[Ti] XBench 800 MHZ DVI compared with 1.6 GHZ 64MB VRAM (Part 1)

[Chris Olson]

On Feb 5, 2005, at 9:00 AM, Lisbeth Zachs wrote:

> Why do you want us to look at all this figures? Prove something or 
> comfort yourself you have done a good choice by not buying a new PB? 
> :-)

Actually, it is quite interesting.  To add to the fun, below is the cpu 
results from my PowerMac G4/1.42 DP workstation.  This machine uses the 
last "real" G4's that were built, running 2 MB of 3:1 L3 DDR cache with 
a short pipeline.  This is basically the same processor family as 
Robert has in his 800 Ti, except the more high performance version of 
it.

Some general observations:
1.) The G5 is a floating point monster, and thus achieves high cpu 
scores based on floating point performance.  On integer performance the 
G5 sucks.

2.) The G4 7455 Apollo is more efficient than the G5 per clock cycle, 
and actually outperforms the G5 on many day-to-day operations that 
don't depend heavily on floating point performance.

3.) Apple has resorted to Intel-style marketing to sell new hardware.  
People have been programmed into thinking the higher the "G" number, 
and more megahertz it clocks, then it's better.  This is not 
necessarily true.  They've dropped the L3 cache and deepened the 
pipeline in order to get faster clock, but in the process haven't 
gained anything in throughput, actually going backwards in work done 
per clock cycle.

4.) Those who own 800 MHz, 867 Mhz, and 1.0 GHz Ti's with the L3 cache 
can rest assured that there's no need to upgrade just from a 
performance standpoint.  Any gains in performance will probably not be 
very noticeable in your daily workflow.

Results	179.43	
System Info		
Xbench Version		1.1.3
System Version		10.3.7 (7S215)
Physical RAM			2048 MB
Model				PowerMac3,6
Processor			PowerPC G4x2 @ 1.42 GHz
Version				7455 (Apollo) v3.3
L1 Cache				32K (instruction), 32K (data)
L2 Cache				256K @ 1.42 GHz
L3 Cache				2048K @ 4.15 GHz
Bus Frequency		167 MHz
Video Card			ATY,RV250
Drive Type			IBM-IC35L090AVV207-0
	CPU Test	182.91	
GCD Loop			176.76	6.89 Mops/sec
Floating Point Basic	176.66	638.11 Mflop/sec
AltiVec Basic			175.56	5.09 Gflop/sec
vecLib FFT			178.12	2.77 Gflop/sec
Floating Point Library	176.09	7.05 Mops/sec
Thread Test			192.75	
Computation			180.35	2.43 Mops/sec, 4 threads
Lock Contention		206.96	2.60 Mlocks/sec, 4 threads