Earlier this year, I stumbled across a benchmark that would test how well the new Intel Macs compared against the PowerPC Macs. I’m going to call the benchmark svnmark because consists of compiling Subversion. The benchmark results showed that the new Intel Macs blew away the PPC Macs. Well, all but one: the Quad G5 still was #1. It compiled Subversion in 1 minute 39 seconds.
Welcome the new king: The Mac Pro. I had a chance to test out this beast at WWDC. The model was a Quad core running at 3Ghz with 4GB of FB-ECC RAM and a 250GB hard drive running at 7200RPM.
The results: using the “-j8” flag to try to load up the cores: 55.821 seconds.
But even better, I tried using “-j4” and I got 53.057 seconds. That’s 53% of the time it took the Quad G5, or as Apple might put it, that’s 1.9x faster than the Quad G5 2.5Ghz! Also, it is 2.9x faster than a PowerMac Dual G5 2.5Ghz!
p.s. If anyone has a 2.66Ghz Mac Pro out there, please try out svnmark using the instructions in the original benchmark numbers post. I’m guessing it’ll be right around 1 minute.
My mac pro is set to arrive today. If no one else does the benchmark, I’ll give it a shot.
That’s awesome! When are you gonna get one? ;-)
Well it is a sad day after being King of the Hill for so long.
The really cool thing is that the Quad G5 was an absolutely awesome machine. I was completely blown away by its speed.
It is great the the Mac Pro beat the Quad G5 so handily. It’ll mean upgrading from a Quad G5 to a Mac Pro is definitely worth it.
JustinW: Cool – please post your numbers here when you get them. I want to make some nice graphs too of the performance numbers.
Justin: I’m just checking my options first before I get it. Specifically checking for Universal versions of the apps that I use. But I’ll probably get one soon. :)
JonW: The Quad G5 is dead. Long live the Quad Xeon! :)
Ok. Just got around to getting the numbers.
Machine: Dual 2.66 w/ 2 gigs of RAM.
Time: 1m 4.119s
Ping me on AIM if you have any q’s.