Apple's Mac Pro - A True PowerMac Successor
by Anand Lal Shimpi on August 16, 2006 12:27 PM EST- Posted in
- Mac
iLife '06 Performance with iPhoto, iMovie HD and iDVD
One of the benefits of OS X and Apple's application suites is that most of the applications are already properly threaded. Even though you wouldn't expect it, iPhoto is threaded quite well and thus our import photos test gets a speedup from going to quad cores.
The test is simple; we timed the import of 379 photos into iPhoto which, believe it or not, is quite CPU intensive and not as I/O bound as you'd think. After we got the time we divided it into 379 to get the number of pictures imported per second. We included the performance of a hypothetical dual core Mac Pro in addition to the native quad offerings in order to provide a good point of comparison to the dual processor PowerMac G5s.
Although there's a slight performance boost when going from dual to quad core (6.9%), this test is largely dependent on clock speed within a single microprocessor architecture. Comparing the Woodcrest based Xeons to the older G5s is no contest, at 2.0GHz the Mac Pro is already 14% faster than the 2.5GHz PowerMac G5; even if we account for the dual vs. quad core comparison, the 2.0GHz Mac Pro is still noticeably faster than the G5.
The next application we looked at was iMovie HD. There are two primary focuses for performance in iMovie HD, video import speed (if you are dealing with a non-DV or non-iSight video source) and effect rendering speed. We focused on the latter, measuring the time it takes to render the most CPU intensive transition and video effect in iMovie HD.
Our Macs have gotten a little too fast for the billow transition test, as the Mac Pro 2.66GHz can now complete the test in 3 seconds flat. All of the Mac Pros here are faster than the PowerMac G5s, which is what we'd expect given what we learned in the iMac Core Duo vs. iMac G5 article.
Rendering the "Electricity" Video FX sees no benefit going from dual to quad cores, but the Mac Pro doesn't need it as the 2.0GHz configuration is already 26.5% faster than the PowerMac G5 2.5GHz.
Finally we've got iDVD, an application that you can use to create DVDs that are playable on any consumer DVD player. There are once again two aspects to performance in iDVD, video encoding performance and menu encoding performance. Since we've already looked at video encoding performance with Quicktime, this test is predominantly limited by how long it takes to encode the menu system in our test DVD. There is a small 13 second iSight video and audio that's encoded in the process but it adds a matter of seconds to the overall time. The image is written to disc instead of sent to the DVD burner for obvious reasons. The results are expressed in seconds, lower being better. This workload is multithreaded.
The benchmark gets just under 11% thanks to the 4 cores in the Mac Pro, but even without them the Mac Pro 2.66GHz is able to outperform the PowerMac G5 2.5GHz by just under 13%. The Xeon seems to scale much better with clock speed in this test than the G5.
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Anand Lal Shimpi - Wednesday, August 16, 2006 - link
Could you show me how to get Dell to take $149 off for the monitor? Whenever I try to configure it if I select the "No Monitor" option it lists a cost of $0, meaning I don't gain or lose anything.The Dell protection plan is truly enterprise class however the point of the comparison was to look at things from a purely hardware/cost of components perspective, which is how these Mac vs. PC price comparisons are usually done. Once you go above and beyond that then you get into this slippery slope argument of how much you should tack on for the price of being able to run OS X, etc...
Take care,
Anand
delta53 - Wednesday, August 16, 2006 - link
The "they" was referring to Apple namely at the WWDC6, no offence Anand. The option is given under the Medium and Large business section, but your point is well taken that exact price is impossible in that section.Keep up the good reports,
Kyle
Furen - Wednesday, August 16, 2006 - link
I was under the impression that Cinebench had very light memory usage. It looks to me that what will make or break Woodcrest's "power efficiency" is going to be FBDIMM power so perhaps loading up the ram will paint slightly different numbers...TamarinMonkey - Wednesday, August 16, 2006 - link
Now that we can run both OSX and XP on the same hardware, I'd be interested to see some of the benchmarks run on both OSs and see how they do. Any plans to do this in a future article?~Tam~
retrospooty - Wednesday, August 16, 2006 - link
I am pretty sure this has been done, and OSX has been found to be lacking, especially in 3d games. The speed advantage of PC over MAC was not that Intel/AMD were so much faster than IBM G4, then G5, but the OS and drivers are much finer tuned.Tegeril - Wednesday, August 16, 2006 - link
It was definitely not so much about the OS/Drivers being finer tuned in regards to 3D gaming. It was definitely a DirectX versus OpenGL issue.psychobriggsy - Thursday, August 17, 2006 - link
More specifically, Apple's OpenGL implementation on PowerPC was/is severely lacking.I wonder if the Intel Mac OS X drivers are better - i.e., the ATI/Nvidia drivers ported to Mac OS X.
Konq - Monday, September 11, 2006 - link
I just played WoW last night on my Quadro 4500-equiped Mac Pro. An ATI version should be similar. I was in a 40 man raid for my guild. This thing screams in OS X. I get 30-40 fps in a crowded IF, 50-100 fps flying, and I peaked at 135 fps looking at the sky. All at 1920x1200. The drivers sure have improved and I think are better on intel. I have a 2.3 Ghz dual core G5 and this is twice as fast even thought the G5 had a 7800 GT card. Oh - and I never noticed the fans spin up during the raid even though I had low sound volume.Rumor has it that OpenGL will be much improved when it goes multithreaded in 10.4.8. We will see. :)
Konq - Monday, September 11, 2006 - link
I forgot to mention: the Mac Pro loaded the WoW AQ40 instance in about 2 seconds! Faster even the second time. I can't express how impressed I am with this machine.As a side note, I used Office in Rosetta, and it is as fast as my G5. Maybe 4GB of RAM helps here but I was worried after reading Anands' report.
Pirks - Wednesday, August 16, 2006 - link
Please use XP x64 benchmarks as well, since it's uberinteresting to see how both 64-bit OSes from MS and Apple compete. XP 32-bit is okay, but a bit boring.