How An Old PowerMac G5 Compares To Modern Intel CPUs

[feanor]

phoronix these results look like there is no SIMD (aka Altivec) enabled. Sure, there is no chance that a PPC970 will be faster than a modern Intel, but it's definitely not that slow.

[andrei_me]

I wonder how this old PPC Mac compares to a smartphone or any recent ARM board

[cjcox]

I know some are wanting some comparisons to POWER8 ... search openbenchmarking.org and you'll see some. And while it starts to be competitive on select benchmarks, the cost to own and operate a POWER8 system is huge. Let's just say that it's hard to give it much credit because it might beat one machine in certain cases, but when you can buy 5, 6, 10+ machines for the cost of a POWER8 system (and likely still have better power consumption), it just doesn't seem interesting anymore.

[rene]

Your (personal) block size is set too low, please re-read original.

Maybe your sentence should have been less cryptic, if you meant to say not to use the 5 kernel release for 7 months or what it was before (windfarm?) fan control was implemented.
I wonder why you need to point that out, though, as it usually is: do not use the X months linux kernel releases after hardware release until all HW features where properly implemented and things settled down, ... same applies to any other silicon as well ;-)

[rene]

phoronix these results look like there is no SIMD (aka Altivec) enabled. Sure, there is no chance that a PPC970 will be faster than a modern Intel, but it's definitely not that slow.

also if they time compiling linux kernel once for x86, and one for ppc code generation. The difference of amount of code, as well as code generation can be huge, ...

[ldo17]

The biggest loss with dropping the old PPC Macs will probably be the native big-endian testing environment.

While I think little-endian makes more sense than big-endian, still I have to concur. It is nice to be sure that your code is correctly endian-independent.

Running up a PPC emulator in QEMU should let me test for code correctness, at least, even if it’s useless for performance testing...

[ethana2]

I work with some Power8 hardware but there's no way I'd get approval to run any kind of benchmarks on it

[kgardas]

Comparison of PPC970 and POWER7/8 and also ARM may be seen on 7-zip benchmarks here: http://www.7-cpu.com/

[leipero]

That makes sense, 32 bit CPU's are simply not usable anymore (outside of text docs etc.).

[ldo17]

32 bit CPU's are simply not usable anymore...

Have they suddenly stopped working?