Re: 17" PowerBook vs Pismo 500 Xbench

[Kevin Stevens]

On Saturday, Mar 22, 2003, at 00:55 US/Pacific, Tom Burke wrote:

>
> On Thursday, March 20, 2003, at 04:21 AM, Kevin Stevens wrote:
>
>> Exec Summary:  Overall performance almost exactly 2x, memory 
>> operations
>> close to 4x, OpenGL not much different.
>>
>> KeS
>>
>> Pismo:
>>
>
> Did you read the 867 Mhz 12" PB review in April MacWorld? They compared
> it with the 867 15", 1Gb 15", and 800 Mh iBook. The PB ran a little bit
> slower than than the 867 15", and that difference would be accounted
> for by the different cacheing arrangements. But what was most
> interesting was how much faster, on suitable tasks (Photoshop tasks,
> iMovie rendering, MP3 encoding) all the g4 were than the G3 iBook - 3
> time quicker in the case of the Photoshop tasks. That's where the
> benefit of the G4 lies, not in day-to-day browsing/ emailing/ wp, etc.
>
> Tom Burke

Yes, I posted a followup where I said that I hadn't done any real work 
with the computer yet.  I bought it for doing digital processing in 
Photoshop, another reason that the defective pixels are a royal PITA.  
There were Altivec numbers listed in the Xbench detail.

KeS


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Re: 17" PowerBook vs Pismo 500 Xbench

[Tom Burke]

On Thursday, March 20, 2003, at 04:21 AM, Kevin Stevens wrote:

> Exec Summary:  Overall performance almost exactly 2x, memory operations
> close to 4x, OpenGL not much different.
>
> KeS
>
> Pismo:
>

Did you read the 867 Mhz 12" PB review in April MacWorld? They compared 
it with the 867 15", 1Gb 15", and 800 Mh iBook. The PB ran a little bit 
slower than than the 867 15", and that difference would be accounted 
for by the different cacheing arrangements. But what was most 
interesting was how much faster, on suitable tasks (Photoshop tasks, 
iMovie rendering, MP3 encoding) all the g4 were than the G3 iBook - 3 
time quicker in the case of the Photoshop tasks. That's where the 
benefit of the G4 lies, not in day-to-day browsing/ emailing/ wp, etc.

Tom Burke


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Re: 17" PowerBook vs Pismo 500 Xbench

[Steve Fuller]

>
>
>The information that I have states that pre orders are going to take until
>mid-to-late April to finish shipping.  Then the normal orders will ship and
>stores will start stocking them.
>  
>
That gives me some idea, but I am hoping that Apple states something 
along the lines of "1,000,000 customers pre-ordered a 17" Powerbook" or 
something like that in their quarterly report. My tiny knowledge of 
manufacturing technology tells me that 4 weeks of notebook production 
from a factory should mean more a metric ton of notebooks are being 
produced :)

Steve


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Re: 17" PowerBook vs Pismo 500 Xbench

[Kyle Hansen]

On 3/21/03 1:25 AM, "Steve Fuller" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Spew into the
Cybertrough:

>> 
>> 
>> You probably would've been extremely happy with a 15" and it would be in
>> your hot little hands right now ;-)
>>  
>> 
> That thought has crossed my mind. However, I have Alpha Geek status that
> I need to uphold. :) I guess the money sits in the account and earns a
> meager bit of interest for another 3 weeks. :)  I would be interested in
> finding out how many pre-orders there were for the 17" unit tho.

The information that I have states that pre orders are going to take until
mid-to-late April to finish shipping.  Then the normal orders will ship and
stores will start stocking them.

Kyle H. Hansen
-- 
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Re: 17" PowerBook vs Pismo 500 Xbench

[Steve Fuller]

You probably would've been extremely happy with a 15" and it would be in
your hot little hands right now ;-)
 

That thought has crossed my mind. However, I have Alpha Geek status that 
I need to uphold. :) I guess the money sits in the account and earns a 
meager bit of interest for another 3 weeks. :)  I would be interested in 
finding out how many pre-orders there were for the 17" unit tho.

Steve

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Re: 17" PowerBook vs Pismo 500 Xbench

[Kyle Hansen]

On 3/20/03 10:45 AM, "Steve Fuller" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Spew into the
Cybertrough:

> Kevin Stevens wrote:
> 
>> That the faster disk and extra 512MB are making more of an impact than
>> CPU performance.  Of course, I haven't done much real work with it yet.
>>  
>> 
> Glad you received yours Kevin. I'm still waiting here. ETA of 4/15 now.
> If  I wasn't so convinced that switching platforms was the better thing
> for me to do, I'd turn around and go buy another PC right now. One of
> the new dually desktops with a 17" LCD was also pretty tempting too...

You MUST keep in mind that this is a brand new product.  Sometimes things
happen in supply lines.  You can't tell me that this never happens to PC
manufacturers.  

You probably would've been extremely happy with a 15" and it would be in
your hot little hands right now ;-)


Kyle H. Hansen
-- 
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Re: 17" PowerBook vs Pismo 500 Xbench

[Steve Fuller]

Kevin Stevens wrote:

That the faster disk and extra 512MB are making more of an impact than 
CPU performance.  Of course, I haven't done much real work with it yet.
 

Glad you received yours Kevin. I'm still waiting here. ETA of 4/15 now. 
If  I wasn't so convinced that switching platforms was the better thing 
for me to do, I'd turn around and go buy another PC right now. One of 
the new dually desktops with a 17" LCD was also pretty tempting too...

Steve

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Re: 17" PowerBook vs Pismo 500 Xbench

[Kevin Stevens]

On Thursday, Mar 20, 2003, at 00:25 US/Pacific, Tom Burke wrote:
> I'm wondering how surprised I am about this. Much of the difference
> seems to be accounted for by the simple difference in CPU speed, which
> is indeed 2x. You would expect memory to be faster on the 17", and the
> disk looks to be about 50% quicker. But that isn't a great deal of
> difference, all things considering I wonder how a G4-equipped Pismo
> (or Lombard) would compare against, say, a 667 or 887 15" TiBook; it
> would still only be 500Mhz, but you'd get the Altivec improvements.
> There again, you're still hobbled by the old ATI Rage (Pro? 128?)
> graphics card, so in that aspect of performance any TiBook (or AiBook)
> ought to shine.
>
> Of course, these aren't real-world tasks. What's  your subjective
> feeling about comparative performance in actual work?

That the faster disk and extra 512MB are making more of an impact than 
CPU performance.  Of course, I haven't done much real work with it yet.

KeS


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Re: 17" PowerBook vs Pismo 500 Xbench

[Tom Burke]

On Thursday, March 20, 2003, at 04:21 AM, Kevin Stevens wrote:

> Exec Summary:  Overall performance almost exactly 2x, memory operations
> close to 4x, OpenGL not much different.
>
> KeS
>

I'm wondering how surprised I am about this. Much of the difference 
seems to be accounted for by the simple difference in CPU speed, which 
is indeed 2x. You would expect memory to be faster on the 17", and the 
disk looks to be about 50% quicker. But that isn't a great deal of 
difference, all things considering I wonder how a G4-equipped Pismo 
(or Lombard) would compare against, say, a 667 or 887 15" TiBook; it 
would still only be 500Mhz, but you'd get the Altivec improvements. 
There again, you're still hobbled by the old ATI Rage (Pro? 128?) 
graphics card, so in that aspect of performance any TiBook (or AiBook) 
ought to shine.

Of course, these aren't real-world tasks. What's  your subjective 
feeling about comparative performance in actual work?

Tom Burke


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17" PowerBook vs Pismo 500 Xbench

[Kevin Stevens]

Exec Summary:  Overall performance almost exactly 2x, memory operations 
close to 4x, OpenGL not much different.

KeS

Pismo:

Results 46.22   
System Info 
Xbench Version  1.0b5
System Version  10.2.3
Physical RAM512 MB
Processor   PowerPC 750 [500 MHz]
L1 Cache32K (instruction), 32K (data)
L2 Cache1024K
Bus Frequency   100 MHz
CPU Test53.94   
GCD Recursion   45.96   1.79 Mops/sec
Floating Point Basic46.62   157.14 Mflop/sec
Floating Point Library  80.56   3.62 Mops/sec
Thread Test 38.93   
Computation 31.89   256.95 Kops/sec, 4 threads
Lock Contention 49.95   627.01 Klocks/sec, 4 threads
Memory Test 31.62   
System  28.63   
Allocate90.32   47.51 Kalloc/sec
Fill35.59   204.07 MB/sec
Copy15.24   76.19 MB/sec
Stream  35.32   
Copy35.51   155.29 MB/sec
Scale   35.61   155.36 MB/sec
Add 34.47   156.86 MB/sec
Triad   35.70   156.86 MB/sec
Quartz Graphics Test54.82   
Line48.42   1.23 Klines/sec [50% alpha]
Rectangle   56.48   3.97 Krects/sec [50% alpha]
Circle  59.48   1.37 Kcircles/sec [50% alpha]
Bezier  57.19   621.43 beziers/sec [50% alpha]
Text53.88   878.30 chars/sec
OpenGL Graphics Test133.12  
Spinning Squares133.12  93.16 frames/sec
User Interface Test 48.00   
Elements48.00   16.33 refresh/sec
Disk Test   34.48   
Sequential  36.61   
Uncached Write  30.37   13.25 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write  30.85   12.55 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read   70.45   11.10 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read   33.63   14.51 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Random  32.59   
Uncached Write  20.36   0.31 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write  32.70   7.50 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read   48.82   0.32 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read   44.35   8.69 MB/sec [256K blocks]


17":

Results 92.56   
System Info 
Xbench Version  1.0b5
System Version  10.2.4
Physical RAM1024 MB
Processor   PowerPC G4 [1000.00 GHz]
L1 Cache32K (instruction), 32K (data)
L2 Cache256K
L3 Cache1024K
Bus Frequency   167 MHz
CPU Test109.56  
GCD Recursion   98.87   3.86 Mops/sec
Floating Point Basic115.38  388.89 Mflop/sec
AltiVec Basic   109.48  5.94 Gflop/sec
Floating Point Library  116.34  5.22 Mops/sec
Thread Test 65.61   
Computation 63.10   508.35 Kops/sec, 4 threads
Lock Contention 68.32   857.55 Klocks/sec, 4 threads
Memory Test 124.32  
System  122.50  
Allocate123.21  64.81 Kalloc/sec
Fill200.20  1148.02 MB/sec
Copy87.89   439.45 MB/sec
Stream  126.19  
Copy124.68  545.22 MB/sec [altivec]
Scale   127.85  557.81 MB/sec [altivec]
Add 128.77  585.89 MB/sec [altivec]
Triad   123.60  543.09 MB/sec [altivec]
Quartz Graphics Test120.40  
Line124.36  3.17 Klines/sec [50% alpha]
Rectangle   119.38  8.40 Krects/sec [50% alpha]
Circle  132.76  3.06 Kcircles/sec [50% alpha]
Bezier  119.25  1.30 Kbeziers/sec [50% alpha]
Text108.80  1.77 Kchars/sec
OpenGL Graphics Test123.58  
Spinning Squares123.58  86.48 frames/sec
User Interface Test 104.39  
Elements104.39  35.52 refresh/sec
Disk Test   61.08   
Sequential  62.11   
Uncached Write  56.17   24.51 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write  51.74   21.05 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read   121.13  19.08 MB/sec [4K blocks]