Apple's Mac Pro - A True PowerMac Successor
by Anand Lal Shimpi on August 16, 2006 12:27 PM EST- Posted in
- Mac
iWork '06 Performance with Pages and Keynote
Now let's shift our attention to Apple's iWork suite, with Pages 2 and Keynote 3. For the Pages test we simply timed how long it would take to export a 116 page document to PDF. This test is single threaded.
Pretty much all of Apple's applications fare very well on the new Intel processors, and Pages is no exception. With no benefit to quad cores over dual, the Mac Pro 2.0GHz is noticeably faster than the PowerMac G5 and the 2.66GHz model simply puts it to shame.
For Keynote, there are two tests that we ran, both involving exporting a presentation. The first test exports the presentation to a PowerPoint (.ppt) file, which is a task that is pretty common for Keynote users:
Once again we see a very strong showing by the new Mac Pro. If you're looking at shaving some cost off of the system, you can always downgrade to the 2.0GHz CPU and still come out faster than a high end PowerMac G5.
The next test is exporting a smaller presentation to a Quicktime file, using the default export settings. This test is multithreaded.
Quicktime encoding seems to be a strong point of the G5 as it gives the Mac Pro a good run for its money here. A quad core PowerMac G5 could probably compete with the 2.66GHz Mac Pro in this case, although it would not be able to touch the top of the line 3GHz Mac Pro. The Mac Pro is most likely limited by a couple of factors here: 1) the additional latency and lower usable bandwidth of FB-DIMMs aren't too great for its hungry architecture, and 2) Quicktime carries very few SSEn optimizations to begin with, giving the G5 a bit of a performance advantage here.
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plinden - Saturday, August 19, 2006 - link
No point in arguing with this guy - he's shown just how much he knows about the subject. How could someone regularly read AnandTech and not know about EFI? And then profess to have confused it with some obscure mobo manufacturer?Oddly enough, I can't find any motherboards for sale manufactured by a company called EFI - either it's very obscure or he's making it up. I wonder which one it is?
michael2k - Friday, August 18, 2006 - link
EFI isn't a manufacturer, it stands for "Extensible Firmware Interface", see the link in the other post.Lian Li had an aluminum case first, but Apple's design was COPIED by Lian Li. Read the Anandtech article in which half the comments for the case review claim "G5 ripoff".
plinden - Friday, August 18, 2006 - link
I laughed out loud at this. You're absolutely right, EFI is no DFI or ASUS, not even close.
You've just proved you know fuck all about this. I suggest you read up on EFI (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extensible_Firmware_I...">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extensible_Firmware_I... before posting about this in the future.
I'm not going to tell you makes the Mac motherboards. I'll leave that up to you to research.
Petoschka - Wednesday, April 1, 2020 - link
Well, my Junk Pro from early 2008 is still running.pervisanathema - Wednesday, August 16, 2006 - link
I want one. :otakeshi7 - Tuesday, January 7, 2014 - link
Just a small correction on page 2: The Power Mac G5 PCI-E also has 3 USB 2.0 ports on the rear panel.