[MacDV] Re: G5

[Peter Tattersall]

The keynote is available on the Apple site - go to the QuickTime 
section. It's a two-hour streaming video, but you can move forward to 
the second half of the video if you just want to check out the hardware.

The apps generally ran about twice as fast on the Mac Dual G5 as on the 
Dell Duel Xeon. While it _may_ be that the examples were carefully 
selected, it was a convincing demo in real world applications. As for 
the benchmarks, they were paid for by Apple but were carried out by a 
reputable third-party lab. The conditions were set up to exercise the 
same software on each machine, using a compiler common to both 
platforms.

The complaints generally were that
	1) since Apple paid for the tests, the testing wasn't unbiased (as 
though Dell's tests would be). Apple published details on the test so 
the biases could be evaluated. They obviously felt that this would 
sidestep the issue of bias, but True Believers for both Mac and PC were 
not swayed.
	2) the compiler on the Dell generate slow code, so it wasn't a fair 
test (but then the test would have been a test of the hardware and the 
software together - and the compiler on the Mac didn't generate the 
fastest code either).
	3) even the benchmarks showed that the Mac was still slower than the 
Dell in integer arithmetic, though it beat the Dell handily in floating 
point. The claim was then made that integer arithmetic is more 
important than floating point, so this shows the Dell is better. I 
can't speak to that: I always used to prefer integer arithmetic when 
doing graphics processing, but that was a long time ago, and I'm not 
sure if that would be true today since I don't do that kind of work any 
more {and when I did it, they were 8-bit micros!).

I'm more interested in the real-world implications of the G5 than the 
benchmarks, so the application demos were more convincing. I'd like to 
see FCP 4 running on a G5 with real-time edits.

On Wednesday, June 25, 2003, at 01:15  PM, Russ at Skyline wrote:

> I heard that the keynote showed some demos of real world apps that were
> pretty amazing. Anyone confirm / deny?