Apple - Power Mac G5 - Performance

Measuring the world's fastest personal computer.

The PowerPC G5 out-shoots the Pentium 4 in a battery of tests. But it’s in the rough-and-tumble of real-world performance that the G5 really comes into its own — shredding the PC’s reputation in the process.

The Power Mac G5 puts tremendous creative firepower at your disposal. Your unfair advantages start with the PowerPC G5, the first 64-bit desktop processor, running at clock speeds of up to 2GHz. Combine that with a 1GHz frontside bus, an advanced system controller, ultrafast 400MHz 128-bit memory and industry-leading expansion, and you begin to understand why the Power Mac G5 is the kind of machine a PC wouldn’t want to compete for a job against.

SPECint_base2000 and SPECfp_base2000 measure the speed of a single task — either an integer calculation or a floating-point calculation — executing on a single processor. Each test measures how long the processor takes to complete the benchmark set of single tasks.

SPECint_rate_base2000 and SPECfp_rate_base2000 recognize multiple processors and more demonstrate the performance of a dual processor system

SPECint_rate_base2000 and SPECfp_rate_base2000 recognize multiple processors and more demonstrate the performance of a dual processor system

The “SPEC rate” metrics - SPECint_rate_base2000 and SPECfp_rate_base2000, recognize multiple processors and more accurately demonstrate the performance of a dual processor system — which are, of course, the fastest systems. The results should make your pulse race just a little bit faster.

Throughput champion
The SPEC CPU2000 benchmark suite is the recognized industry standard for assessing processing performance. SPEC developed the 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. The SPEC CPU2000 benchmark suite comprises four metrics that represent different performance characteristics of the system.

SPECint_base2000 and SPECfp_base2000 measure the speed of a single task — either an integer calculation or a floating-point calculation — executing on a single processor. Each test measures how long the processor takes to complete the benchmark set of single tasks relative to a SPEC-defined baseline score. The “SPEC rate” metrics, which recognize multiple processors, more accurately demonstrate the performance of a dual processor system. With SPECint_rate_base2000 and SPECfp_rate_base2000, the benchmark code is compiled and multiple copies are run concurrently — allowing both processors to work in parallel. SPEC rate tests determine the number of times a system can complete the benchmark per hour, also referred to as system throughput.

”World’s fastest” based on SPECrate® 2000 benchmark results and leading professional application performance tests against 3 GHz Pentium 4-based Dell Dimension 8300 and 3.06 GHz Dual Xeon-based Dell Precision 650. SPECrate® 2000 benchmarks run with GCC 3.3 and independently tested, full report available from Veritest; professional applications tested by Apple, June 2003.

The dual 2GHz Power Mac G5 ran 45 Adobe Photoshop 7 filters 2.2 times faster than the 3GHz Pentium 4-based system and almost twice as fast as the dual 3.06GHz Xeon-based system. In fact, even the 1.6GHz single-processor Power Mac G5 was 50 percent faster than the 3GHz Pentium 4-based system.

Design and print pro
The Power Mac G5 delivers a significant performance leap that will delight design and publishing professionals. More system memory and a faster memory architecture let you manipulate massive image files and layouts entirely in RAM, thus reducing the need for the G5 to keep accessing the hard drive while you perform these actions. And other hardware features — like integrated Gigabit Ethernet, DVD burning and fast Serial ATA hard drives — put design and print workflows on a very fast track.

It helps that the Power Mac G5 comes with Mac OS X, the world’s most powerful operating system. With so many graphics-friendly technologies and attributes, Mac OS X thrives in a studio environment. ColorSync, for instance, ensures consistent, accurate color. AppleScript makes it easy to manage repetitive tasks consistently across your workflow. And a palette of elegant typestyles with powerful font management features built in gives you the tools you need for cutting-edge design. What’s more, Mac OS X’s multitasking and memory management strengths let you work in more applications than ever before.

Apple ran the Adobe Photoshop tests using a 600MB Photoshop file and a suite of 45 commonly used Photoshop actions, including file saving, image adjustments, mode changes, and filters. We measured the time to execute each filter or function and compared the performance of all actions using an indexed score. The files were stored entirely in RAM, making this a good test of each system’s processor and memory bandwidth capabilities.

To demonstrate the superiority of the Power Mac G5, Apple conducted tests using Adobe Photoshop, the most popular application among creative professionals. Photoshop is an effective cross-platform measure of system performance because it has been optimized for both Macintosh and Windows platforms. It even takes advantage of the latest processor technologies on both platforms: SSE2 in the Pentium 4 and the Xeon, and Velocity Engine in the PowerPC G5.

The dual 2GHz Power Mac G5 with Logic Platinum 6.1 can play 115 plug-ins, compared with a maximum of 35 on the Dell Dimension 8300 and 81 on the Dell Precision 650 each with Cubase SX 1.051. More impressively, the 1.6GHz single-processor Power Mac G5 played 50 percent more plug-ins than the 3GHz Pentium 4-based system.

Music and audio maestro
The Power Mac G5 supports more audio tracks with real-time effects and more software instruments than any previous desktop system in history, giving audio pros a wealth of creative resources in a native environment. In addition, Mac OS X Core Audio offers a scalable platform that supports 32-bit high-resolution audio, a single plug-in called Audio Units for DSP and software Instruments, and plug-and-play connectivity for modern and legacy audio gear. And the built-in optical S/PDIF connects to other audio equipment for pristine sound quality — without those pesky ground loops.

To quantify the performance advantages of the Power Mac G5 for audio production, Apple tested two of the industry leaders in professional audio software: eMagic's Logic Platinum for the Macintosh and Steinberg's Cubase SX 1.051 for the PC. We created a processor-intensive project containing multiple unique audio tracks; assigned five default reverb plug-ins to each of the audio tracks; and tested each platform to see which could play more plug-ins.

Testing BLAST with common searches using a word size of more than 11, the Power Mac G5 far outperformed the Pentium 4-based system and the dual Xeon-based system, and nearly five times faster at the long word length of 40. This dramatic performance advantage enables researchers to use the Power Mac for computing more specific and more accurate comparisons at longer word length searches — operations that can be painfully slow on other desktop systems.

Hmmer Performance Graph

The dual 2GHz Power Mac G5 performed the HMMer search nearly seven times faster than the 3GHz Pentium 4-based system and almost four times faster than the dual 3.06GHz Xeon-based workstation — clearly demonstrating the advantages of the Velocity Engine and symmetric multiprocessing.

Science and technology genius
The 64-bit Power Mac G5 puts high-speed data analysis and 3D visualization within your grasp. With an optimized Velocity Engine and two floating-point units, the PowerPC G5 performs huge computations dramatically faster. High-capacity, high-speed memory enables scientists to manipulate large models and data sets quickly and efficiently. And since Mac OS X is UNIX based, it’s easy to run UNIX software — such as BLAST and HMMer — on the same system as your office and productivity applications.

To demonstrate the performance advantages of the Power Mac G5 for processorintensive scientific analysis, Apple used Basic Local Alignment Search Tool, or BLAST. BLAST is a popular open source biotechnology application used by life science researchers to find matches in DNA and protein sequences — a highly processorintensive task.

BLAST searches are based on word size, or the number of nucleotide pairs specified by the researcher to register as a match. For example, a word size of 40 means that two sets of genetic code have 40 nucleotides in common. Different word sizes are used for different kinds of research, and users can adjust word size to the sensitivity appropriate to their needs.With long-word-size, or high-performance, searches, the researcher is looking for similarities between DNA sequences that are nearly identical — for example, comparing DNA samples from two different mice. For short-word-size searches (fewer than 11), the researcher is comparing more distantly related sequences, such as mouse DNA versus human DNA. These searches require high resolution in order to find the small matches between dissimilar sequences.

HMMer is another application that demonstrates the performance advantages of the Power Mac G5 with Velocity Engine for processor-intensive scientific analysis. HMMer is a genome sequence — matching application that uses Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) to identify similarities in genetic structures — a critical task in areas such as speech recognition and protein and DNA sequence analysis. By representing the properties of a sequence family as a statistic, an HMM makes it possible to perform highly sensitive database searches.

Professional applications tested by Apple in June 2003 using preproduction Power Mac G5 units and, with the exception of HMMer, application software optimized for the PowerPC G5.

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--	PowerMac G5	Juli.
-	64-bit breakthrough	2003