Off topic - G5 question

[Simon Hogg]

At 10:04 26/06/03 -0400, Robert G. Brown wrote:
 >On Wed, 25 Jun 2003, Luis Fernando Licon Padilla wrote:
 >> http://www.apple.com/lae/g5

>Looks great (if you believe their white papers) if you're planning to
>run BLAST. [...]  Although I believe that
>it requires some fairly careful programming to get maximum speed out of
>the CPU and would be very curious about real-world benchmarks for code
>that is just slapped on it and compiled, no tuning or hand
>vectorization.

Aye, there's the rub ...  If you believe their white papers ... Comparing 
A/G BLAST on the G5 with 'vanilla' BLAST on the Xeons.  "Apple compared the 
performance of the dual 2GHz Power Mac G5 running A/G BLAST with a 3GHz 
Pentium 4­based system and a dual 3.06GHz Xeon-based system, both running 
Red Hat Linux 9.0 and NCBI BLAST."

And what is A/G BLAST?  "A/G BLAST is an optimized version of NCBI BLAST 
developed by Apple in collaboration with Genentech. Optimized for dual 
PowerPC G5 processors, the Velocity Engine, and the symmetric 
multiprocessing capabilities of Mac OS X[...]"

So once again, it would be nice to see some 'real-world' comparisons of 
like-with-like.

>However, the traditional litany requires that one examine price as well
>as raw performance, and comparing it to P4 (really P6) class CPUs is
>apples to oranges.  A more interesting and fair comparison would be to
>opterons and itaniums, and including price.

Habsolutely agree on that!

--
Simon

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