps.

      • Re:Except (Score:3, Funny)

        by shaka999 ( 335100 )
        So you both agree, its a bogus comparison. Good.

        • Re:Except (Score:2, Informative)

          by Anonymous Coward
          No, I was stating that it WAS A good comparison. Two 64-bit processors (that are 32-bit compatible, natively) running 32-bit code (along with "optimized" code as I'm sure Adobe's optimized for both CPUs) aka a "test under real world conditions" because both were run with what is available today.
          • Yeah, that was sacrasm. I know what you were TRYING to say but it was bogus. If you want to compare CPUs run them in their optimized state. If you want to test platforms and OS's then thats a different story.

            As it stands, when 64 bit windows comes out (or if things were run 64 bit Linux) the results would have been different. If I bought an Athlon system today I would know (well maybe know) that in the near future I would be running much faster.

          • Re:Except (Score:3, Insightful)

            by CrowScape ( 659629 )
            Actually, it's not a good comparison. One AE test (Oh! It's NightFlight! So... um... what functions are being tested? At least provide a link [aefreemart.com] to the breakdown.) A fricken BRYCE 5 test. (I'm sorry, if you're doing something in Bryce that would tax a PIII you should look to Maya or 3D Studio Max. At least test something with the Maya personal learning edition.) Again, not so much as a snapshot of the image being generated. Oh, Photoshop 7 "Mp Actions" and "Non-MP" Actions. Gee, that's helpful. Again, what are

    • Re:Except (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 28, 2003 @12:51AM (#7820246)
      the g5 isn't running a 64-bit Mac OS X. it's still running the regular 32 bit version. so in essence, the G5s 32-bit emulation is better than the Opteron's 32-bit emulation. we'll have to wait and see how 64-bit compares with 64-bit a little longer.
    • What comments like this seem to miss is that the only benchmarks that matter are the application you are going to be using doing those tasks you are going to be performing.

      Absolute speed is largely irrelevant.

      So benching with Linux is all fine and good, but will that matter to most end users who are trying to decide between the two? Possibly, but simply because it wasn't used doesn't mean that the app isn't fair within its own context.

    • Re:Except (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Croaker ( 10633 ) on Sunday December 28, 2003 @01:00AM (#7820293)
      The thing is, are you sure that GCC is equally optimized for both platforms? If the support for code generation on the G5, say, is lackluster in GCC, your results won't reflect which processor is truely faster. Of course... does it really make a difference? Really, what you are worried about is real-world performance of these things, unless you are just into pissing contests for bragging rights (which, come to think of it, mose die-hard adherents to one or the other platform seem to be). For real-world, you'd just configure and tweak the systems the way you anticiptae they would be used. In most case,s you'd run OS X on the G5. For the Opteron... well, you'd either be running XP for desktop stuff (perhaps Linux in certain specific cases... such as some graphics workstations for software that has a Linux port) or maybe running Linux as a server.
      • I believe gcc is better optimized for the x86 series, although Apple is doing their best to improve things. The more interesting compiler for the G5 is XLC from IBM. However that is still in beta, although promising. Unfortunately I've heard it does what Intel's compiler does with certain benchmarks, making it difficult to compare completely. There was an extended discussion of this over on Ars Technica a couple of months ago.

    • Re:Except (Score:2, Informative)

      by ImTwoSlick ( 723185 )
      That since they are running the Opteron in 32-bit mode, it's not taking advantage of it's full potential. Guess we'll wait until "round 2" like he says, but it still looks bad that he kind of dodges this.

      Try reading the article. He addresses this, but I'll save you the time. OSX is not a 64-bit OS either, so neither really has any advantage there. Hopefully, in the next few months, each system will have a fully 64-bit OS, so we can really see some full speed comparisons.

    • Re:Except (Score:3, Insightful)

      by croddy ( 659025 )
      yep. I'm gonna wait for a meaningful benchmark. not OSX vs. Windows XP.

      sigh.

  • I wonder what the results would have been... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by jasonfncsu ( 735876 ) <jason@oldos.org> on Sunday December 28, 2003 @12:47AM (#7820234) Homepage
    If they would have used a linux platform instead of Windows...

  • Old Tests... one issue (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Rosyna ( 80334 ) on Sunday December 28, 2003 @12:47AM (#7820236) Homepage
    One main issue with the UT 2003 tests. It doesn't say if they are running UT 2k3 2225.1 or 2225. 2225.1 brings MASSIVE performance increases. From the notes:

    It's much, much faster. Several optimizations have been made, lots of Altivec code has been added, and the entire sound subsystem has been rewritten. Performance improvements of 25% or more over the original retail version are typical, with single CPU systems achieving a more noticible gain.

  • This may sound like flamebait or a troll... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by DwarfGoanna ( 447841 ) on Sunday December 28, 2003 @12:48AM (#7820239)
    But do people really care about this stuff? I mean for real, day to day, get my work done reasons? I still have a 500 mhz G4, and now that I've gotten a little older don't really *have to have* the latest and greatest just to piss my friends off, it seems just fine. I thought about upgrading, and then my next thought was...."why?"


    Am I just an exception?

    • Nah, if you don't play games or do compute intensive work (CAE/graphics), whats the point?
      • Nah, if you don't play games or do compute intensive work (CAE/graphics), whats the point?

        And honestly if you're using a Mac you're not a gamer anyway. Yea yea, I know, there are a whole 10 decent games for the Mac, but there are hundreds for Windows. If you're a gamer you run Windows, period. Personally I've always been of the "use the right tool for the right job" perspective. My gaming machine runs Windows, my laptop (iBook) runs MacOS X, and my servers and PVR run Linux. People need to stop bein

        • Re:This may sound like flamebait or a troll... (Score:5, Interesting)

          by grahams ( 5366 ) on Sunday December 28, 2003 @02:45AM (#7820636) Homepage
          Or: if you're a gamer, own a console. While we aren't quite at the point where all games are "better" and "first" on the console, that day seems to be growing closer. Game stores are stocking fewer and fewer PC games, and signs point to stores like Game Stop eliminating them completely.

          • Re:This may sound like flamebait or a troll... (Score:5, Insightful)

            by strider_starslayer ( 730294 ) on Sunday December 28, 2003 @03:35AM (#7820753)
            This is only partially true; CRPGs (Computer Role Playing Games) are generally far superior on the computer (Morrowind: need I say more?), as well as FPS (First person shooters) (Alien Vs Predator 2, Return to castle wolfenstien: Enemy Teritory), Adventure games (I can't think of a current one; monkey island?) and RTS (Real Time Stratagy)(Red Alert 2, warcraft 3, Kohan)- and there's a simple reason, the keyboard/mouse/very high def monitor are all but required to play these games and the ability to mod/upgrade these games is easily at least 1/2 the fun.
    • I'd have to agree. I have 3 machines in front of me: a 1700+ Athlon XP, 300 mhz PII and 366 PII laptop. I can do everything on the 366 (slackware) that I do on the Athlon (gentoo) sans Quake 3. I'd like some more ram in all 3 machines but honestly they're fine.

      Then again, a year ago my fast machine was a 366 Celeron, the server was a 80 Mhz sparcstation and my laptop at that time was a 133 Mhz P1. The 366 Celery is now being used by my dad, the laptop died and I had to sell the sparc.

      Just because some
    • Screw computers! I'm going to go ride a bike!
    • now that I've gotten a little older

      I think what you really mean is now that my parents don't buy my computer. ;-) I definitely agree though. I recently upgraded my 450MHz G3 to a PowerBook, but that was only because I wanted a laptop. The whole time, I felt sort of dirty, because my G3 is by no means a bad machine. It runs everything I do just fine. I just can't take it to work with me, like I can my PowerBook.

  • Mac vs. PC Flamewar in 5... 4... 3... 2... (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 28, 2003 @12:50AM (#7820244)
    I'll get you started:

    (a) Mac only has one mouse button
    (b) PC is like a Dodge Neon, Mac is like a BMW
    (c) Mac has no games
    (d) Windows XP: DRM
    (e) Linux has no games
    (f) X windows sucks
    (g) etc.

  • Price? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by BWJones ( 18351 ) on Sunday December 28, 2003 @12:51AM (#7820247) Homepage Journal
    O.K., hopefully this will put to bed all those folks who cry about Apple computers being so damned expensive. Feature for feature, the G5 is about $600 cheaper than the Opteron. I certainly found this out when I was pricing workstations from Dell and other Wintel manufacturers and the G5's from Apple. I went with a fully loaded G5 and the price delta was $1200 cheaper going with the G5. Plus, OS X is soooooo nice.

    • Re:Price? (Score:3, Insightful)

      by mattgreen ( 701203 )
      Who are you kidding?

      If people actually took the time to look up accurate information about what they bash they probably wouldn't have much to talk about in the first place. Just like how the Windows-bashers are quick to cite Win98 as a sucky OS, the Mac-bashers point to "huge" price differences when in reality they aren't that much more.

      People are only as open-minded as they want to be, and most people prefer the stronger arguments that used to hold true.

      • Re:Price? (Score:5, Insightful)

        by JK Master-Slave ( 727990 ) on Sunday December 28, 2003 @01:54AM (#7820503)
        The 'huge' price difference isn't really the main issue. The issue is being boxed into a single-vendor solution. I can buy x86 machines from hundreds of sources. I can mix-and-match components rather freely.

        Or I can hope Jobs hasn't discontinued the model of Mac that I had started to like. Apple proved they're not ready to be anything but a niche vendor when they got cold feet and killed their second source vendors (the Mac clone business)

        • Re:Price? (Score:3, Funny)

          by Anonymous Coward

          I agree: I hate how the G5 doesn't let me mix-and-match components freely. I mean, with the exception of the RAM, hard drives, optical drive, graphics card, PCI cards, and all external peripherals, I've got some serious vendor lock-in going on! What if I wanted to replace my motherboard with this electronic-looking thing I pulled out of my broken alarm clock, and my processors with these two turds my cat just left in the litter box? Will Steve Jobs let me do this? Absolutely not. Disgusting.

        • Re:Price? (Score:5, Insightful)

          by MKalus ( 72765 ) <mkalus.gmail@com> on Sunday December 28, 2003 @10:15AM (#7821519) Homepage
          A collegue has a five year old "Wallstreet" Powerbook. When Panther came out he installed it.

          Guess what: It got faster.

          Show me one PC Manufacturer (not alone Microsoft) who can manage something like that?

          I have a five year old Dell Notebook.... XP I guess might run on it, or not. But the reality is I wouldn't even want to run XP on that thing.

          I didn't own an Apple until I bought an iBook a year and a half ago (together with an iPod). But I can tell you right now that my next one will be an Apple again, because "It just works" and I don't feel completly abandoned by Apple once I walk out of the door.

          This might be the case because Apple is still relativly small in comparision to other Computer companies, but at this point in time I don't really care, I get what I paid for, if not more so.

    • Re:Price? (Score:3, Informative)

      by truesaer ( 135079 )
      Your first mistake was looking at Dell. That stuff is pricey, and anyway they don't sell Opterons.


      I can't figure out the pricing in that review anyway, I just went to the xicomputer.com website and configured the same system and came up with $3236, not $4107. I'm not sure if I missed an option or something, but maybe they just bought their system a long time ago before prices dropped (maybe before AMD released the Opteron 248, the 246 which was tested isn't even their fastest chip anymore.

      • Re:Price? (Score:4, Insightful)

        by b17bmbr ( 608864 ) on Sunday December 28, 2003 @02:18AM (#7820557)
        the people who are going to buy these are buying dell for primarily one reason. it's a dell. now, you and i go, BFD. but, if you're a business, or even a serious professional, it is a tool. it is worth far more than $500 or whatever, to know that if your box takes a shit, they'll back it up. i just bought a canon A70 (pix of the kids) from ritz camera. yes, i could've gotten it elsewhere, with a better package. but you know what, i got their extended warranty, which basically says if i drop it off a building, and bring in the battery door, they'll replace it. now, what's that worth? that kind of peace of mind comes at a price. businesses expect that when they call, someone is there. if something goes to hell, they're gonna get something fixed. dell is still pretty good at service. even though they're PQ has taken a shit last couple of years.

    • Re:Price? (Score:2, Offtopic)

      by colmore ( 56499 )
      Agreed!

      And let's not overlook the humble 12" iBook, unquestionably the best value in light laptops.

    • Re:Price? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Coventry ( 3779 ) * on Sunday December 28, 2003 @02:39AM (#7820618) Journal
      O.K., hopefully this will put to bed all those folks who cry about Apple computers being so damned expensive. Feature for feature, the G5 is about $600 cheaper than the Opteron. I certainly found this out when I was pricing workstations from Dell and other Wintel manufacturers and the G5's from Apple. I went with a fully loaded G5 and the price delta was $1200 cheaper going with the G5. Plus, OS X is soooooo nice.

      I am very curious as to how you got an Opteron price from Dell, which doesn't Make an Opteron system.

      I've read this sort of argument before, and what it comes down to is the difference in price between a comsumer system (G5) and a pro workstation (dual Opterons are not for the avergae consumer). The manufacturers making dual Opteron systems provide very heavy support - because their market (Engineering, 3d modeling, rendering) demands it. You pay for said support. The G5, however, comes with typical Apple support - which, while very nice, is not at the same level.

      Also of note, the manufacturers making Opteron workstations tend to put on very high end graphics cards - not the game-use 9600 pro that comes standard on a G5.

      Unfortunatly, no one makes a dual opteron that isn't targeted at a professional user currently - instead you have to cobble one together yourself. The price point drops considerably when you do this, becoming on par with that of the G5, but you wind up with 5+ warrenties to keep track of, and no central org to get service from. :(

      • Re:Price? (Score:5, Informative)

        by fearx ( 19408 ) on Sunday December 28, 2003 @10:36AM (#7821570)
        I've read this sort of argument before, and what it comes down to is the difference in price between a comsumer system (G5) and a pro workstation (dual Opterons are not for the avergae consumer). The manufacturers making dual Opteron systems provide very heavy support - because their market (Engineering, 3d modeling, rendering) demands it. You pay for said support. The G5, however, comes with typical Apple support - which, while very nice, is not at the same level.


        Actually, the G5 is Apples Pro Line. Their consumer line consists of the iBook, iMac, and eMac. Their Pro line consists of the PoweBook and Power Mac. Maybe the naming gives it away too... POWER Mac, POWER Book.

    • PC configuration a little funky (Score:5, Informative)

      by Hoser McMoose ( 202552 ) on Sunday December 28, 2003 @04:32AM (#7820943)
      I don't know if the author of the article was just trying to make the mac look cheaper, or if they just weren't looking very hard (I suspect the latter), but they could have EASILY shaved $82 off the cost of the Opteron system and got 1394b support for free too boot!

      For some reason they configured the Opteron with an add-in Serial ATA RAID controller, supposedly in order to better match the configuration of the Mac (which doesn't support RAID, but I digress). This added $117 to the price. However they completely ignored the motherboard upgrade option that added SATA support (no RAID) and 1394b support together for only $35.

      They could also have shaved another $37 off the price by using a software modem instead of a hardware modem (though the HW modem might be a good idea for Linux users that need dial-up) or $72 off the price by not including a modem at all for those of us with broadband connections.

      In the end though, the Mac is still a bit cheaper. Macs are not expensive for what you get, the problem is that you don't have much choice but to get top-end. To price out a dual-processor Opteron with similar specs to a dual-processor Mac, you'll be easily over $3000 and possibly up closer to the $3938 of the Xi computer system. However, if you don't need all those features you can easily configure yourself an Athlon64 system for SIGNIFICANTLY less.

      I have absolutely no need for a modem (got an old external kicking around in case of emergancies) and have never owned any 1394b devices. Therefore, if I were configuring a PC for myself I would never bother adding either of those two options. I might also configure a cheaper video card and I probably wouldn't bother with a DVD-RW drive, though I would prefer to have two optical drives (one CD-RW and one DVD). These are all easy options on most PC configurations, but often they aren't on Mac configurations. Simply put, you have more choices on PC configurations than on Macs. If you desired setup matches that of a Mac closely, then they often offer good value for your money. If not, then they can be quite expensive for what you want.

    • Re:Price? (Score:3, Funny)

      by arty3 ( 64523 )
      I have to say. The fact that you said "price delta" and not "price difference", gives you a lot more credibility.
  • it's interesting that the G5 was bested in photoshop benchmarks... heh. (how long will it be until someone else publishes some benchmarks that utilize some other filters and show the G5 to be faster?)

  • Not a Processor Comparison (Score:5, Insightful)

    by ender_wiggin30 ( 733751 ) on Sunday December 28, 2003 @12:55AM (#7820271)
    Those two processors are not compared. The video graphics cards, the motherboard speed, and other things are compared. It should be labeled how Apple G5 Platform compares to Athlon Based Platform.

  • D3D vs OGL (Score:3, Interesting)

    by illumina+us ( 615188 ) on Sunday December 28, 2003 @12:55AM (#7820273) Homepage
    Unreal Tournament 2003 runs in Direct X mode on the Opteron and OpenGL mode on the G5. Some say this isn't a fair test but if you are choosing between the two systems, you need to know how it runs your favorite game.

    If a G5 running in OGL gets such low scores something is wrong. D3D renders slower and requires more processing power than OGL.

    • Re:D3D vs OGL (Score:5, Informative)

      by Quarters ( 18322 ) on Sunday December 28, 2003 @01:06AM (#7820331)
      Except for nVidia cards, which have always had excellent OpenGL drivers, D3D renders faster than OGL on practically all current consumer level 3D hardware for Windows. Even on the nVidia hardware the speed difference is practically negligble.

  • w00t. Like this is something new! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by CatOne ( 655161 ) on Sunday December 28, 2003 @01:01AM (#7820300)
    The thing that's true now is that the Mac systems are competitive. They're close to the fastest Intel/Athlon systems -- close enough that there's not an OBVIOUS performance reason to choose one or another.

    They're close in price, too (if you go PC white box then the PC is still less than half the price, but for a Xeon system or something from Dell it's fairly close).

    I don't think this benchmark is going to make up ANYBODY's mind one way or another, though -- it's an emotional debate rather than a logical one.

    The good thing is the Mac's numbers are no longer embarrasingly crappy, as they were in the latter G4 days.

  • Remarks (Score:5, Interesting)

    by internet-redstar ( 552612 ) * on Sunday December 28, 2003 @01:04AM (#7820314) Homepage
    Price comparisation:
    - comparisation of artificially low memory systems as Apples prices are where Apple makes the most on. On the one hand claiming 'we don't want to build ourselves as Apples can't be build, and then going to another store to add memory, just isn't fair when comparing prices.
    - Boot-testing the Mac for performance difference with other the HD is a good thing, but the test in the other direction (booting the PC with the other HD might reveal that the bottleneck is in the other direction).
    - MacOS X is certainly better in 64bit environments than not wanting to run beta software on a system bought for performance.
    - The problem with the Mac is also that the graphics subsystem is already dated. The release cycle of Macs is just too long. When they're first released they -arguably- beat most of the fastest PC's. But the next version is only released at quickest 6 months later, if you compare at that time with latest hardware. Macs just can cope up.
    - I also assume that near the end of the cycle, Apple's profit margins are incredible high. It's a very good marketing tactic to keep hardware and software tied to each other, keeping it all under control.
    - As I'm typing this on my top-equipped 12" PowerBook, I must admit that MacOS X is a good OS and the hardware is very good (this laptop was cheaper than any comparable hardware at the time I ordered it - not any more at the time when it got delivered)
    - And as a rule of thumb, I always say it's better to buy a less expensive system and upgrade it quicker than to go for the fastest and be stuck with it for an extra year.
    - Macs also have a better second hand value, and that shouldn't be forgotten when taking the price into account.
    - But most performance comparisations clearly SUCK because they tend to be optimised for a certain system (because of lack of knowledge of the party), or highly dependent on release schedules of involved hardware or software.
    • Only beta software? SuSE and Redhat both have official, supported releases for Opteron. Others probably do as well that can be considered better than beta quality, but even sticking strictly to supported platforms you don't need to go beta.

      Other than that, I didn't really take time to comprehend most of that post. I think OSX is an excellent OS, but have found Apple hardware poor in both performance and reliability and customer service to be about as hostile as I've had experience dealing with. I've sw

  • Macworld Dec 2003 Issue (Score:4, Informative)

    by Valluvan ( 564515 ) on Sunday December 28, 2003 @01:04AM (#7820318) Homepage Journal
    had feature called "The Race Is On" by Jonathan Seef. The comparison was between G5 and PC's with opteron. The PCs seemed to fare better in most of the tests (photoshop, word, quake, premiere, mp3-encoding, mpeg-2 encoding). Mac seemed to be better only with the DVD creation. By the way, I use Powerbook G4. Anyone's got a link for the article ?

    • Re:Macworld Dec 2003 Issue (Score:5, Informative)

      by general_re ( 8883 ) on Sunday December 28, 2003 @01:35AM (#7820440) Homepage
      Anyone's got a link for the article ?

      Macworld isn't making the article available on their website, but you piqued my curiosity enough to go looking for it. Alienware [alienware.com], which makes the Athlon and P4 systems that Macworld apparently used for its testing, has made excerpts available here [alienware.com].

      Who should I believe - Macworld, or some guy with bare feet? Hmmm............

    • Maximum PC, Dec2003 issue, has a showdown of the Athlon64 F-51 vs. Intel P4ExtremeEdition vs. Mac dual G5 2.0ghz.

      Basically, they came up with the conclusion that the P4EE, though it's very hard to find one, is a bit faster in the majority, the Athlon64 takes up almost all the rest of the field, and the Mac G5 comes in first in one or two areas. They also concluded that 1.) the mac is a good deal for a fast computer, 2.) the intel chip looks more like vaporware than anything else, as you can actually get A

  • Mac fanboy? (Score:5, Informative)

    by truesaer ( 135079 ) on Sunday December 28, 2003 @01:08AM (#7820341) Homepage
    Well, I will admit that I'm a bit of an AMD fanboy, but let me point out a few things here that I think should be agreeable by all parties.


    First, lets examine the statement The G5 spanks the Opteron in many of the non-gaming tests, except for the Photoshop tests. I see five tests in this review, and there are two wins for G5, two wins for Opteron, and one tie. So I really don't see either chip spanking the other. On the second page Opteron wins two, G5 wins one.


    Second, the configuration notes section was pathetic. It doesn't really give a very good description of the real configuration of the systems. Anyone that views benchmarks regularly knows that the devil is in the details. Still, this is equally a problem for Opteron and G5.


    Third, I wonder what kind of comparison is really valid. Anyone familiar with the AMD/Intel world knows that you can't just grab two 2Ghz chips and run them head to head. The architectures are not the same, it wouldn't be a valid comparison. So with two entirely different ISAs, what chips should be run head to head? The only obvious comparison would be each manufacturer's fastest...in this case I believe the 2GHz G5 is Apple's current fastest, but AMD does have a 2.2Ghz part that is available (see pricewatch) and that wasn't tested.


    Lastly, let me address the importance of compilation. I can't speak for G5, but you would get a substantial boost in performance on most applications just with a recompile for AMD64 chips. This is because Opterons have 32 GPRs instead of 16, which can make a big difference (especially in multimedia apps like photoshop). Obviously these products aren't commercially available, but people should be aware that a substantial performance boost for AMD64 could come just from optimized releases of software once it reaches a wide enough audience to make it worthwhile for software vendors.


    I guess this has turned more into a "notes about AMD64 architecture" post than anything else. It looks to me like this review is interesting but doesn't really settle much. Both Opteron and G5 performed well.

  • apples and oranges and my favorite alphas (Score:3, Informative)

    by cluge ( 114877 ) on Sunday December 28, 2003 @01:11AM (#7820353) Homepage
    I know this isn't quite on topic, but I wonder how the latest Alpha design would fair. The alpha was the first mass produced 64 bit chip that had any commercial success. It was introduced in the early nineties. IN fact Linus had one. Basically the curret EV78 is a 6 or 7 year old design, but in most serious tests of processor power it has done quite good. It's amazing that such an "old" design still works so well. The last SPEC [spec.org] numbers I can find are here [spec.org]. Considering the platorm has been ignored and basically orphaned, it's suprising that this chip still powers many of the worlds top rated super computers [top500.org].

    How does all this relate to the G5 and Opteron? Well AMD gets it's bus design from the Alpha lineage. The G5 is built by IBM, who I believe is building the alpha cores as well (I could be wrong, I can't keep up). The irony? Every current intel pentium chip is quality control checked by machines with alpha processors. Funny world huh?

    AngryPeopleRule [angrypeoplerule.com]

  • Here are some benchmarks that show comparitive performance under Maya and Mental Ray. The G5 does not due so well in this, atleast compared to Intels and AMDs offerings.
    An item of interest in both benchmarks are
    the stats from an SGI Tezro workstation with 4 procs.

    Mental Ray for Maya
    http://www.zoorender.com/html/benchmark_men t al.htm

    Standard Maya Renderer
    http://www.zoorender.com/html/benchmark_ maya.htm

    Also there are alot better reviews already published that cover these cpus respective performance in m

  • > In gaming, the Opteron system proved to be superior, which is partly due to the superior 9800XT over the base Radeon 9800. The G5 spanks the Opteron in many of the non-gaming tests, except for the Photoshop tests.

    I wouldn't think benchmarks would matter as much when comparing the two in these arenas. If I was looking for a good gaming or a good Photoshop machine, I'd choose a platform over a processor speed.

  • pcworld did this a little while ago. (Score:4, Informative)

    by jon_c ( 100593 ) on Sunday December 28, 2003 @01:28AM (#7820420) Homepage
    according to them:
    [pcworld.com]
    Athlon 64 vs. Apple G5 Systems: Not Even Close

    Now i can't say whether these tests are any less or more objective, but they do draw a completely different conclusion.

    -Jon

  • User Perception (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Bruha ( 412869 ) on Sunday December 28, 2003 @01:41AM (#7820456) Homepage Journal
    Everyone can compare numbers until pigs fly but what about user perception? Yes it's great X component makes X application run faster. But as a whole who's out there using these applications on a daily basis? What about from power on to usability (of which many users just leave the pc running) or how long it takes from click until your email application fires up and starts accessing email?

    It's really these things that users care about not the 1% that may be using specialized applications that were complied to take advantage of these processors.

    The G5 will obviously have a advantage due to the OS being tweaked for it and the Opteron will have a advantage if the applications are compiled 64bit. Of which were any of these applications full 64bit or recompiles.

    There is also a world of difference in the applications depending on which compiler you run. Intel compilers are vastly superior to many run of the mill compilers and will generally run better on Intel systems. AMD and Apple probably have their own compilers and more than likely encourage the use of them. Now since application developers will use what's cheapest and is most stable across platforms you'll probably see the differences you're seeing. Any native Apple application will obviously be done with a apple compiler. Photoshop may have been done with a generic thus better performance on x86/64 vs it compiled for a G5 processor which Apple may or may not release all specs for proper compilation with a generic.

    Either way comparing them in this manner is nothing but a mess of varibles unless you're using everything the same across the board.

    Better to compare bandwidth and other functions of the processors and not varible application performance where you're not sure of the breeding of code.

  • Server chip versus desktop processor? Duh. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by perlow ( 451482 ) on Sunday December 28, 2003 @01:43AM (#7820462) Homepage
    This article strictly compares the 970 to the G5 using GAMING benchmarks.

    The Opteron and the G5 (IBM PowerPC 970) are two disparately different chips meant to serve two different purposes. The Opteron is AMD's server chip designed to handle for the most part, 64 bit high performance database applications and applications which require large memory models in which the 64 bit memory addressing is needed-- NOT 64 bit desktop applications or games. That's reserved for the Athlon 64 which is clocked significantly higher and has a much smaller L2 cache than the Opteron. On Gaming and desktop content creation benchmarks the Athlon64 is a much better match for the 970.

    If you want to compare apples to apples I would compare the IBM Power4 to the Itanium2 to the Opteron, hook them all up to an EMC storage array using fiberoptic SAN connections, and run a few million row length Oracle and DB2 databases and some SQL database benchmarks -- and for load up a few gigantic thermodynamic simulations up into main memory and see how quickly they can run through them. THAT would be an appropriate test for these server chips.
    • The Opteron and the G5 (IBM PowerPC 970) are two disparately different chips meant to serve two different purposes. The Opteron is AMD's server chip designed to handle for the most part, 64 bit high performance database applications and applications which require large memory models in which the 64 bit memory addressing is needed-- NOT 64 bit desktop applications or games. That's reserved for the Athlon 64 which is clocked significantly higher and has a much smaller L2 cache than the Opteron. On Gaming and

  • Top500.org (Score:5, Informative)

    by RedWingsSuck ( 644332 ) on Sunday December 28, 2003 @02:18AM (#7820558) Homepage
    On the latest Top500 list Virginia Tech's Mac cluster is number 3 with 2200 2GHz G5 processors, and Los Alamos National Laboratorys machine, with 2816 2 GHz Opteron processors is number 5.. I didn't look at the topology, or connection medium, but I am certain that the Mac cluster was cheaper, and is faster running the SAME benchmarks...

    • Re:Top500.org (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Junta ( 36770 )
      I don't know about the Los Alamos cluster referenced, but the Big Mac cluster went all out on Inifiniband interconnect, inferring a potentially extremely better network interconnecting the cluster.

    • Re:Top500.org (Score:5, Informative)

      by Hoser McMoose ( 202552 ) on Sunday December 28, 2003 @04:57AM (#7820998)
      Yup, the PPC 970 (G5) is quite fast at running Linpack, particularly in comparison to x86 chips. The main reason for this is that Linpack is basically just a bunch of floating point adds and multiplies, and the PPC 970 has this nifty instruction that does a floating point multiple and add all in one. On x86 this requires two separate instructions.

      Some scientific computing does closely resemble Linpack's workload. Basically any time you're dealing with matricies you are almost always going to be doing lots of FP mult-adds. However, this is a VERY narrow benchmark of CPU performance.

      A much better benchmark of raw CPU power is SPEC CPU2000 (though the compiler and memory subsystem play a major role here). Unfortunately Apple has chosen not to grace Spec with it's precense. So far it's only numbers released have been from the Veritest results which "proved" that the G5 was faster than a Pentium4. These results were rather unimpressive and SIGNIFICANTLY slower than the results for Opteron and P4 systems.

      All benchmarks have their limitations, Linpack (used by Top500) just tends to be more limited than most. Rumor has it that a new set of high-performance computing benchmarks is in the works to replace plain old Linpack.

  • How are we going to explaing something this subtle (Score:4, Insightful)

    by be-fan ( 61476 ) on Sunday December 28, 2003 @02:32AM (#7820599)
    to Mac people??? The same people who thought that the "G3 was faster than the fastest Pentium II" for years!

    Let me try to make this simple: neither Windows XP nor OS X are 64-bit OSs, and neither was running 64-bit programs. This is a much better situation for the G5 than the Opteron. 64-bit mode on the G5 really only allows for 64-bit instruction execution, and 64-bit pointers. On the Opteron, 64-bit mode enables a host of non-64-bit-related improvements, notably a doubling of the visible register set.

    The bottom line is this:

    The G5 will run 32-bit code just as fast (or faster, because of better cache utilization) than 64-bit code. The Opteron will run 32-bit bit code about 20% slower than 64-bit code, because of the architectural improvements in X86-64 long mode.

    Note that none of the apps here would really benifet from 64-bit processing. Floating point is already 64-bit (actually, 80-bit) in both processors, and the only program that could concievably use 64-bit integer math would be Photoshop. Neither machine had more than 4GB of RAM, so 64-bit memory addressing was a non-factor.

    That said, the G5 beat the Opteron by more than 20% in most of the benchmarks. I fully expect that with both CPUs running optimized 64-bit code, the G5 would still be faster, though the performance delta will be less.

  • Its not the hardware its the software (Score:5, Interesting)

    by ducomputergeek ( 595742 ) on Sunday December 28, 2003 @03:48AM (#7820805)
    I guess I've worked in the video production industry too long, but most of the people I have been working with are switching to Macs or upgrading to G5's not because of hardware, but software and the total package.

    Answer this question: will final cut pro run on an x86 based machine?

    To me, and most Mac users, gaming is irrelvant. Most people that use Macs are in a profession such as desktop publishing, video production, or graphic arts. Sure they may play a game or two, but their machine is used for work.

    I do a little bit of everything with my G3 700Mhz 14.1" iBook, but mostly its MS Office, Mail, Safari, and Quark that I use. Along with Final Cut Pro and Photoshop when need be.

    Our office is 95% Mac and 5% FreeBSD, which we run on Althon white boxes, and we have beat out competition because of productivty. We are not spending loads of time with viruses and patching security issues on a weekly basis. Our machines rarely lock up, none have crashed (knock on wood), and that helps with the bottom line.

    Does it help in video rendering to have the extra speed and power of the 64-bit G5? Yeah, the faster a project is rendered, the quicker we move on to the next. But for everyday business use, our older G4 500's, 867's, and Dual 1.25gz will serve us for years to come and even though Apples cost more up front, we know we have saved time and money by using macs for our desktops.

  • Gaming comparisons? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Wakko Warner ( 324 ) * on Sunday December 28, 2003 @04:52AM (#7820989) Homepage Journal
    Huh?

    For the 3 games you can play on a G5?

    Why not compare more relevant things? Okay, you say, let's do some applications tests. Okay, photoshop filters. A couple rendering jobs. Yawn. Who the hell does this on their machines all the time? Okay, now the five of you, leave the room.

    Why not give me some more information about the guts of the machine, like how fast memory access is or how each bus design handles contention issues, explain why they're relevant in various facets of operating system or application execution, and provide some anecdotal evidence by way of application benchmarks. Hell, run them in a debugger so we can see if our assumptions about system behavior are correct in real-world situations.

    These people get a dual G5 and a dual Opteron and all they do is run Photoshop and Quake 3 on it and call it a night. What the hell? Where's the investigation, the effort? How much more boring could that article have been? (Okay, maybe they could've lost the graphs and numbers and just told us, "Trust us, this one's faster", but that would've seemed like they were phoning it in.)

    In summary, I was a little disappointed.

    - A.P.

  • Apple's prices aren't bad considering (Score:5, Insightful)

    by SiliconJesus101 ( 622291 ) on Sunday December 28, 2003 @05:05AM (#7821015) Homepage
    I for one recently switched from a Windows box to a Mac OSX box as my main machine. I tried Linux on the desktop for almost a year and was left with a somewhat bad taste in my mouth; For my servers Linux is definitely the OS of choice but it is still extremely lacking in the desktop OS department.

    As far as the pricing on the Apple machines, it may seem a bit steep at first but when you look at the total package (sexy aluminum case, sweet fan setup, SATA hard drives, Firewire 800, 64bit PCI (even as far back as the old B&W G3 I recently picked up) and especially the resale value you really aren't doing to poorly. I love the comparisons where people say "I can build an x86 box for half the price". Well, the problem is that the x86 box is worth crap 3 months after you build it while the Apple boxen seem to hold their values long after your half priced x86 box becomes a machine you cannot even give away except maybe to a buddy who wants an old machine to use as an IPCop firewall box.

    The G5 definitely isn't a slow machine, you will be able to resell your G5 without taking a bath on your investment, and OSX is damned slick....I mean...REALLY slick.

    All in all I would have to say that the G5 machines are holding their own. Slower on some things, faster on other things, but nevertheless holding their own. The price/performance thing really depends on what you want the machine to do for you. I personally play games on a Playstation 2, listen to music on a real live stereo system and use a computer for browsing the web and checking email. So for me, OSX is a really nice environment to work in and the price of admission for OSX dictates Apple hardware. For others that play games I guess x86 and Windows is the way to go, and for those that like a total lack of intergration of their various UI components and appreciate a plethora of different "widgets" and toolkits all crammed together in a hodgepodge of a UI with no unified look or feel from application to application (wanrning, run-on sentence) and an almost unrelenting requirement to be tweaked and fiddled with then I guess a Linux x86 desktop is the way to go.

    I guess where my rant is going is that the hardware playing field seems to be fairly level these days and therefore your choices in systems would have almost entirely to do with how you plan on using your machine and/or which particular environment you prefer to work or play in.

  • we've had benchmarks for months (Score:4, Informative)

    by penguin7of9 ( 697383 ) on Sunday December 28, 2003 @05:11AM (#7821031)
    We've had benchmarks for months, actually meaningful benchmarks. They show that the G5 is a nice, competitive chip, but it's merely keeping up with AMD performance-wise. And G5 systems are behind Opteron systems in terms of bang-for-the-buck and features.

    If you check the published SPEC benchmarks [spec.org] for the Opteron 148 against Apple's claimed SPEC results [apple.com] for the G5, you'll see that a dual G5 is not faster than the Opteron. It is pretty telling, incidentally, that Apple still has not actually submitted official SPEC results for the G5's--they really don't seem comfortable with the comparison on a real benchmark.

    Of course, a dual Opteron will have other advantages for many users: you can get it in 1U rack mounts, it runs a lot more application software, and it's cheaper.

    Running five application programs does not constitute a meaningful benchmark of the CPU. We don't know how those applications are written, what CPUs they are compiled for, what compilers they used, etc. Most likely, none of those applications have been tuned for Opteron, wherease they have received extensive tuning for PPC and AltiVec over the years. The differences may be something as trivial as cache conflicts. All those "benchmarks" tell you is that if you must run the current version of Bryce and AfterEffects, you may get more bang (but not necessarily more bang-for-the-buck) out of a G5 for the time being.

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