In response to the mounting pressure placed upon it by the ever widening megahertz gap, Apple has been hard at work behind the scenes for the past few years on its next generation of professional desktop Macs. The result is the Power Mac G5, which Apple has gleefully heralded as the world's fastest personal computer.
As with all such claims, particularly when they're made by Apple, this has sparked a huge amount of controversy in the computer industry. At the launch of the G5, Apple published a set of benchmark test results which showed the top-end model of the new Power Mac range, which has dual 2GHz processors, to be up to 42 per cent faster than a similarly specified dual 3.06GHz Intel Xeon-based workstation.
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The controversy surrounds exactly how these benchmark tests were performed and whether they were biased towards the Apple hardware. For example, the tests used the industry standard SPEC CPU 2000 benchmark suite to negate any bias, but the suite ran atop the cross-platform GCC compiler.
It has been argued that the Intel-based machines would have achieved better results using an Intel-optimised compiler, while the Mac received an unfair boost since the Mac architecture is optimised for GCC. On the other hand, the Intel systems' performance was optimised by running Linux rather than Windows, and configuring a host of additional settings in their favour.
There are plenty of other more technical arguments on both sides of the fence, and neither point of view is without merit. But the bottom line is that the performance of the Power Mac G5 is certainly in the same ballpark as high-end Intel workstations, something which certainly couldn't be said about its predecessor, the Power Mac G4. It's interesting to note that Apple hasn't published any performance comparisons with AMD Opteron-based systems, which are generally recognised to be faster than the competition.
As our benchmarking software runs on Windows only, we can't weigh in on this debate. The true test will come from real world performance, and whether Power Macs will save professional users' time compared to Intel and AMD systems. Suffice to say that in the time we spent with the dual 2GHz G5, it was blisteringly fast.
An important point to note about Apple's claim is that the Power Mac G5 is a personal computer, with the performance of a high-end workstation.
Apple is keen to point out that what drives its new machine is the world's first 64bit 'desktop processor' - another controversial claim, which really comes down to pricing. The Power Mac range starts at £1,549 for a single processor 1.6GHz PC, and goes up to a whopping £2,299 for the superfast dual 2GHz model, hardly the same price bracket as your typical desktop PC, particularly when you remember that Power Macs are sold without monitors.
These are also not the kinds of prices you'd expect to pay for a powerful workstation.
Read more about the processor, expansion and airflow of the Apple Power Mac G5 in the October 2003 issue.
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