More details please of any kind. Especially out of the box experience and real world use impressions.
Seconded. If you check your PowerMac G5 EULA, it clearly states "new G5 users incur a sacred duty to share their excitement with other Apple customers by offering descriptions and pictures to permit others as accurate a vicarious owner-experience as current technology affords. This includes, but is not limited to, photographs of the keyboard and mouse and subjective assessments of responsiveness and fan noise."
Remember, Apple Legal is not to be underestimated.
Based on benchmarks I've seen, the G4e is about two or three times faster on CPU-bound AltiVec code than the G5. However the Power Mac G5 is almost that much faster than the Power Mac G4 when it comes to memory bandwidth to the AltiVec unit.
The AltiVec Fractal application benefits almost not at all from the high memory bandwidth and also suffers greatly because of the slower AltiVec unit. This particular app isn't moving a lot of data around, it's just loading a few coordinates into some vector registers and iterating a simple mathematical operation on them (basically square and add) thousands of times really, really fast.
Most of what people practically use AltiVec to do, though, is speed up media apps like QuickTime, digital video applications, and so on. These applications depend as much on delivering huge amounts of data to the AltiVec unit really fast as they do on raw AltiVec CPU performance, so they'll be much better served by a Power Mac G5.
Bottom line is that the 970 is twice as fast at regular, ordinary floating point code as the G4e at the same processor speed, plus it has a huge memory bandwidth advantage, and this was traded off against AltiVec performance. In fact, that arstechnica.com article above speculates that the only reason the 970 has AltiVec compatible operations is that Apple insisted on it for the G5, and it was added late in the design process.
So, because of all the above factors, you'll probably see (I'm guessing here) performance on AltiVec capable digital video and audio apps that roughly tracks the increase in clock speed between the G4 machines and the G5, and this is all because of the memory bandwidth.
However, for applications that rely on double-precision floating-point (such as any 3D application) or that haven't been specially rewritten for AltiVec (such as any cross-platform numerical code) the G5 will SPANK the G4 at a similar clock speed and scale up from there.
The reasons for the G4's much stronger performance in AltiVec ...[snip]
It's not that bad. As the author of the article later found out in an interview, the Altivec unit it's as "bad" as it first seemed to be. A lot of the info in that article, particularly about altivec, is just assumptions anyway.
The reason the G5 AV performance seems to be alot lower than the G4 is that it's running code full of DST's (which is the G4 way of prefetching data, but the G5 has it's own, fully automatic way), which creates serialization of code execution, and thus slows it down a whole lot! It's very easy to fix this problem, but it's something that has to be done.
In my opinion, they really engineered the inside. I've never seen a PC manufacturer go through this much trouble to make access and expandability this easy.
Yes, and to top it off, they engineered out a second optical drive bay and extra drive mounting brackets. Still can't wait to get one, just not looking forward to having firewire drives around.
I didn't run to much on it. I currently have a dual 1.25 with 23" cinema display, so tomorrow, I'll do some fooling around. Any recomendations on what I should look for in comparing, any easy ways to compare?
I'd like a report on the X factor ripping 160 kbps AAC files from Audio CDs. How fast does it rip - the number to the left of the letter X in the iTunes window during rips. Did you get a SuperDrive or a Combo Drive? Thanks.
I'd like a report on the X factor ripping 160 kbps AAC files from Audio CDs. How fast does it rip - the number to the left of the letter X in the iTunes window during rips. Did you get a SuperDrive or a Combo Drive? Thanks.
Obviously he got a Superdrive...I don't know many people that wouldn't...but this is an office, so they might have ditched it to save money.
Obviously he got a Superdrive...I don't know many people that wouldn't...but this is an office, so they might have ditched it to save money.
You can gain a G5 compatible FW Combo Drive for FREE by ordering your G5 with Combo and then using the $200 saved to buy a SuperDrive aftermarket for $143 (Pioneer DVR-105) and swaping them out and putting the Combo drive in an external FW case with the other $57. It makes a lot of sense to order the Combo drive instead of the Superdrive.
If you're still around richcigar, please run the Altivec Fractal at the default settings with Altivec and MP turned off (on the 1.6 and the dual 1.25). That should give us a good comparison of scalar code execution speed for CPU-bound calculations. It would also sidestep possible altivec pre-fetch commands that may be present in the code.
Comments
Originally posted by Ensign Pulver
More details please of any kind. Especially out of the box experience and real world use impressions.
Seconded. If you check your PowerMac G5 EULA, it clearly states "new G5 users incur a sacred duty to share their excitement with other Apple customers by offering descriptions and pictures to permit others as accurate a vicarious owner-experience as current technology affords. This includes, but is not limited to, photographs of the keyboard and mouse and subjective assessments of responsiveness and fan noise."
Remember, Apple Legal is not to be underestimated.
Congrats!!
AltiVec: The G4e vs. the 970
Based on benchmarks I've seen, the G4e is about two or three times faster on CPU-bound AltiVec code than the G5. However the Power Mac G5 is almost that much faster than the Power Mac G4 when it comes to memory bandwidth to the AltiVec unit.
The AltiVec Fractal application benefits almost not at all from the high memory bandwidth and also suffers greatly because of the slower AltiVec unit. This particular app isn't moving a lot of data around, it's just loading a few coordinates into some vector registers and iterating a simple mathematical operation on them (basically square and add) thousands of times really, really fast.
Most of what people practically use AltiVec to do, though, is speed up media apps like QuickTime, digital video applications, and so on. These applications depend as much on delivering huge amounts of data to the AltiVec unit really fast as they do on raw AltiVec CPU performance, so they'll be much better served by a Power Mac G5.
Bottom line is that the 970 is twice as fast at regular, ordinary floating point code as the G4e at the same processor speed, plus it has a huge memory bandwidth advantage, and this was traded off against AltiVec performance. In fact, that arstechnica.com article above speculates that the only reason the 970 has AltiVec compatible operations is that Apple insisted on it for the G5, and it was added late in the design process.
So, because of all the above factors, you'll probably see (I'm guessing here) performance on AltiVec capable digital video and audio apps that roughly tracks the increase in clock speed between the G4 machines and the G5, and this is all because of the memory bandwidth.
However, for applications that rely on double-precision floating-point (such as any 3D application) or that haven't been specially rewritten for AltiVec (such as any cross-platform numerical code) the G5 will SPANK the G4 at a similar clock speed and scale up from there.
-- Mark
(this is the important stuff!) ;-)
What brand is the SuperDrive?
PLEASE.
Sure does look spatial in that thing?
Edit:
Well, it could be mounted at the top. This CRT screen I have at work sucks hard. Brightness is kind of low.
Originally posted by mark_wilkins
The reasons for the G4's much stronger performance in AltiVec ...[snip]
It's not that bad. As the author of the article later found out in an interview, the Altivec unit it's as "bad" as it first seemed to be. A lot of the info in that article, particularly about altivec, is just assumptions anyway.
The reason the G5 AV performance seems to be alot lower than the G4 is that it's running code full of DST's (which is the G4 way of prefetching data, but the G5 has it's own, fully automatic way), which creates serialization of code execution, and thus slows it down a whole lot! It's very easy to fix this problem, but it's something that has to be done.
I'm DYING to know.
PS, thanks a lot, richcigar.
You instantly became the most famous guy into the Mac Community...
Please show us a little bit of the beast....
Originally posted by richcigar
In my opinion, they really engineered the inside. I've never seen a PC manufacturer go through this much trouble to make access and expandability this easy.
Yes, and to top it off, they engineered out a second optical drive bay and extra drive mounting brackets. Still can't wait to get one, just not looking forward to having firewire drives around.
Originally posted by richcigar
I didn't run to much on it. I currently have a dual 1.25 with 23" cinema display, so tomorrow, I'll do some fooling around. Any recomendations on what I should look for in comparing, any easy ways to compare?
I'd like a report on the X factor ripping 160 kbps AAC files from Audio CDs. How fast does it rip - the number to the left of the letter X in the iTunes window during rips. Did you get a SuperDrive or a Combo Drive? Thanks.
Originally posted by piwozniak
Maybe Richcigar was blown out of his office ?
ah ah ah...
Very funny
It sounds like this could be real...
Originally posted by Multimedia
I'd like a report on the X factor ripping 160 kbps AAC files from Audio CDs. How fast does it rip - the number to the left of the letter X in the iTunes window during rips. Did you get a SuperDrive or a Combo Drive? Thanks.
Obviously he got a Superdrive...I don't know many people that wouldn't...but this is an office, so they might have ditched it to save money.
PLEASE POST KEYBOARD & MOUSE PICTURES!!!
Originally posted by Placebo
Obviously he got a Superdrive...I don't know many people that wouldn't...but this is an office, so they might have ditched it to save money.
You can gain a G5 compatible FW Combo Drive for FREE by ordering your G5 with Combo and then using the $200 saved to buy a SuperDrive aftermarket for $143 (Pioneer DVR-105) and swaping them out and putting the Combo drive in an external FW case with the other $57. It makes a lot of sense to order the Combo drive instead of the Superdrive.