"
I got the new Mac Pro last night and am setting it up today. I'll
throw some impressions and comments out at you, vis a vis my old G5.
Old system: dual 1.8 GHz G5, 2GB RAM, ATi Radeon X800XT
New system: quad 2.66 GHz Xeon, 2GB RAM, NVidia 7300GT
First and foremost... wow. It's really, really quiet. I'm sure part
of the reason is that the 7300GT is fanless, but the G5 was a wind
tunnel compared to the Mac Pro.
Multithreading seems to be really well done with 10.4.7 and the Intel
architecture. Everything I've used so far is a universal binary, and
all actions in the finder, safari, mail, itunes, etc., etc. seem to
tax the processors equally. That is, each of the four bars representing the CPUs seem to go up and down simultaneously, the same amount, instead of one processor maxing out and the others less so. (I read in a MW review that Quicktime Conversion/encoding wasn't mutl-threaded (used one core), but a reader (Charles, in the video biz) sent a note that:
"QT's exporter engine is multithreaded, however, not all of the encoders QT uses are multithreaded. So, you end up having some encodes that use two or four cores, while others only use one.")
Having two superdrives is a nice luxury. For instance, installing
Final Cut Studio Pro 5.1 which comes on 6 discs (4 of them big fat
dual layer discs) is nice because you can stick two in at a time, and
the installer just automatically reads from the next one. Allows you
to walk away and let it do it's thing. I was wondering how apple
would implement the disc ejection system, with two drives. What
they've done is the eject key on the keyboard controls/toggles the
position of the top-most drive, and there is a menu item up by the
volume control with the options "Open Upper Super Drive" and "Open
Lower Super Drive." (This is also seen with the Mirror Drive Door G4 Towers when you have 2 Optical drives installed. BTW - a reader sent a reminder that "Option+Eject" will open the lower drive on MDD's, and should on Mac Pro's also.-Mike)
Of course, these are dynamic, and change to say
"close" if the drive is open. Even nicer, they change to say, for
instance, "Eject 'DVD Studio Pro'" depending on the volume mounted in that drive. Very intuitive. For apps that come on one CD, well, with
two drives, four cores and a fast RAID, why not install two apps
simultaneously? :-)
I've had the chance now to run some legacy applications under
Rosetta, including Adobe CS2. Subjectively speaking, I see literally
no performance difference over my dual 1.8. This could be because of the 44% base clock speed increase moving to 2.66 GHz, and the more efficient processor architecture, but also because multithreading seems so well done, that having other tasks in the background (even finder, window manager, etc.) will effect Photoshop less with four cores than it did with two G5s. I'm sure someone moving from a quad 2.5GHz G5 would have a totally different perspective than I, but moving from a dual 1.8, I can say that Rosetta performance is right on par with the old G5 on a quad 2.66 Xeon. (I'm sending him a PShop action script he can use for timed tests/comparisons.-Mike)
I'll send you some more thoughts (specifically regarding comparison to the G5). I've got to go do some more testing.
(he later wrote)
I ran the OWC PSBench suite, (PSbench 21 filter action script w/o repeated tests/image restores, see notes/link below-Mike) and the results show what I expected
from subjective use. If the bench is similar to real world usage,
then a Quad 2.66 Xeon is about equivalent to a Dual 1.8 G5. I ran the
test on a brand new CS2 installation on brand new and updated 10.4.7
installations (obviously the Mac Pro's install is a later Intel
version). Both were running with 2GB RAM.(Note - he later
wrote the G5 had only 1GB RAM) The Mac Pro was running on
a 250GB SATA/2 drive, and the G5 on a 120GB SATA/1 drive.
Time to complete OWC PSBench action script with Photoshop CS2:
Dual 1.8 G5: 153sec, Mac Pro Quad 2.66 Xeon: 151sec (Rosetta)
(I asked what PShop CS2's Prefs were set as far as
max Memory usage and he wrote with revised results of tests, as previous CS2 Apps users recommended a lot of RAM for Rosetta use.-Mike)
I made a slight mistake. The G5 was actually running with 1GB RAM
installed, not 2GB (long story). I used the Photoshop preferences to
set both machines' copies using only 1GB of available RAM. (Appx 971MB) The
result: two back-to-back tests resulted in the G5 being 4 seconds
faster than the Mac Pro. In my books, that's still equal on a bench
that takes almost three minutes.
Most interestingly to me, their speed differential was not linear
throughout the test. You could see the Mac Pro ahead of the G5, and
then the G5 would catch up and pass, but then slow down on later
tests. I can't remember which filter tests specifically. But in the end the
Mac Pro just edged out the Dual 1.8. To me, this is excellent. The
Dual 1.8 G5 is no slouch at Photoshop, and I have never found it
laggy or inordinately slow. Nice to know my Mac Pro will equal my
past experience until CS3 is out and universal next year. Obviously,
people using Dual 2.0 G5s and higher will experience degradation in
performance for now.
Also of interest:
Opening Photoshop (CS2) for the first time after reboot:
Dual 1.8 G5: 13sec, Mac Pro Quad 2.66 Xeon: 17sec
Opening Photoshop (CS2) for the second time after reboot:
Dual 1.8 G5: 5sec, Mac Pro Quad 2.66 Xeon: 9sec
And finally of interest. I had Activity monitor open on both
machines, just the CPU monitor showing, to see what was going on.
Amazingly, all four cores were maxed out on the Mac Pro at many times
during the test. I didn't expect this. Isn't Photoshop only dual core
aware? I seem to recall benchmarks where the Quad 2.5 was the same as
a Dual 2.5 G5. I have also noticed running other Rosetta apps, that
all four cores seem to be active. Perhaps Rosetta is able to thread
the operation of legacy PPC apps to all cores? Interesting, if true,
but also scary that it takes 4x2.66 GHz to translate PPC code as fast
as 2x1.8 GHz native.
-Vader"
Emulators typically take a big performance hit, but at least you're not running significantly slower than with your previous G5 dual 1.8GHz system. Increasing memory prefs setting may help with Rosetta/CS2 performance.
BTW: Jamie at OWC sent a note you can download the revised action script based on PSbench at this page.
