If you thought that Apple had indeed come out with the fastest desktop on the planet, here's an article to dampen your enthusiasm. This guy, who calls himself a mac user, has given a detailed description of how Apple tweaked the benchmarking tests to give their PowerMacs an advantage over the other computers. The article seems to take issue with almost every feature in the test to the point of appearing acutely prejudiced, but within all the technical verbiage, there are some valid points. Many of the accusations are, however pointless. For example, he is outraged that Apple used an option on the gcc compiler to use features in the 64-bit G5 processor. This seems to me as a very natural thing to do since it would be pointless to try to assess the speed of the 64-bit processor using programs that do not use the features of the processor. After all, the improved speed is precisely because of the fact that programs can take advantage fo the 64-bit arithmetic and new instructions.
Having said that, I can see (thanks to a long discussion we had in the office) why the new PowerMac might not be the greatest idea since CBF. For one, they have chosen IBM as their chip provider. IBM does not have a stake in the desktop market, and Apple products form 5% of this market which translates to longer product cycles. Compare this with Intel which comes out with faster processors every few months. What this means is that by the time we've stopped gloating over how the PowerMac is faster than any other computer, Intel would have come out with a chip that is twice as fast. Of course, it is understandable that Apple does not want to be dependant on Intel which already has a Microsoft-like monopoly over the desktop market, but then it should have come out with a computer that is much, much faster than anything available today, not one that is twice as fast as a chip that was available months ago!
Also, having a 64-bit desktop with a 1GHz frontside bus is definitely great, but is it really great for the average user? It does not make sense to use a 64-bit computer for normal desktop operations, and gaming performance can be achieved with graphics cards which boast more powerful chips than the desktops of a few years ago. If it is the graphics professional that the computer is aimed at, they could do the same with SUN machines which were 64-bit machines for a very long time. After all, movie rendering is done on render farms which do not need desktops. (Pixar, headed by Jobs uses such render farms instead of Apple machines).
The 1GHz frontside bus is definitely a great idea since the frontside bus has always been the main bottleneck in a computer's performance. It doesn't really matter if you have a 3GHz processor if your bus (which is the channel for data to flow in your computer) runs at a few hundred MHz. To be fair, Apple does have an advantage here since they have the privilege of designing the entire computer and not just the processor, so their entire hardware is (in theory) well optimized and suited for each other. Also, Apple is helping push desktop design in a new direction, so it will be interesting to see how the PCs deal with the PowerMac. Also, check out Apple's very convincing reply on slashdot.
[7/4/03 update : Nasa Benchmarks the G5 (slashdot)]
