How An Old PowerMac G5 Compares To Modern Intel CPUs

[phoronix]

Phoronix: How An Old PowerMac G5 Compares To Modern Intel CPUs

With Debian and Ubuntu dropping 32-bit PowerPC support in their future releases, you may be curious how the older PowerPC hardware compares to Intel's modern x86 processors if you are wishing to switchover. Here are some benchmarks...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=PowerMac-Intel-KBL

[chuckula]

So what you are saying is that Kaby Lake is still overpriced and doesn't perform well.

[dungeon]

He, he, i tought this will be compared with Goldmont dual core J3355... even to that cheap lowpower thing it would be huge upgrade and worth switching

[L_A_G]

Not sure if this benchmark is completely fair because as far as I'm aware Ubuntu PPC has always been built as 32 bit PPC binaries to provide hardware support going all the way back to PowerPC G3 hardware, which was introduced in the 1990s. While some of the vector instructions introduced in the G4 may be used, the G5 introduced a whole new ISA with loads of enhancements which naturally go unused when running 32 bit PPC code. Using PPC Ubuntu to run these benches is a lot like benchmarking an AMD64 CPU using 32 bit Ubuntu.

[cRaZy-bisCuiT]

Is this just click bate? I mean, come on, no one would have expected something different. What about quality instead of quantity when it comes down to the number of articles?

[-MacNuke-]

PowerPC G5 couldn't even compete with Athlon 64 and Pentium 4 when it came out. Why should this get any better? Near to nobody is working on optimizing code for PowerPC / POWER. Even IBM is just fixing/optimizing stuff that is necessary for servers.

[Min1123]

Using PPC Ubuntu to run these benches is a lot like benchmarking an AMD64 CPU using 32 bit Ubuntu.

I concur, the PPC 970 was a big endian 64-bit processor based off of the POWER4 arch. This should be running 64-bit PPC code (which has been available for over a decade, don't use the stuff before that, it doesn't have support for controlling the fans, so it makes the machine sound like a chorus of vacuum cleaners).

Unless they are removing PPC64 or PPC big endian support, this still has support.

IBM switched PPC to little endian to make it more compatible with Intel in recent years, so their POWER8 and POWER9 at least can operate on little endian PPC64, which is a different distro from regular PPC64 and from PPC32 (all PPC32 is big endian, but the old PPCs could flip endianess on the fly, the G5 couldn't).

Still interesting to see the results though (and I doubt there will be an immense improvement if you benchmark a PPC64, the chip is just too old for that).

[AllLinux]

Comparison to ARM would be more interesting.

[starshipeleven]

Is this just click bate?

Possibly, but less so than many other articles I've seen here on Phoronix. It provides some data at least.

What about quality instead of quantity when it comes down to the number of articles?

Would yeld less overall clicks so less income.

[torsionbar28]

Is this just click bate? I mean, come on, no one would have expected something different. What about quality instead of quantity when it comes down to the number of articles?

There are tons of other sites benchmarking the newest Brand X vs. Brand Y. I like to see how older stuff compares to newer. This PPC G5 is obviously a more extreme example, but for example, comparing hardware from 5 years ago against stuff from today is a huge help in deciding when or whether to upgrade.

PS it's "bait" not "bate".