Originally posted by: Sunner
Drag, come on man, everyone ain't worth $hit unless it can run Quake III at 182534 FPS!
We bought a new UltraSPARC box a while back, man talk about a ripoff, it cost a buttload and can't even run XP!!!
hehe, damn straight.
What are you talking about dude? All the platforms have exactly 6.4GB/s of "cpu bandwith" because they all use the same sort of dual DDR 3200 memory subsytem.
Sure the memory bandwidth is a dual channel DDR setup. With a 6.4GB/s bandwidth, just like Opteron/AMD's setup. And that's the same as the quad channel P4 setup.
HOWEVER. That's not exactly what I was talking about.
Each CPU has it's own path to the chipset, which is set up quite a bit different from a x86 setup. They operate a 1/4 the speed of the CPU in DDR mode. Effectively making a 1ghz CPU dedicated bus to each proccessor.
THAT'S 8GB/s PER CPU. Or a 16GB/s in total for each CPU. Then each CPU can have it's own dedicated path directly into it's own stick of RAM.
That's what makes the g5 setup so cool.
It's designed up to be dedicated SMP proccessing archatecture.
It's all about the I/O.
Say your editing a video stream in real time. Say it's a mpeg2.
You have to decode it, edit it, play around with it, then encode it back to save it.
With 2 cpu's one CPU can be maxed out completely handing the encoding/decoding and controlling the IDE drives, while the other one is completely dedicated to the application your using.
With a regular x86 setup you can only (in reality) be doing one thing at a time. You just do it fast enough that it seems to be going at the same time.
However this causes issues with scedualling memory access and a whole other bunch of things that can degrade performance.
What is all that CPU power worth if you can't use it? Why do you think that HT in pentium 4s are all about?
They emulate SMP performance. This actually degrades performance on benchmarks and stuff, but makes multiproccessing quite a bit more responsive.
Well that's what the G5 is designed to do.
Dual Opterons running on linux would obliviate a G5... Apple has been touting the G5 as THE fastest for months.. They are great at paper launches. If it wasnt for AMD and IBM, Apple wouldnt even HAVE the technology for the G5.
Intel Vs AMD zealotry can be dealt with, but when Apple zealots appear, it just makes the whole discussion in a whole, assanine. Go back under your rock and get off Steve Job's nutsack.
Sure (whose nutsack are you on? moron).
But how many name brand dual Opteron setups your going to get for less then 3000 dollars? Not a whole lot.
If I wanted to I could go out and buy a IBM power4 setup with 16CPU's that would blow your imaginary Opteron setup out of the f****g water, but does that make Opteron a POS?
No. Opterons rock, too. I like them I would like a SMP setup, possibly even 4-way. It just depends on the purpose of the computer and how much money I have to spend.
Plus if you pay attention to how the CPU's work, you'd quickly realise that the G5 and Opteron are a great deal alike in how they work. This is because a large amount of the technology that AMD put into the Opteron can from IBM and was first used with the Power3/4/4+/5 line of proccessors, which is what also the Power970 is based off of.
The G5 is a SMP setup designed to be priced competatively with other commodity level PC's and workstations. The only thing within the price range that is SMP setup is the lower end Xeon workstations and the G5 does well against those in benchmarks.
here is a reference to a cinebench between different proccessors
So you see that the g5 does fairly well. However it always does well on cinebench so their you go.
After all, unlike a lot of windows people I can actually look at the computer platform objectively and taylor my purchases to what I use the computer for.
This is because Linux is platform independant. If I want to play games or do max proccessing power, I'd get a fast opteron/Athlon64, or a small cluster setup. If I am going to do multimedia stuff, or I want a computer that will still be usefull 5-6 years from now then I'd choose the Apple.