Apple's Mac Pro - A True PowerMac Successor
by Anand Lal Shimpi on August 16, 2006 12:27 PM EST- Posted in
- Mac
Professional Application Performance with Final Cut Pro, Xcode and CineBench
Our first "Pro" application test uses Apple's famed Final Cut Pro 5.1.1. The test is simple, we are just rendering a video we dragged into our project:
If you spend a lot of time in Final Cut, you can't get faster than the Mac Pro. At 2.0GHz it's already faster than the PowerMac G5 (even when you extrapolate out the performance of the 2.7GHz G5).
Our next test is for all you developers out there, we're simply measuring build time using Xcode 2.4 and building our favorite OS X IM client: Adium. Compiling is very disk intensive but it's also quite CPU bound as well; while there's no benefit to quad processors when only compiling a single application there is a benefit to higher clock speeds.
The Mac Pro completely demolishes the PowerMac G5 in build time, cutting the time to build Adium almost in half. The performance improvement is tremendous and it echoes some of the feelings we've had when using Intel based Macs; anything involving I/O seems to be faster and smoother.
Our final professional benchmark is CineBench 9.5, which measures 3D rendering performance. Two versions of the benchmark are run, one that's single threaded and one that spawns as many threads as you have cores.
The single threaded test shows a reasonable advantage over the PowerMac G5, about 8% at the same clock speed. The PowerPC G5 architecture was no slouch and floating point performance was its strong point, thus even the almighty Woodcrest can't really put it to shame too much.
The multithreaded test shows the advantages of having four cores, as the Mac Pro maintains a significant lead. Note that the Mac Pro 2.66GHz held a 15.4% performance advantage over the PowerMac G5 in the single threaded test, but that grew to 19.4% in the multithreaded test. The performance scaling shows one of the advantages of Intel's shared L2 cache, making for better performance scaling when going from one to two cores.
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dborod - Monday, August 21, 2006 - link
I also miss the Keyboard II. As an alternative I use the TactilePro from Matias (tactilepro.com). To quote from their web site: "The Matias Tactile Pro Keyboard is built from the same premium keyswitch technology that Apple used in its original Apple Extended Keyboard, widely viewed as the best keyboard Apple ever made."I agree.
Maury Markowitz - Friday, August 18, 2006 - link
I actually use the Keyboard II. ON MY PC!Maury Markowitz - Wednesday, August 16, 2006 - link
You're basically asking why you should bother with a woman when you can "operate" with your hand. After all, you can do everything with your hand that you can do with a woman, right, so what could a woman offer?No, really, I'm not joking here. I'm using this blatently outrageous imagery to get my point across. There are things in life that you simply can not put into words, yet to claim they don't exist is obviously untrue. Try watching your kid being born some time, try putting THAT into words!
I didn't even know the answer myself until last winter. My friend was on a four-month trip, so he lent me his Mac while he was gone so I could handle his e-mail (he has a small company). Some things are not as good on the Mac as the PC, some things are just _different_, but a lot of things are better. There's no simpler way to say it.
There's no laundry-list of features that will convince you of this, you just have to try it for a while. It's entirely possible that you won't even notice much of a difference after trying it out. But I'm betting that's not true for the vast majority of people. In my experience the Mac simply looked better, ran smoother, and was much quieter than my PC. I wanted to buy one then and there, but the lack of games meant I'd need to keep a PC around as well, so it was very difficult to justify. Now that the new machines run Windows too, there's no good excuse any more. Now I'm saving up.
Maury
plinden - Wednesday, August 16, 2006 - link
An answer to this can only be a mix of objective and subjective, but this is what I like about OS X:* The OS is more stable and professional, easier to use and better looking than Windows or Linux (I've used Windows since Win3.1 and *nix since before that - it's maybe not more stable than Linux, but definitely much easier to use).
* I can do in OS X whatever I can do in Linux and Windows. (If you really need something like AutoCAD, go ahead and get a windows-only PC. It's cheaper than a Mac + XP install disks).
* I can install on a backup boot (without going through any WGA crap) on an external FireWire drive and USB2 (with the Intel Macs) without having to hack anything on the install disk.
* OS X is much more secure ... whether through obscurity or better design, it doesn't matter. You can't get infected with a virus or other malware. I tried hard to infect my backup install with that "virus" that was released back in February, but it couldn't do anything. Because I was running, as I normally do, without administrator privileges.
* You don't need to be administrator to be able to do anything ... yes that mostly the fault of third party developers who don't understand, but MS didn't do a lot to educate them on writing apps to be used as non-administrators.
* OS X is *nix, and I can clone my development environment across Linux and Solaris without needing to download and install something like cygwin (I'm a big fan of cygwin, but I would rather not have to use it).
* I can run OS X, Linux or Windows (if I really want it) on one machine.
* I can spend my time doing productive work, rather than running virus and spyware scans, defragging the hard drive or tweaking services.msc in Windows ... or trying to make sure I don't trash one of my Linux apps by installing a binary that doesn't work in my kernel version (because I didn't have time to get the source code and all dependencies and build with the correct version of gcc). I've enjoyed tweaking Windows and Linux in the past, but now I'm a productive member of society and just want to be able to meet my project deadlines.
Instead, why don't I rephrase your question and ask "what does Windows bring me that OS X doesn't?"
Assume, like 90+% of the general population, that I don't play graphics-intensive 3D games.
Desslok - Wednesday, August 16, 2006 - link
Nothing beats their current iLife software suite. At least nothing I have found comes close to it on the PC side, plus now that you can run XP on them you can have the best of both worlds. Albeit no SLI/Crossfire, but then again how many people really use SLI?retrospooty - Wednesday, August 16, 2006 - link
I keep asking the same question, and ilife keeps coming up as the answer, but no-one cares to explain what it is an/or why it is better then the PC equivalent. What is ilife, and why is it so great?Desslok - Wednesday, August 16, 2006 - link
Read the reviews on iLife if you want to know more. They can explain it much better than I.retrospooty - Wednesday, August 16, 2006 - link
Thanks, I did at your suggestion... So its a suite of iTunes, iPhoto, iMovie, iDVD, GarageBand, and iWeb... Oh boy, I am totally unimpressed. I have all that on my PC using various free crap. I am sure they are nice apps for what they do, but hardly worth purchasing (thus the reason they are free). That is SOOOO not a reason to buy a MAC over PC (to me anyhow). I prefer to build my own hardware and have a way faster system.plinden - Wednesday, August 16, 2006 - link
Unlike you, I've used both iLife and free crap (as you aptly call it), and apart from Picassa (as a replacement for iPhoto) there's no contest. I have been able to very quickly and easily put together DVDs of the kids for the rest of the family using iMovie and iDVD. Sure I have done something similar with Windows Movie Maker, but the result is nowhere near as good.But ignoring iLife (it's not one of the reasons I give for liking Macs) there is still no reason for me to switch back to Windows.
90% of my time on my computers is spent working ... that includes code development. Compilation time for my code on my Mac is the same as in Linux but is twice as fast per CPU cycle as in Windows.
So explain to me again why Macs are crap ... what? ... oh games. Right, well I guess I'm too cheap to spend thousands on a toy.
retrospooty - Wednesday, August 16, 2006 - link
I never said macs are crap specifically... I was just asking what the draw is. I would personally not buy ANY computer from ANY major manufacturer. Not Dell, not sony, gateway, Apple, or any other manufacturer, because they are all crap. Cheap mobo's and memory bought in bulk and sold to the masses. Junk.