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Subject: Re: Apple G5 Comments

Author: Vincent Diepeveen

Date: 09:32:06 07/09/03

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On July 09, 2003 at 12:15:29, Tord Romstad wrote:

>On July 09, 2003 at 12:08:28, Vincent Diepeveen wrote:
>
>>For chess either an AMD or Intel will of course wipe
>>away anything that Motorola can produce.
>
>Despite being a very satisfied Mac user, I share your pessimism regarding
>the performance of the G5 for chess programs.  However, the G5 has nothing
>to do with Motorola.  It's an IBM chip (a scaled-down version of Power4, I
>think).
>
>Tord

Apologies, still in the G4 time here :)

Yes the ibm Power4. Note that the fpu performance of it is not as good as it
looks in the testset. The G5 has smaller level caches and the power4 they used
the usual trick of 'sharing' other processors resources (unified cache) in order
to do a bit better at specfpu.

So where the FPU performance is more than ok it's not outstanding by any means,
because of the huge caches that are simply doing great at those testsets
(specint also).

But if you compare to the average dual g4 which was like 533Mhz to at most
733Mhz for diehards then this is a major jump forward trivially. A company like
Apple doesn't need the fastest processor to sell well. They just need something
that with a lot of drumbeats at least can look as fast :)

Note that opteron is in fact also produced by IBM, only at paper it is AMD to
avoid the agreements with intel that at most 20% of the production from AMD
processors can be produced outside AMD owned factories :)

Best regards,
Vincent



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