Women in Technology

Article:		Developer Notes from WWDC 2003
Subject:		Performance?
Date:		2003-06-25 08:29:38
From:		anonymous2
Response to: Performance?
Does anybody understand why the new G5 is only a few percent faster than the 32 bit Dell system? The Mac is a 64 bit machine, with a really fast bus and ran applications that were optimized and compiled for the 64 bit processor on a 64 bit operating system. Why the hell did it not completely knock down the Dell? What happens with the G5 if the first 64 bit Xeon appears? Looks like it will fall behind the intel processors again soon, doesn't it?

Showing messages 1 through 2 of 2.

• Performance?
  2003-07-02 16:04:11  anonymous2 [View]
  
  
  64 bits is more about address space than speed. It lets you use more RAM; it doesn't necessarily make processing any faster, and might even make it slower in some circumstances. There are a number of articles on Ars Technica (http://www.arstechnica.com/) that discuss this issue in more detail, if you're interested.
  Also, remember the Dell had processors with a clock speed 50% higher than the G5.
  The most important point about the benchmarks, whether they're completly accurate or not, is that they show this new generation of Macs has an architecture and processor that can hold its own with the best the Wintel world can put up. That's huge. All that, and they don't cost an arm and a leg, either.
• Performance?
  2003-07-07 06:28:08  anonymous2 [View]
  
  
  OK, I understand that.
  
  But 64 bit means also twice the data path and thus the possibility to process twice the data in parallel, doesn't it?
  So I would expect roughly twice the performance of a 32 bit system and not only a few percent more speed.
  
  But we also learned in the meantime that the G5 ran on OS 10.2.7. So there was no 64 bit OS running.
  There is also the bottleneck of slow memory that could not catch up with the speed of the bus.
  Michael