Poor performance of G5 on GNOME's CPU benchmarks.
Hello everybody,
I have to admit that I have always been disappointed to the performance
of my iMac running Debian, and have a gut feeling that it is faster
under OS X. Yesterday, I found by chance a "System Profiler and
Benchmarks" facility in the GNOME Sytem menu, and ran it on my iMac and
a intel-based laptop. The benchmark provides additional references
values for a Celron M and a PowerPC 740/750, which I also have included.
The G5:
Processor PowerPC PPC970FX, altivec supported (1800,00MHz)
Memory 745MB (204MB used)
The laptop:
Processor 2x Intel(R) Core(TM)2 CPU L7400 @ 1.50GHz
Memory 1547MB (258MB used)
(Apparently, the benchmark is not parallellised and uses only one core).
Benchmarks:
Higher is better Zlib MD5 SHA1
PowerPC PPC970FX (1800,00MHz) 15701 18 19
Core(TM)2 CPU L7400 @ 1.50GHz 12611 49 56
Intel(R) Celeron(R) M 1.50GHz 8761 38 49
PowerPC 740/750 (280.00MHz) 2150 7 6
Lower is better Fibonacci Blowfish Raytracing
PowerPC PPC970FX (1800,00MHz) 18 62 25
Core(TM)2 CPU L7400 @ 1.50GHz 6 21 29
Intel(R) Celeron(R) M 1.50GHz 8 26 40
PowerPC 740/750 (280.00MHz) 58 172 161
The result is that on some particular types of computations, the G5
performs extremely bad: something like twice slower as an old 1.5 Ghz
Celeron machine. For some other tests, the performances of the
processors scale with the frequency.
Is is a known characteristic of the G5, or are there specific parameters
to switch on in the kernel or whereever else to get the expected
performance of a 1.8 Ghz chip?
Have a nice day,
--
Charles Plessy
Tsurumi, Kanagawa, Japan
Reply to: