[MacDV] Re: G5 - is it really that fast?

[Michael Murie]

on 6/25/03 4:09 PM, Frank Flynn at frank at declan.com wrote:

> http://www.haxial.com/spls-soapbox/apple-powermac-G5/
> 
> The article seem to raise some valid points about how the tests were
> conducted to the G5's advantage and to the Pentium's disadvantage.


Apple has denied they fiddled the results:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/39/31416.html

Apple denies fiddling G5, Xeon tests
By Tony Smith  
Posted: 25/06/2003 at 10:21 GMT

Apple has defended its benchmark comparison of its new Power Mac G5 and two
Dell Pentium 4 and Xeon-based systems, stating that the tests performed and
the way those tests were conducted is all above board.

Far from adjusting the Intel-based machines to yield lower scores, Apple's
contract tester, VeriTest, actually chose settings to improve the Dell
scores, Apple's VP of hardware product marketing, Greg Joswiak, told
Slashdot yesterday.

...

According to Joswiak, HT was disabled in the SPECint and SPECfp base tests
because it yielded higher scores than when HT was enabled. VeriTest did keep
HT switched on when it performed its SPECint and SPECfp rate tests.

Indeed, a number of Register readers have pointed out a report on Dell's web
site that supports Joswiak's claim. Essentially, it says HT is good for
server applications, but less well suited to compute-intensive apps.

... 

Joswiak also said that the test conducted by VeriTest did make use of the
Pentium 4's SSE2 SIMD engine for floating-point operations. Claims that it
didn't were based on a misreading of the compile flags listed at the end of
the VeriTest report...

Joswiak admitted that the Dell machines would have scored higher if VeriTest
had used Intel's own compilers rather than GCC 3.3, but equally the G5 would
have rated higher if Apple had offered alternative PowerPC compilers. As we
noted in our report yesterday, VeriTest used GCC on both platforms to make
the comparison as close as possible....