“Analysts and others are raising questions over Apple Computer’s claim that its new Power Mac G5 is the world’s fastest personal computer,” CNET reports. “In his keynote speech Monday at the company’s annual developer conference, Apple CEO Steve Jobs introduced the aluminum-encased Power Mac and showed a variety of industry benchmarks that placed the machine ahead of 3GHz Dell machines using Pentium 4 and Xeon processors. Jobs also showed the Power Mac, built around an IBM chip dubbed the G5, outperforming the Dell on various applications.”
CNET reports, “Apple has won praise for the new Macs as a substantial improvement over prior machines, some have criticized the choices made in putting together the rival Dell machine for use in tests developed by the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation (SPEC). Apple’s tests, which were conducted by third-party testing firm Veritest, used the same GCC compiler for both machines, with the Dell boxes running the Linux operating system. Critics charge that much higher benchmarks can be achieved using the Windows OS and an Intel-optimized compiler, rather than GCC.”
“‘It wasn’t really a fair test,’ said Gartner analyst Martin Reynolds, who said that the Dell machines are capable of producing scores 30 percent to 40 percent higher than those produced under Apple’s methodology. ‘The reason this happened is Apple had a third party go out and test a Dell under less than optimal conditions,'” according to CNET.
“In response, an Apple representative said it wanted to compare hardware performance, so it made sense to use the same compiler on the Mac and the Dell. The SPEC benchmark tests measure the performance of the hardware and the compiler,” reports CNET.
“‘We set out to conduct and report as fair a comparison as we could,’ Greg Joswiak, Apple’s VP of hardware marketing, said in an interview on Tuesday. ‘SPEC measures a combination of hardware and compiler. The only way to do a hardware-to-hardware comparison is to normalize the compiler,'” CNET reports.
Full article here.