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Benchmarks on dual-1GHz vs. 933MHz

updated 02:40 pm EDT, Thu May 16, 2002


Digital Video Editing's benchmark comparison between the dual-1GHz and the 933MHz Power Mac G4 concludes: "If you work primarily in 2D design work, you can get yourself a G4 933 and feel pretty good about the purchase. You'll save yourself $700 (minus the cost of the extra RAM), and you won't be sacrificing too much in the way of performance. If, on the other hand, you work in video editing and/or compositing, the dual G4 is clearly the way to go, particularly with Final Cut Pro and Combustion."


by MacNN Staff

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  1. MacNN.com Reader

    Fresh-Faced Recruit

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    05/16, 02:47pm | report spam | Reply |

    How About X!

    Yeah, and if you are doing ANYTHING in OS X you should get the dual machine!

  1. noverflow

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    05/16, 04:52pm | report spam | Reply |

    read the article

    it shows that photoshop does not really even use the second processor... anyways that shows that the test of after effects with the dual 1ghz vs the dual athlon was bunk, afttereffects barely uses the second processor.

  1. trevc

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    05/16, 06:00pm | report spam | Reply |

    related article

    http://www.digitalvideoediting.com/2002/05_may/features/cw_aeshowdown.htm

    Shows that some graphic related items are better on an athlon machine.

    This along with comparisons such as the May issue of Popular Science between an iMac and a Sony machine makes you think why we find it so hard for 'non mac lovers' to overlook the mac.

  1. MacNN.com Reader

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    05/16, 06:35pm | report spam | Reply |

    Next MoBo

    I think that reason why the dual wasn't that much better and why the related Athlon article wasn't very flattering is purely based in memory bandwidth. It looks as though a dual GHz G4 pushes the limits of PC133 RAM. This is supported by the stats from the article where the more memory-intensive an operation is, the closer the performance of the two systems.

    Given the new DDR support seen in the Xserve mother board, I think that this summer should give us DDR-based pro-Macs that can perform well.

    We might not be hurt as much by a slow bus given our ample registers and shallow pipe-lines but running a 2x 7.5 multiplier is pushing it.

  1. MacNN.com Reader

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    05/16, 07:43pm | report spam | Reply |

    Xserve

    Whats to prevent someone from using xServe as a normal machine? Build or buy a small rack, mount it, make a platform in the rack for a monitor and a slide-out tray for a keyboard. Sure it's expensive, but you get DDR and DDR L3 caches that no one else will get for a couple months.

  1. MacNN.com Reader

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    05/16, 08:13pm | report spam | Reply |

    re

    re

  1. jellygreen

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    05/17, 03:06am | report spam | Reply |

    Ahhh, nooo...

    Now, why don't people see the actual situation/problem here??

    I know everyone, even Mac enthusiasts, like to look towards Apple for speed/performance issues. But in this case, and also in the case of that AE G4 vs. Athlon article, Apple is not solely at fault.

    It's obvious, Adobe Photoshop and After Effects are not optimised well for multiple G4 based systems. Beyond that, they are not well 'threaded' apps.

    For example, take a look at the article. Notice how an app that didn't even claim to be MP aware, Synthetik Studio Artist 2.0, had a larger speed percentage gain on the dual G4. I have never even used that program, but from these rudimentary tests I think that it's more threaded than AE or Photoshop.

    If one writes an app and is able to split up the right number of processes into seperate threads, then it will scale better. 1, 2, 4 processors... The application will speed up according to how many procs are installed. There isn't always a 2 or 4 fold increase, but it generaly does improve. If Photoshop were to have each proc render alternating lines of a given image, it's speed would increase with each additional processor. I have much, much more to learn about programing. So that example may be overly simplified.

    Things take time. Everyone is getting their feet wet with X, and the better optimisations will take time. Combustion's speed increase most likely comes from the fact that the folks at Discreet know SMP systems. Their whole high-end line runs on SGI boxes.

    It's like some other article talked about the 'sad state of web browsers on OS X'. True, the platform is new. But don't dump the blame solely on the OS/computer. IE and the likes are slow, but if anyone here has used Chimera... Well, you know! It is crazy fast, and it's only in alpha!

    Don't use that 'narrow focus' beam when placing blame/pressuring change. Apple can only do so much, and they still need to do that. However, even once they have optimised/accelerated things to death, the programmers of additional software will still need to work on their stuff too.

    That's what we pay for anyway, right??

    Food for thought...

    ~Mr. Jelly

  1. hamdust

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    05/17, 04:56pm | report spam | Reply | delete

    Mr.Jelly makes sense but:

    The guy at Digital VIDEO editing's been sitting in a 640x480 world a little too long. He didn't explain why he couldn't use a larger file in PS, but when I'm working with 56 MB scans, I SURE see a much larger difference between the 1000x2 and the 933 machines.

    None the less, Mr. Jelly's right in that some programs, like Internet Exploder and PS are simply slower than they should be. I DO use Studio Artist, and it screams on the faster machine - and the object code file is relatively tiny. I conclude it's better programmed for performance.

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