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Additional Related Resources
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Thursday, September 27, 2001
We have looked at the performance of the Quicksilver
733
compared to the 867, and looked at the performance
of all three machines (the 733, 867 and dual 800), when
using a Blue & White G3/350 Power Mac as the base score.
Below we look at just the 867 MHz Quicksilver performance
when compared to the dual processor 800 MHz machine. You should
note that we were running OS 9.2 on both machines and that
only two of our tests are dual processor savvy. The Photoshop
Altivec test and the RayTracing test of CineBench 2000, are
able to take advantage of dual G4 processors. You can see
the potential that a dual processor setup has over the single
processor by looking at the RayTracing results. Unfortunately
there are very few programs under 9.2 that will utilize an
extra processor if it is present.
To truly take advantage of dual processors you
will need to migrate to OS X, as your applications migrate
to the new operating system. OS X is supposed to have dual
processor support built into the operating system. According
to Apple, any Carbon
or Cocoa application should be able to utilize this support
to spawn concurrent actions through the OS, to multiple processors.
We plan to do testing on this, this weekend, and should have
results posted early next week.
Note: This is our initial look at the performance
of the new Quicksilver towers. We will be running more tests
and hope to have a full review of all the new Power Macs in
the next few weeks.
Additional resources:
"Real World" Tests
The tests below are from our suite of real
world application tests. These tests feature a diverse
selection of applications commonly used by the Mac community.
The test suite was designed to render an accurate and well
rounded picture of a machine's performance. All of the tests
below (with the exception of the Quake III & CineBench
2000 tests) were timed with a stopwatch. The times are then
converted to percentages relative to the dual processor 800
MHz Power Mac which is set to 100%. For all scores, higher
numbers are better.
Finder Tests
The test above copies a folder containing thousands of files.
It appears that the 867 machine runs somewhat slower that
the other two Quicksilver machines when reading and writing
this kind of data.
Pretty similar scores here ... within the
margin of error
AppleWorks 6 Tests
The extra processor speed pushes the 867 ahead
here.
The dual 800 does a good job of keeping up
with the 867 despite the former's slower clock speed.
Quake III Tests
These scores are relative.
At 'fastest' setting the processor plays a
bigger role
When most, if not all, the processing is being done by the
graphics card, the speed difference more or less disappears.
Both machines have the same graphics card. The difference
in scores is within the margin of error.
Photoshop 6 & Other Data Crunching Tests
This result is within the margin of error.
Apparently we have picked several Photoshop operations that
take advantage of dual processors. Not all do, as you'll see
in the results below. The gap above is even wider if you take
into consideration the difference in clock speed.
This is pure, raw data crunching. Program
does not utilize dual processors.
But this one does. If adjusted for clock speed
the dual processor machine would be almost twice as fast.
This is a combination of both processor and
graphics card performance ... no advantage to dual processors
here.
Encoding/Decoding Tests
Again heavy duty crunching going on here. QuickTime 5 apparently
cannot take advantage of dual processor under OS 9.2. We'll
see next week if the case if different when running OS X.
Again this is within the margin of error.
So the 800 machine does a good job of keeping up
The both have the same SuperDrive
Have no idea why the 867 is faster here. Perhaps
the 800 MHz has to load extra code because of the dual processors.
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