Author: Steven Edwards
Date: 19:39:34 09/18/03
The gang over at http://www.veritest.com was contracted by Apple to run the SPEC benchmarks on the new PowerMac dual 2.0 GHz PowerPC G5. For comparison purposes, a Dell dual 3.06 GHz Xeon was also used in the testing. The Mac was running Mac OS X 10.2.7 while the Dell ran Red Hat Linux 9.0. The test of interest here is SPEC_base_int as it includes Crafty as a subtest for measuring overall integer performance. While the Mac had the overall higher SPEC_base_int score, the Dell beat the Mac on the Crafty subtest. By one percent. Which is not much considering the Xeon dual has a 50% higher clock rate. I don't know offhand how much a loaded Dell dual Xeon costs, but the dual G5 model tested can be had for US$3,000 (or less, if you can got a student / instructor / developer discount). The 3.0 GHz dual G5 Macs are projected to become available for consumer retail by August of next year. IBM, the makers of the G5 CPU (a.k.a., the PPC970) and the related Power architecture, are confident that they can push the G5 clock rate close to the 10 GHz range over the next few years.
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