Intel iMacs really that much faster than PPC?

[macphisto]

Okay, so I was mulling this idea and let me know what you think.

Apples to apples (no pun intended...well, maybe a little) it seems to me that the Intel chips are on par horsepower-wise with with current G5 PPC chip iMacs. The only benefit that you get with the Intel iMac is the fact that it is a dual processor iMac with a slightly faster chipset and a few other bells and whistles.

Am I thinking correctly with this?

 

[Dont Hurt Me]

No

 

[crazzyeddie]

Usually, a Pentium M (single processor mobile chip) would perform better per clock than a G4, which performs better per clock than a G5. Since the Core Duo is two chips, it should perform even better... but only benchmarks will show for certain.

 

[bugfaceuk]

Well you know, those stats were largely bull shoe.

They were integer and float operation through put, and the base line for equivalence would be 2x faster. I mean you would hope that with two cores, you could do approaching 2x as much (yes yes, approaching). Of course, if it (or the CPU intensive operation) is single threaded, then we might expect similiar or possibly slower performance with 2 cores.

What is clear that a "very good at multi-tasking" OS like OS-X will benefit greatly from dual-core CPUs to become a "very very good at multi-tasking" OS. I have a dual core windows machine and a dual core linux machine, I noticed the extra core on Linux, on XP... not so much.

 

[Little Endian]

http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/library/pa-fpf970mp/

According to SPEC rates the 970MP and Intel Duo are more or less equal clock for clock.

A single 2.5Ghz 970MP Dual core chip gets 32.3 on integer and 42.8 on Floating Point.

A single Intel Duo Dual core chip @ 2.0Ghz gets 32.6 on interger but only 27.1 on Floating Point. SPEC scores don't translate into real world performance though but I think the G5 will perform better clock for clock and core for core until more Universal binary Apps are launched and better optimizations for the intel platform are made. Remember Apple's benches are the usual twists and they are putting Intel Duo performance with it's best foot forward, we will have to wait for more detailed benchmarks.


http://www.anandtech.com/mac/showdoc.aspx?i=2520

Anandtech also goes into detail about PowerPC vs. X86 based raw perfromance.

 

[Morn]

A 2.4ghz dual cpu opteron
SPECint_rate2000 37,5
SPECfp_rate2000 34,4

A single dual core 2.5ghz G5
SPECint_rate2000 32.3
SPECfp_rate2000 42.8

3.2ghz Pentium D
SPECint_rate2000 32,6
SPECfp_rate2000 32,5

Intel Core Duo 2ghz
SPECint_rate2000 32.6
SPECfp_rate2000 27.1

To put it in perspective with other CPU's around today. (And yes the 2ghz G5 and 1.67G4 are a lot slower than all of these). And it's the opteron that tends to win in most real world tests.

Here's what the original powermac 2ghz G5 gets.
SPECint_rate2000 17,2
SPECfp_rate2000 15.7

 

[maya]

Is it my imagination or did no one notice that Steve Jobs compared a single core iMac G5 to a dual core x86 iMac.

If that were the case, then yes the Core Duo would outperform a G5.

Maybe I have to re-read and watch the keynote again, to make sure.

 

[Morn]

What other imac would he compare it to?

 

[maya]

What other imac would he compare it to?

Well he is comparing a dual core to a single core processor. Plus the Core Duo has 2M L2 cache, while the G5 only has 512k cache. Any processor with a 1M or larger cache will see better performance gains.

If Jobs was going to compare he should have done it with a Core Solo or something. This was just sneaky, as usual.

 

[MRU]

Exactly.... Why would he compare it to a dual G5 wheh it's not in the imac?

Same as the macbookpro compared to the G4 powerbook..

We will see what they do with the powermac's towards summer/fall I guess. I'm hoping 2x duo core all around... That would give the performace boost all around on the powermac models..

 

[Morn]

The powermacs won't have Core Duo.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Next_Generation_Microarchitecture
Conroe will be in the powermac most likely. Which will be necessary as the Core Duo is not faster than the 2.5ghz dual core G5. And we can pretty much guess from intel's estimated launch date that it's going to be out after the wwdc.

 

[AtHomeBoy_2000]

Exactly.... Why would he compare it to a dual G5 wheh it's not in the imac?

Same as the macbookpro compared to the G4 powerbook..

I totally agree. A lot of people forget about that part.

 

[rot@ti.org]

Benchmarks

Apple's web site has some more numbers comparing the 1.83 dual core MacBook with the 1.67 PowerBook:

3D rendering 4.1X faster
Gaming 2.2X faster
HTML load 1.9X faster

So not everything is 4 to 5 times faster. I wonder how much of the speed increase is due to the faster bus.

See http://www.apple.com/macbookpro/graphics.html for above numbers.

 

[Koodauw]

What I would like to see is how much faster is it for everyday apps. Floating point and integer operations mean very little to me. Does it help on the load time of apps? Does Photoshop render faster? Will safari be faster? Will it perform better with 8 apps open? 10-12? than its PPC counterpart? These are true tests of speed if you ask me.

 

[Morn]

Gaming? That'll be like 80% due to the faster graphics chip. Games don't yet take advantage of multiple cores.
Koodauw, yes, if the apps are native. Though loading time is hard drive speed dependant. I think that safari and photoshop (when it's universal) will be much faster. Multitasking performance shouldn't change that much, it's mainly about ram.

 

[maya]

Apple's web site has some more numbers comparing the 1.83 dual core MacBook with the 1.67 PowerBook:

3D rendering 4.1X faster
Gaming 2.2X faster
HTML load 1.9X faster

So not everything is 4 to 5 times faster. I wonder how much of the speed increase is due to the faster bus.

See http://www.apple.com/macbookpro/graphics.html for above numbers.

You are also comparing 5 year old technology to current technology. The G4 has been out since 1999+, while the Core Duo has been out since late 2005.

Of course the Core Duo will outperform on the notebook side, and also the desktop side, as the G5 was released mid 2003.

One has to remember that you cannot compare directly a G5 or G4 with a Core Duo unless you have a dual core G4 or G5 in the same cat.

Sure the Core Duo does more work per watt, however that is expected as its considered new technology. Its all marketing.

 

[andiwm2003]

..........................Sure the Core Duo does more work per watt, however that is expected as its considered new technology. Its all marketing.

no.

the only relevant measure is how much faster my apps are on the new mac compared to the old mac. if the new mac has 2,4,8 cores and the old mac has only 1 core doesn't matter at all.

theoretical comparisons of a non existant single core 1mb cache g5 powermac to a nonexistent intel core duo single 1mb cache are a waste of time.

performance of the apps is important to the user not techical justifications why the old mac is slower. who cares?

 

[Flowbee]

You are also comparing 5 year old technology to current technology.

And yet, until this week, Apple was selling the G4 Powerbooks as "current" technology.

 

[Morn]

The Core Duo is based on the Pentium Pro which was out in 1995. Although it's been tweaked an awful lot since then. The G4 is just a G3 with an added altivec unit. And the G5 is very similar with tweaks and additions, like an extra FPU unit.
The newest microarchitectures around today, the Athlon. And the Pentium 4 which Intel is giving up. New is not necessarily better.
And the G5 is faster than the Core Duo. But the G4 was even slower than the Pentium M, Freescale was not able to keep up with Intel.

 

[neocell]

no.

the only relevant measure is how much faster my apps are on the new mac compared to the old mac. if the new mac has 2,4,8 cores and the old mac has only 1 core doesn't matter at all.

theoretical comparisons of a non existant single core 1mb cache g5 powermac to a nonexistent intel core duo single 1mb cache are a waste of time.

performance of the apps is important to the user not techical justifications why the old mac is slower. who cares?

Completely agree. Who the hell cares about hypothetical situations/configurations. Open the box, boot it up and which one is faster. Don't care what's inside, just how well does it work and how fast does it go. It's perfectly fair to compare the PowerBook to the MacBook and the intel iMac to the old one. What are they replacing? The old ones. What are you doing? Buying a new one and using it? Crap, how could anyone bitch about this. Is it faster, yes or no, if so how much. Period.

 

[Meyvn]

It's also fairly significant that the G5 is 64-bit, and this first generation of Core Duos are not.

 

[lssmit02]

It's also fairly significant that the G5 is 64-bit, and this first generation of Core Duos are not.

Yeah, I was wondering about that. Most apps don't benefit from the G5 being a 64 bit processor, in OS X, though,

Myth #5:
Myth: My application will have much faster performance if it is a “native” 64-bit application.
Fact: This is true for some other architectures because the number of registers and the width of registers changes between 32-bit and 64-bit mode. However, the PowerPC architecture does not have either of these limitations. It was designed for 64-bit computing from the beginning, and supports 64-bit arithmetic instructions in 32-bit mode. Thus, on PowerPC architectures, software does not generally become faster (and may actually slow down) when compiled as a 64-bit executable.

According to Apple

But the same might not be true with a 32-bit Core Duo.

 

[Meyvn]

I never bought the 64-bit on 64-bit is a huge difference over 32-bit on 32-bit anyway. What I was arguing is: what happens when significant applications begin to be released in only 64-bit format? What happens when significant features in future OS releases and applications (which is more probable than simply completely disabling 32-bit support any time soon) are only available for 64-bit computers? THAT is the real concern.

 

[Morn]

It's also fairly significant that the G5 is 64-bit, and this first generation of Core Duos are not.

64bit is mostly hype, it doesn't make much different in 90% of apps

 

[Catfish_Man]

The Core Duo is based on the Pentium Pro which was out in 1995. Although it's been tweaked an awful lot since then. The G4 is just a G3 with an added altivec unit. And the G5 is very similar with tweaks and additions, like an extra FPU unit.
The newest microarchitectures around today, the Athlon. And the Pentium 4 which Intel is giving up. New is not necessarily better.
And the G5 is faster than the Core Duo. But the G4 was even slower than the Pentium M, Freescale was not able to keep up with Intel.

The G5 is almost totally unrelated to the G4. All it shares is the instruction set (including Altivec). Different number and types of execution units, different pipeline lengths, cacheline size, out of order depth, number of rename registers, dispatch width, bus type and speed, basically everything. The G5 is descended from the POWER4 line, not the G3 line.

One thing I've been wondering is this:
Why does the 970MP (dual core G5) score SO much better on SPECcpu (which is single threaded) than the 970FX does?

I believe that the key point is that it used version 8 of IBM's compiler, rather than version 6 as the 970FX did. XlC 8 can automatically multithread and vectorize programs in certain situations, so what claims to be a single threaded non-vector benchmark may have ended up being a dual threaded vector benchmark, at least to a certain extent, allowing the 970MP to use some of its second core to help the first core out.

For reference:
2.5GHz 970MP SPECint: 1428
2.5GHz 970MP SPECfp: 2076
2.2GHz 970FX SPECint:1040
2.2GHz 970FX SPECfp: 1241
2.26GHz Pentium-M SPECint: 1839
2.26GHz Pentium-M SPECfp: 1375

note: Pentium-M here refers to Dothan, which is the predecessor to the Core Duo (Yonah).

Sources:
http://www.aceshardware.com/SPECmine/
http://www.heise.de/ct/05/24/018/
http://www.llnl.gov/asci/platforms/bluegene/papers/10mendell.pdf

<edit>
in response to the 64 bit posts: the main point of 64 bit is to allow for more than 4GB of ram.
</edit>