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G4, PIII & E2K Compared 72

Posted by CmdrTaco from the chips-and-bits dept.
Lord Kano-The Gangster Of Love writes "A head to head to head comparison of PowerPC G4, Intel Pentium III and E2K ( CT : that russian chip) can be found at macintouch. This has all of the makings for an interesting year, indeed."
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G4, PIII & E2K Compared More

G4, PIII & E2K Compared

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  • When did Sun announce plans for x86 based systems? They have Solaris x86, true, but they don't sell systems for it, and they have announced that they will support Solaris on IA64, but Sun workstations with x86 processors?
  • Posted by Nr9:

    They take the SUM of the times because it really isn't a benchmark, its designed to estimate the time a graphics pro will waste on filters....

    anyway's in working with pentium II systems, i kind of believe this benchmark result but not the 18 specint95


    ps... by compiler dependent i mean that the tester has to used a precompiled binary of photoshop and can't really optimize his system with another compiler
  • Posted by Nr9:

    What do you call a seldomly used filter and besides, Intel payed adobe to code parts of photoshop in intel asm because their processors are too slow...

    how do you know the filter is used 1/1000 of the time and people usually don't keep doing small rotates and tiny-pixel gaussian blurs that mmx does
  • Posted by Nr9:

    BLAH!!!
    Intel claims high spec scores but using standard compilers and machines, a pentium II 450 does 12 specint95 and 12 specfp95
  • Posted by Nr9:

    The Intel tests are done with intel using exotic machines and compilers
    true personal testing shows about a 12 for both specint95 and specfp95 for the pentium II 450
  • Posted by Nr9:

    because the shitty 18 specint95 numbers have been posted that much times....

    a Pentim II at 450mhz has NOWHERE THE PERFORMANCE OF 18 SPECINT95

    if you take a look at real world performance, a single G3@400 beats a dual pentium II 450 nt sp4 at photoshop(PSBench5)
  • Posted by Nr9:

    a pentium II 450 actually(usually regular hardware and compilers) does 12 specint95 and specfp95

    a G3 450 doing 20 shows that a G3 is much faster than the pentium
  • Posted by Nr9:

    because it sux and hard to use

    no applications use it
  • Posted by Nr9:

    of course he didn't use the intel compiler because it just doesn't correspond to real world performance

    most applications don't use the intel compiler so why should benchmarks use it

    note that Apple was conservative during their bytemarks because they didn't use their MrC(which is used to compile the Mac OS compiler, which posted bytemark scores twice of those using the codewarrior compiler because it is more widely used...

    since the majority(sadly) of intel users use windows, they should use ms vc++ or borland to test their systems
  • Posted by Nr9:

    They take the SUM of the times because it really isn't a benchmark, its designed to estimate the time a graphics pro will waste on filters....

    anyway's in working with pentium II systems, i kind of believe this benchmark result but not the 18 specint95
  • Posted by Nr9:

    the site didn't mention the compiler they used....possibly intels'?
  • Posted by Nr9:

    And all the current SPEC results from Intel use this compiler, with Windows NT. In contrast, Motorola and Apple don't make often their SPECs results for G3/G4 public to the SPEC organisation (which looks like they have something to hide, probably completly bogus claims that the G3 is twice faster as a PII). And the very few they published (or other published) used AIX and Motorola C/C++ compiler or IBM C SET++. And I have not the faintest reason to think that they ever used something else when they published their benchmark. Wake up Motorola/Apple is no better than Intel just worse (how many Macintoshes use AIX ?).
    the problem with the intel compiler is that it is optimized only for SPEC, ive seen intel spec scores for a processor posted and a few months later, they increase as much as 50% for the same processor.

    Motorola is FORCED to use their compiler because of the small range of platforms SPEC is available on.

    although SPEC is theorectically better than bytemarks because of the wider range of tests and real-world shit, its also extremely compiler dependent and intel has exploited this the most.

    bytemark happens to be used by a magazine for a long time and although it is limited, a great feature of it is that its free and is supported on a wide range of platforms.

    i don't buy into apple's claims of a G3 being twice the speed of the pentium II but i do think that the integer unit of the G3 is about 50% faster than that of the pentium II at the same frequency.

    I would really like to see SPEC ported to the mac OS and MrC run it. That might really show how fast the G3 is

    On a side note:

    who the hell are you, an intel bunny, anonymoust coward?
    it just seems strange that a processor based on the x86 instruction set with a non-load/store core and crap 16-stage superpipeline would able to score a highly respectable specmark of 18. people who do real cpu-intensive photoshop work and 3d rendering realize that the ppc is much faster than the x86, regardless of a bloated OS(although the user interface rulz, ehhe)

    IF a company spends 300 million making claims like "better internet" with a new processor, it doesn't seem strange that they will spend tons of money optimizing their compiler for SPEC.(ie, the FIRST RESULTS FOR THE XEON were like 14-15 for specint95, and now its 18-19)?

    you must agree something is going on here
  • Posted by Nr9:

    this is probably due to the crap hardware of the 8500/180, which only has a 45mhz bus

    how about the suspicious benchmark jumps of intel's processors? intel IS optimizing their compiler for SPEC
  • Posted by Nr9:

    the G4 does 8 watts---still low power compared to other chips
  • Posted by Nr9:

    because it sux and hard to use

    little applications use it
  • Posted by retroman:

    Whoever owns Amiga is NOT doing it. They won't even say what CPU the new AmigaOS will run on. There are several 3rd party PPC accelerators for the Amiga, but none to my knowledge are actually integrated into the system by the manufacturer.

    For that matter, NO Amigas have been in production since '92/'93. Amiga International I think just now or shortly will resume manufacturing the Amiga 4000's out of NOS from the West Chester Commodore facility. Sheesh, 6 years without a new model... pathetic.
  • Posted by Nr9:



    So, when a website reports the speed of PC hardware, you don't believe it, but when it reports that the Mac is faster than a PC you do believe it? Everyone except for your friend gets scores of 18, that means everyone is using magic compilers and the latest in alien technology?

    i don't believe any Mac claim but I certainly don't believe the score of 18...DID YOU BENCHMARK THE THING YOURSELF? how many applications use the Intel compiler......

    i believe the mac one because it used an application benchmark, PSBench5, which uses photoshop. It is not compiler dependent and it clearly shows the mac has the lead
  • Sun workstations from $2500, but w/ no SCSI
  • Gives a 17.2 for a 450Mhz Pentium II (no figures for the Xeon yet).

    http://www.specbench.org/osg/cpu95/results/res98 q3/cpu95-980831-03026.asc
    --
  • From CPU info center [berkeley.edu]

    450 Mhz Pentium II 17.2 - 12.9
    450 Mhz Xeon 18.9 - 14.7
    400 Mhz PowerPC G3 17.6 - 12.2
    200 Mhz IBM POWER3 13.2 - 30.1
    450 Mhz UltraSparcII 19.6 - 27.1
    600 Mhz UltraSparcIII 35+ - 60+ (est)
    575 Mhz Alpha 21264 30.3 - 47.7
    667 Mhz Alpha 21264 44 - 66
    1000 Mhz Alpha 21364 ~70 - ~120 (est)
    250 Mhz MIPS R10000 14.7 - 24.5
  • What many people still dont seem to realize is that PPC 750 ("G3") is really descended from earlier low-power implementations, namely the 603 family.. its unfortunately lacks the high-end FPU of its bigger, older brother, the 604e, which packs one hell of a punch... as both Motorola and IBM are still making the things, I cannot understand the defocusing from that chip so early since the G3 really was no great replacement, and the G4 isnt here yet.

    However, I know a few people that have touched the things and seen Altivec demos and its hard not to be impressed... too bad Exponential Technologies fell apart a few years ago, I heard of live demos back then at 500-600 mhz when PPC and Pentiums were just breaking 100.
  • >> Macintosh machines have crappy processors, but incredible bus architecture. That means that their 232Mhz (or whatever the fuck it is) can drive alongside a PII 300 (with the 66Mhz bus).
    >>
    Hhahah, theres a fine example of an informed opinion... getting all too common here.

    Macs have traditionally lagged behind high-end Intel main bus speeds, and like Intel systems, rely on a high bus-to-cpu speed ratio to deal with todays high cpu clockspeeds.

    As far as the high-speed bus you refer to, that is a result of the new trend in three-tiered caches... level 1 is on chip, level 2 is interconnected to CPU on a very fast dedicated bus, and level 3 is what used to be called level 2 :) AFAIK, all current Pentiums also have a fast level 2 cache on a high-speed bus, which does wonders in relieving main buses of high loads of traffic... huge speed boost for any cpu that can pull it off.

    Let me just make one point simply:

    PowerPC DOES NOT EQUAL PowerMac, Apple, or MacOS... so dont bring out the Apple laundry unless its fair then to diss x86 because of Windows... as we all know well here, there are more than one (or two) OSes, and hardware architectures are seemingly taking a backseat to functionality... how many platforms do we have Linux running on? Ive got a dual-processor PowerMac here that rarely sees Mac OS and absolutely rocks on other OSes (BeOS screams on dual 604e chips).

  • If anyone is interested, there is a big interview with Babayan (where he also speaks about Merced technology, future of the CPUs etc) about E2K at
    http://www.ibusiness.ru/archive/story/babayan.ht ml
    and http://www.osp.ru/cw/1998/03/business/05.htm

    Anyone cares to translate?
  • Great that you have done it.

    I understand Russian and was pretty excited after reading all these articles, but I'm not well at making translations :-)

    If I won't see your article posted on slashdot RSN, I'll write them as well reminding them about it. ;)

  • k7? (Score:1)

    by Plutor ( 2994 )
    no unfounded speculation on the k7? im hurt.

    Log
  • Our shop is almost all Sun. 4 people got a 2,800 US dollar deal on USparc 5. IDE, 4Meg video. USparc 333 processor.

    Screw that. I got a dual PII 450 ATX Full Tower with Adaptec SCSI, G200 video, SCSI 9G and 32x CD for the SAME DAMN PRICE. Redhat preinstalled from atipa.

    Sun guys are already whining about having to buy a SCSI card to add all their external drives. They are about out of slots already since the PC-Card (AMD 300 computer on a card)that Sun pawned off on them takes up two slots in their mid-tower which is short on expansion slots to begin with. I'll never fill all the slots on the Tyan mobo. I'll run out of IRQs first.


    Some people need the Sun stamp of approval for that fuzzy feeling. Bah. (I keep telling them they should run Linux on the Sparc processor and Solaris on the AMD) :)

    Suns makes really nice servers.

    -k
  • Has anyone else noticed the extreme antisocial behavior inherent to many of the internet porn sites? And no, I'm not anti-porn, pro censorship, or anything else of that ilk -- my desktop backgrounds would shock many a straitlaced person.

    However, I have encountered numerous porn sites which have a tendancy to be very antisocial when it comes to java scripting, not to mention eye-numbing graphics that are irritatingly distracting from the interest at hand (looking at people engaged in various natural/unnatural acts). Before surfing for porn I always have to disable javascript, lest my entire browser is hijacked! Unfortunately I need javascript for a couple of sites I use regularly (aviation weather sites mostly), else I would leave it disabled always. As an example of "hijacking", some sites refuse to ever let you leave, popping up another netscape window after you've closed or exited the porn site. The only way out is to quit Netscape -- you can't kill the windows fast enough to get out otherwise! Other sites pop up twenty or thirty (or infinite) browser windows to various advertisments -- extremely obnoxious (this slowed my xsession down once so bad I had to log in remotely and reboot -- and even that took awhile). Do these people think I'd ever give them one red cent for any product they're trying to push after treating my machine in such a way? Who the fuck are these idiots, to treat the internet, my machine, and my browser, as if it were a broadcast medium where they should control the content and determine where I surf to?

    If all the porn sites become PIII only the only skin off my nose will be the time lost to dig out some old scripts and start ripping stuff down from the binaries news groups again. These idiots offend me, not by their content, but by the disdain, arrogance, and disrespect with which they treat me, the consumer, and my property.
  • It will also be nice to have Altivec, even in a worse case scenerio it will still be about twice as fast as Streaming SIMD, because it is twice as wide.


    The width won't help much if you are performing operations that AltiVec isn't designed for.


    Both AltiVec and KNI have considerable strengths. AltiVec, if I understand correctly, is optimized for DSP-style operations; multiply-accumulate and similar operations useful in filtering. KNI, if I understand correctly, is optimized for geometry operations, like componentwise multiplication of floating-point vectors. At something like signal processing or 2D image processing/filtering, AltiVec has a clear advantage. At something like 3D geometry processing or ray-tracing, KNI has the advantage. Which is more useful to you depends on what you are doing.


    In practice, IMO AltiVec will speed Photoshop up some more and that's about it. IMO, KNI would have been useful a year ago for gaming but will now be useless because graphics cards will be able to do geometry transformations themselves. So, IMO neither is likely to be as big an advantage as their respective makers claim them to be.

  • Alpha is a canonical RISC machine, more so than
    SPARC or PPC. The only simpler instruction set
    out there is MIPS. This means Alpha will be hurt
    even more by the problems that are plaguing all
    high-end RISC designs now. It is becoming the
    very antithesis of itself. Very very complex.
    It's time to move beyond RISC.
  • Russians have always been great with theory, but poor with implimentation. I sincerely doubt that the E2K will ever exist. If it does, it won't be a Pentium or PPC killer. Anything can look good on paper. Putting it to silicon is a very different matter. The ALPHA is where it is at in terms of technology. Nothing else really compares.

    Wait, I'm putting on my flame proof suit, ..... okay,
    BEGIN FLAMING NOW:
  • Personally, I could never figure out the point of the Xeon chips. They run maybe 15% faster than an equal Mhz P2, and they cost WAY too much.
    I mean, I'm all for extra power, but come on!
  • Okay, I hate to break the news to you, but you've got it backwards. A PowerPC 750 (Apple calls it the G3) at equal Mhz to a Pentium-II is a faster CHIP, but the internals of Apple's computers (plus the only OS more bloated than Windows, MacOS) makes it slower.
    Try running optimized Linux on A P2-450 and a G3/300, and (if you're not running on Apple hardware), the G3 will win.
  • PPC MacOS's equivalent to DLLs are shared libraries. PPC MacOS's shared library architecture is more sophisticated than Win32's DLLs. Instead of using virtual memory to map files onto memory, PPC MacOS's code fragment architecture does not require virtual memory and performs better without virtual memory. A shared library is a type of code fragment when it is loaded into memory, and a code fragment is simply a table of contents, storage space for globals and statics, as well as code. It is much harder to work with code fragments than DLLs if you are an assembly language programmer, but if you program in a normal programming language, the compiler handles the interaction with code fragments required to call functions in other code fragments. Simply, code fragments are a far more sophisticated, complex method to do the same thing that DLLs do without being slowed by virtual memory, memory page management, accessing files, etc. Code fragments are much more suited to a RISC environment than a CISC or Intel environment, which is why you probably will not be seeing a version of Windows which compares directly with a code fragment architecture any time soon.
  • The G4's SIMD capabilities look like they maybe theoretically 4X as fast because the Pentium III has only 8 128Bit registers and requires a mode change compared to Altivec's 32 128bit registers. Plus you get the G3's integer performance, the 604E's FPU and up to 2MB of full speed backside cache. Drool.
  • If you are going to compare numbers on Unix, NT, Mac, and etc. You have to level the playing field. You can not compare Unix to any of the gui based systems unless you are running an x-session on the Unix machine. X-Windows, from personal experience, tends to need more horsepower than the other systems. Figiting with the mouse alone can chew up several percent in performance. There are several x-displays that will basically stop a system generating x-graphics. X-Eyes is bad enough but the rest are much worse. You can only compare a Unix benchmark to DOS benchmark unless you add the additional computation.

    Does anyone know if PhotoShop is SMP wise. A lot of SMP systems lose 5% or so as the number of processors goes up. The rational is that it is spending .85 out of the expected 1.8 increase for a dual cpu system badly handling state changes. When you have to save all of the registers and tranfer them to the other cpu so it can have its turn, you lose performance. Adding more cpus just makes it worse.

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