Power Mac G5 Notebokk Performance Test PDF Manual
All this performance begins with the 64-bit PowerPC G5 processor. Developed in collaboration with IBM and produced using state-of-the-art process technology, the PowerPC G5 yields clock speeds up to 2GHz. This breakthrough processing power combines with the industry’s fastest frontside bus, a point-to-point architecture, high-speed memory, and the latest I/O technologies. The result? The world’s fastest personal computer.3
How fast is it? Apple put the Power Mac G5 to the test against two top-of-the-line competitive systems. The Dell Dimension 8300, equipped with the latest 3GHz Pentium 4, provided a baseline for most of the tests. We also tested the Dell Precision Workstation 650 with dual 3.06GHz Xeon processors. Although the Power Mac G5 supports more memory than either of the Dell systems, all systems in each test were configured with equal amounts of memory.
For overall system performance, Apple relied on SPEC CPU2000, the most respected benchmark suite in the industry. For real-world performance, we tested popular applications for creative professionals, including Adobe Photoshop and Logic Platinum from Emagic. All Mac systems used Mac OS X v10.2 “Jaguar”; unless otherwise noted, the competitive systems used Windows XP Professional Service Pack 1. Test results clearly demonstrate the superior processing performance of the Power Mac G5, as well as faster performance in key application categories. We invite you to learn more about the capabilities of the Power Mac G5 with the 64-bit PowerPC G5 processor. The groundbreaking Power Mac G5 sets a new standard for desktop computing. It’s the industry’s first 64-bit personal computer, with the industry’s fastest frontside bus and the latest I/O technologies—including up to 500GB of internal Serial ATA storage4 and FireWire 800 for connecting high-performance devices.
Processor The PowerPC G5 features an entirely new superscalar, superpipelined execution core based on the architecture of the IBM POWER4 server processor. It has 12 discrete processing units that execute various types of calculations in parallel: an optimized Velocity Engine, two floating-point units, two integer units, two load/store units, and a unique three-component branch prediction unit. By arranging internal operations using an efficient group-tracking scheme, the PowerPC G5 can manage up to 215 in-flight instructions simultaneously, 70 percent more than the 126 instructions in the Pentium 4. Data bandwidth is further optimized thanks to a frontside bus—one on each processor in dual processor systems—running at up to 1GHz. This superfast interface provides 8-GBps throughput between each processor and the rest of the system, for an aggregate 16-GBps throughput in dual processor Power Mac G5 systems.
SPEC CPU2000
The Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation (SPEC) CPU2000 benchmark suite is the recognized industry standard for assessing processing performance. SPEC is a nonprofit organization of hardware and software vendors, universities, and consultants. They developed the SPEC CPU2000 benchmarks based on actual end-user applications. These tests depend on processor, memory subsystem, and compiler performance when executing integer and floating-point computations.
Apple hired an independent laboratory, VeriTest, to conduct the SPEC CPU2000 benchmark tests and provide documented results. Since SPEC CPU2000 measures the performance of both the hardware and the compiler, VeriTest normalized the compiler on both platforms to allow for a direct comparison of hardware performance alone. VeriTest used GCC—an open source compiler popular with programmers around the world—with similar settings on all systems. (Even though GCC cannot automatically generate Velocity Engine code for the PowerPC G5, settings included automatic generation of optimized SSE/SSE2 code for the Pentium 4 and the Xeon.) The Power Mac G5 used Mac OS X v10.2.7 (G5), and the Intel-based systems used Red Hat Linux 9.0.
Serial ATA Serial ATA is the next-generation industry-standard storage interface, replacing the Parallel ATA interface. Designed to keep pace with the demands of digital video creation and editing, audio storage and playback, and other data-intensive applications, Serial ATA supports a data rate of 150 MBps, removing the storage interface as a bottleneck. The Power Mac G5 features two internal Serial ATA drives, each on an independent bus—so there is no competition for drive performance, as with Parallel ATA. Apple tested storage performance using Bonnie, an open source benchmark, ported to Mac OS X by Apple. Bonnie measures the throughput of drive systems by writing to and reading from the disks using standard UNIX system calls, reporting results as maximum block read and write performance. A file-size setting of 2GB was used to ensure that the data was written to the disks and not only to the drive cache or to the system’s physical memory.
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