Are G5's lower speeds equivalent to Intels higher MHz?

blascockblascock
Posted:
in General Discussion edited January 2014
Hi, i was wondering how come G5s are hyped up when theyre really slower then intels? i was looking at www.systemshootout.org and they say that a 1.8Ghz G5 is equivalent to a 2.8Ghz p4. is this true?

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 6
    ericeasonericeason Posts: 118member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by Blascock

    Hi, i was wondering how come G5s are hyped up when theyre really slower then intels? i was looking at www.systemshootout.org and they say that a 1.8Ghz G5 is equivalent to a 2.8Ghz p4. is this true?



    Yes, it is true. My 1.25ghz g4 powerbook is much faster than my family's 1.8ghz p4.
  • Reply 2 of 6
    blascockblascock Posts: 153member
    REEAAAAAALLLY... pretty cool
  • Reply 3 of 6
    existenceexistence Posts: 991member
    It really depends. For most things, a 1.8 GHz G5 is about equal to a 2.4GHz P4C (800MHz FSB). For 3D and things floating-point intensive, G5s get clobbered by AMD Athlon64 and Opterons.



    http://www.geocities.com/sw_perf/



    I would take anything you read at www.systemshootout.org with a huge game of salt as most of the comparisons are misleading, poorly justified, and many times outright lies to make the Mac come out ahead.



  • Reply 4 of 6
    talksense101talksense101 Posts: 1,738member
    You are comparing Apples to Oranges. What matters is the ability to get your work done without hassle. Unless you are stuck looking at a hour glass while the computer runs at 100% CPU capacity for a long time, the computer you use is fast enough for your requirements.



    On a note, Intel excels on integer operations and PowerPC excels on FP operations. The real world is a mixture of both instruction sets. The Mac suffers on gaming performance as most game engines are not optimized to make use of the velocity engine and the new Open GL features. Most are ports from the Windoze world.
  • Reply 5 of 6
    kiwi-in-dckiwi-in-dc Posts: 102member
    As has been pointed out, speed is not everything for most people.



    If I am someone like Weta Digital (who did the SFX for LOTR), then I want my render farm to be as fast as possible with the software I use. I'll also specifically tune my software for the CPU I'm using. Based on that, I would almost certainly choose Opteron, Xeon or Athlon64 blade servers running Linux (which they did).



    If I'm someone who does a lot of digital video editing, then I would based the decision on my preferred editing tool. I like Final Cut Pro, so I don't really care about the raw performance, just whether or not I can get the job done fast enough, so I'm quite happy with a 2x2.0 G5 - would I like the G5 to be faster? Of course - time is money, but it's fast enough.



    If my preferred tool were e.g. Avid, I might think about a different platform and run Avid on Windows XP.



    The arguments over elegance of Mac over Windows are getting increasingly moot, especially if most of your work is done in applications rather than the OS. In that case, you're really comparing the elegance of e.g. Avid vs. FCP. That comes down to personal preference.



    Lastly, if you are a gearhead who only wants to see the fastest possible frame rates in Halo 2, then the answer is currently an Athlon64 FX processor and a stonking fast video card like the nVidia 6800.



    So, IMO there is little point getting into arguments of which is faster. That's taking a very one dimensional view of the issue.
  • Reply 6 of 6
    uberspleefuberspleef Posts: 22member
    My 2 cents...



    The 'which is faster' debate becomes moot when you spend hours cleaning viruses off your PC. The fastest P4 will get dusted by the slowest G3 if you have to spend all day cleaning virii, worms, etc, off your M$ boxen.



    Not something that you [currently] have to worry about with Mac.
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