Benchmark results cited by Apple at the launch of its Power Mac G5 desktops yesterday have already come under fire for seeming to not only tweak the Mac test system to improve its performance beyond anything an ordinary user might experience, but crippling rival systems to deliver below-par average user performance. The tests described by Apple CEO Steve Jobs were conducted on the company's behalf ("under contract") by VeriTest. The benchmarks used are SPEC CPU 2000 integer and floating-point tests. Apple asked VeriTest to compare a pre-release a dual 2GHz Power Mac G5 with a Dell Precision 650 workstation based on twin 3.06GHz Intel Xeon CPUs and a Dell Dimension 8300 based on a 3GHz Pentium 4.
The Dell's were running Red Hat Linux 9.0, the G5 Mac OS X 10.2.7. The test software was compiled using GCC 3.3 and NAGware Fortran 95. VeriTest recorded SPECint base score of 800, 889 and 836 for the G5, 8300 and 650, respectively. The equivalent SPECfp base scores were 840, 693 and 646. So the G5 out-performs the other machines, yes?
Well, so says Apple, but a closer look at VeriTest's documentation, freely available from its web site, suggests otherwise. Certainly SPEC figures published on the SPEC web site do, as Register readers noted, along with readers at a number of web sites today. The corresponding SPECint and SPECfp base Dell-provided results for the 650 are 1089 and 1053. Equivalent figures for the Dimension 8300 are not available.
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News source: The Reg
The Dell's were running Red Hat Linux 9.0, the G5 Mac OS X 10.2.7. The test software was compiled using GCC 3.3 and NAGware Fortran 95. VeriTest recorded SPECint base score of 800, 889 and 836 for the G5, 8300 and 650, respectively. The equivalent SPECfp base scores were 840, 693 and 646. So the G5 out-performs the other machines, yes?
Well, so says Apple, but a closer look at VeriTest's documentation, freely available from its web site, suggests otherwise. Certainly SPEC figures published on the SPEC web site do, as Register readers noted, along with readers at a number of web sites today. The corresponding SPECint and SPECfp base Dell-provided results for the 650 are 1089 and 1053. Equivalent figures for the Dimension 8300 are not available.
View: The full story News source: The Reg
Its a fact of corporate marketing nothing more!
People in the real world (like independant benchmarking sites) convince me what is good and what isn't
Its also funny to note that while Apple were marketing stability last time round (ie: the Megahertz myth etc etc) now the seem to be focusing on speed themselves, ah ho hum.
GCC is a cross platform compiler and if it doesn't perform as well in the SPEC tests as the highly customized compilers then tough.
Ultimately the SPEC scores aren't nowhere near as important as real world scores (of which there are none at all), because each vendor optimises it to their own accord. The x86 platform being as experienced as it is has a higher level of optimisation.
Point is, it seems to be almost level pegging across the board in regards to power, with no-one "owning" the other and all performing amazingly well. Price/performance ratio is still squarely in the x86 court, especially with the 3.2GHz P4 outperforming the 1.8GHz G5 and being cheaper, but for me OS X offsets this price difference; for others it doesn't. Each to their own.
Roll on the Athlon 64 so we can bring 64bit computing really into the mainstream.
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