No more mysteries: Apple's G5 versus x86, Mac OS X versus Linux

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• mongo lloyd - Tuesday, June 7, 2005 - link

  At least the non-ECC RAM, that is.

• mongo lloyd - Tuesday, June 7, 2005 - link

  Any reason for why you weren't using RAM with lower timings on the x86 processors? Shouldn't there at least have been a disclaimer?

• jhagman - Tuesday, June 7, 2005 - link

  OK, this clears it up, thanks.
  
  One little thing still, what is the number you are giving in the ab results table? Is it requests per second or perhaps the transfer rate?
  
  

• demuynckr - Tuesday, June 7, 2005 - link

  jhagman:
  As i mentioned before, we used gcc 3.3.3 for all linux, and gcc 3.3 mac compiler on apple, because that was the standard one.
  I did a second flops test with the gcc 4.0 compiler included on the Tiger cd, and the flops are much better when compiled with the -mcpu=g5 option which did not seem available when using the gcc 3.3 Apple compiler.
  As for ab i used these settings,
  ab -n 100000 -n x http://localhost/
  
  x for the various concurrencies: 5,20,50,100,150.
  

• spinportal - Monday, June 6, 2005 - link

  Guess there's no one arguing that the PPC is not keeping its paces with the current market, but rather OS/X able to do Big Iron computing. And if rumors be true, where will you be able to get a PPC built once Apple drops IBM for Intel?
  In a Usenet debate in 93, Torvalds and Tannenbaum go roasting Mach microkernel vs. the death of Linux. Seems Linus' work will be seeing more light of day, and Mach go the way of the dodo. Will Apple rewrite OS/X for Intel x86/64? As far as practical business sense, that's like shooting off one's leg foot.

• spinportal - Monday, June 6, 2005 - link

• jhagman - Monday, June 6, 2005 - link

  Could you please give the exact method of testing apache with ab? It is really hard to try to redo the tests when one does not know which methodology was used. The amount of clients and switches of ab would be appreciated.
  
  Also an answer to why Apple's newest gcc (4.0) was not used would be an interesting one and did you _really_ use gcc 3.3.3 and not Apple's gcc?
  
  Other than these omissions I found the article very interesting, thanks.
  

• demuynckr - Monday, June 6, 2005 - link

  Yes I have read the article, I also personally compiled the microbenchmarks on linux as well as on the PPC, and I can tell you I used gcc 3.3 on Mac for all compilation needs :).

• webflits - Monday, June 6, 2005 - link

  demuynckr, did your read the article?
  
  "So, before we start with application benchmarks, we performed a few micro benchmarks compiled on all platforms with the SAME gcc 3.3.3 compiler. "
  
  
  BTW I ran the same tests using Apple's version of gcc 3.3
  As you can see my 2.0Ghz now beats the 2.5Ghz on 5 of the 8 tests, and a 2.7Ghz G5 would be on par with the Opteron 250 when you extrapolate the results.
  
  Lets face it, Anandtech screwed up by using a crippled compiler for the G5 tests
  
  
  ----------------------------
  GCC 3.3/OSX 10.4.1/2.0GHz G5
  
  FLOPS C Program (Double Precision), V2.0 18 Dec 1992
  
  Module Error RunTime MFLOPS
  (usec)
  1 4.0146e-13 0.0140 997.2971
  2 -1.4166e-13 0.0108 648.4622
  3 4.7184e-14 0.0089 1918.5122
  4 -1.2546e-13 0.0139 1076.8597
  5 -1.3800e-13 0.0312 928.9079
  6 3.2374e-13 0.0182 1596.1407
  7 -8.4583e-11 0.0348 344.3954
  8 3.4855e-13 0.0196 1527.6638
  
  Iterations = 512000000
  NullTime (usec) = 0.0004
  MFLOPS(1) = 827.5658
  MFLOPS(2) = 673.7847
  MFLOPS(3) = 1037.6825
  MFLOPS(4) = 1501.7226

• demuynckr - Monday, June 6, 2005 - link

  Just to clear things up: on linux the gcc 3.3.3 was used, on macintosh gcc 3.3 was used (the one that was included with the OS).