Analysis: x86 Vs PPC 129
Gentu writes "Nicholas Blachford (engineer of the PPC-based PEGASOS Platform) wrote a long and detailed article, comparing the PPC and the x86 architectures on a number of levels: performance, Vector processing and Power Consumption differences, architectural differences, RISC Vs CISC and more. The article is up-to-date and so it takes the G5 into account too."
A good OS... (Score:5, Interesting)
PPC (Score:4, Interesting)
If a company spends extra money on a set of gorgeous G5s or whatever, a non-trivial amount of that money is made back on the utility bills for very similar performance.
Other RISC vendors can be a win, also. For example, my old UltraSPARC workstations are not the space-heaters they might be stereotyped as (USII draws less than 20W). UltraSPARC III tops out at 65 watts, which although not as good as the PPC 970 is still much better than P4 or Itanic.
Re:These arguments are so tired (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:PPC (Score:3, Interesting)
I forgot to address this one. I think the payoff is faster than that, considering that there is added HVAC load from hotter computers, though I don't know how to estimate that.
Also, I don't mean to troll, but there is also the added savings of not dealing with Microsoft Windows every day (financial as well as psychological).
The break-even point is probably more like five or six years, which is a fair replacement interval for non-PC workstations. And after six years, the performance of a new workstation would be justified.
This means, at worst, a PowerMac G5 costs absolutely no more than a PC over time, and most likely (counting administraction costs) will be a net savings all around.
low power? not even close (Score:4, Interesting)
Each g5 dissipates a whopping 97 watts (see http://www.eet.com/sys/news/OEG20030623S0092 [eet.com], which is why the new powermacs have such absurd cooling systems and massive, mostly empty cases. The high-end powermacs actually come with an OUTRAGEOUS 600 watt power supply (http://developer.apple.com/documentation/Hardwar
Let's be clear, this power supply is not for peripherals: the g5 powermac only supports 3 drive bays and 3 pci slots.
The numbers cited by the author come from an early projection of power consumption for lower-spec ppc970 processors.
Re:Truly suprising colnclusion, OR NOT! (Score:4, Interesting)
... but he does misses one of the major problems with RISC architectures, the fact that RISC executables are larger that CISC programs (since RISC usually have simpler instructions and fixed instruction length). Today CPUs are fast, but memory are not. Because of this modern computers have large caches, 800MHz FSB, dual DDR memory busses, etc, but still the memory is slow compared to the raw computing power of the CPUs. But since a CISC program is smaller, the memory pressure is lower on a CISC system, and that's one of the reasons way the RISCs don't have the (on paper) large advantage compared to the CISCs.
This was not true 10 years ago, since the memory timing back then was in the 25MHz range, and the CPUs where running 20MHz. Today we have 3.2GHz CPUs and memory at 800 MHz, so program size matters.
Modern ARM RISC CPUs [arm.com] have worked around this problem by adding an extra instruction set called arm thumb [arm.com], to make the program smaller. Smaller programs = faster execution on the same memory system
Re:An interesting viewpoint (Score:4, Interesting)
First, that Indigo2 is not "plain-jane IDE" (unless you're using some weird adapter board), but rather "plain-jane SCSI-2" (10MB/s).
Second, one big factor you notice when comparing CPUs, especially when some are "budget models" is that magic thing known as cache. Ever wonder what feature they're cutting to lower cost? I'll bet the R4400 has plenty of cache, while the Duron cuts cache (so does the Celeron, and some of Sun's older and slower microSPARC CPUs)
Third, even with those factors, there's no way in hell that the MIPS R4400 (at 120MHz) CPU could ever come close to touching the performance of an AMD Duron (750MHz). You have to be comparing graphics cards.
Now, one of the features of the Indigo2 that you might be using, is the "Impact" line of graphics cards. The Solid (no texturing) and High Impact (texturing) versions have about 450 MFLOPS of performance on the card itself, and the Max Impact has double that. I will believe that your Indigo2 whoops the crap out of the Duron on graphics, if you're comparing one of those fine GIO64 graphics cards to some POS card you threw in the PC.
But I will NOT believe you're comparing CPU performance.
How do I know this? Well, let's just say I've got an R10000 (195MHz) SGI Indigo2 High Impact sitting next to me.