Originally posted by: iwantanewcomputer
Originally posted by: The MACdaddy
Originally posted by: Adn4n
Dual processors? I'm I mistaken when I say that a Dual Opteron system would be better?
Yep.
You can't make a blanket statement like that and expect it to hold any water. Through looking a various bench tests I've come to the conclusion the Dual Opterons and Dual G5s are roughly clock for clock the same performance wise in real world test. EX: video editing, Photoshop, 3D rendering. Macs are better (barely) on some and the Opterons are better (barely) with others. The other thing Is the cost/performance is about the same too. Anyone fully versed on both platforms would easily come to the same conclusion.
this is very true. i'm glad to see some people who actually look at benches before making comparisons. the processors are very similar clock for clock and performance per dollar. the thing is though that the rest of the mac system sucks. i can't really say the motherboard/chipset sucks cause there is nothing to compare with, but the memory is slow, high latency, and way overpriced. video cards?- i'm not even going to go there. a 9600xt in a 3000 dollar computer. I'm not sure but i don't think you can get decent raid or scsi solutions for macs either.
all in all, a dual opteron system would kill any g5 system with equivalent processing power in applications that are memory bandwidth or latency dependent once you put in a few extra sticks of fast memory and run two processors in dual channel.
the g5 is a great processor, the mac system sucks
You have NO IDEA what you are typing into your computer. OMG. Please. This information is NOT hard to find.
"G5 processor has its own dedicated bidirectional interface to the system controller. That?s a mind-boggling 20GB per second of total bandwidth on dual 2.5GHz systems"
http://www.apple.com/powermac/architecture.html
Read through that page...
"Serial ATA, Gigabit Ethernet, FireWire, USB 2.0 and optical digital and analog audio are all integrated through two bidirectional 800MHz HyperTransport interconnects for a maximum throughput of 1.6GB per second."
"The Power Mac G5 can hold two internal Serial ATA drives that support 1.5Gbps throughput per channel (equivalent to a 150 MBps data rate)."
"What?s more, the data streams integrate clock signals along with the data, allowing the frontside bus to work at speeds of up to 1.25GHz for an astonishing 10GB per second of aggregate bandwidth."
This hardly equates to "mac system sucks" in anybody's book that has a clue.
Maybe you ought to look here too:
http://www.hypertransport.org/
And check out the Apple logo on the page as one of the founding members.
Latency on RAM does NOT make a hugh difference at the user level. It doesn't change the 6.4GB memory throughput that the RAM is capable of. BTW there's nothing stopping you from buying better ram. NOBODY buys ram through Apple that knows what they're doing.
OR her some reliable Photoshop scores:
HERE
Notice all the G5's and Opterons at the top? Wow! Not bad for and app as "memory bandwidth or latency dependent" as PS is.
I'm not saying that G5's PWN Opterons... ANY blanket statement is stupid. They are fairly similar performance wise.
Yes you can get RAID/SCSI solutions for Macs - you can even fit up to 5 HD's in a G5 and RAID them, or go external:
http://www.apple.com/xserve/raid/