PPC vs x86 speed/performance comparions?

[Hammer]

downix wrote:

Piru wrote:

If I have a 1.8GHz G5 Mac and a 2.0GHz P4, running the same OS (Say a flavour of Linux), which would yield better performance?

Depends on what you do, but G5 should beat P4 at the same clockrate at many tasks.

The thing is P4 is stoneage x86 technology these days. Take modern core2 cpu .. it runs 1333 fsb (and new ones 1600) and it runs circles around any ppc. Runs cooler, too.

But throw it against an UltraSPARC T2, and it will be crushed in both heat and performance, despite the T2 being half the clock speed.

AMD offers platforms with 780 IGP(with Radeon HD3200 GPU inc. 40 stream FP co-processors), Radeon HD34x0/36x0/38x0 and Phenom/Opteron.

Btw, Fold@Home (GPU2 client) is now available for AMD Radeon HD38x0. My AMD Radeon HD3870 has PPD rate 1746. PS3's CELL has PPD rate 900.

[Hammer]

downix wrote:

Piru wrote:

If I have a 1.8GHz G5 Mac and a 2.0GHz P4, running the same OS (Say a flavour of Linux), which would yield better performance?

Depends on what you do, but G5 should beat P4 at the same clockrate at many tasks.

The thing is P4 is stoneage x86 technology these days. Take modern core2 cpu .. it runs 1333 fsb (and new ones 1600) and it runs circles around any ppc. Runs cooler, too.

But throw it against an UltraSPARC T2, and it will be crushed in both heat and performance, despite the T2 being half the clock speed.

Being out of topic, my AMD Radeon HD3870 (same as AMD FireStream 9170 but with 512MB VRAM) crushes  UltraSPARC T2 in performance.

[Hammer]

Piru wrote:
@dammy

What video cards are you using in the two machines?

What gfxcard has to do with H.264 encoding or renderings?

Any DX10 GPUs from AMD and NVIDIA supports H.264 1080p decoding.

http://www.hothardware.com/articles/ATI_Radeon_HD_2900_XT__R600_Has_Arrived/

AMD's Radeon HDs also supports MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX, WMV9, VC-1, and H.264/AVC encoding and transcoding.

[Hammer]

downix wrote:

bloodline wrote:

Well... err... only as far as I can see... The silverthorn, with its simple in order pipeline... but that is with good reason, i.e. to get a small die and low power consumption so it can compete with the ARM...

Not the Silverthorn, their next-gen Xeons seem to be abandoning the Core-like system and going backwards to P4-style.  I think a bad move from all angles.

Intel Nehalem is still Core 2 based.

Intel is planning for a mix of “fat” X86 and “thin” X86 processor arrays i.e. unlike CELL today, a CELL like CPU with the same ISAs.

According to AMD, DX11 specifies ray tracing.

[Hammer]

downix wrote:

bloodline wrote:

Agafaster wrote:

JJ wrote:
You cant even compare different genrations of the same  processor family by MHZ.  MHZ is the most pointless indicator of chip performace of chips thers is. Unless you are comparing chips of eexactly the same architecture.  Obivously 50mhz 030 is faster than a 25mhz 030.  But you cant compare it against anything else by the MHZ

Although saying that, I do recall a 'rule of thumb' that a PPC of a certain clock could perform around 2x the equivalently clocked contemporary Pentium. I guess that'd be the PIII cf. the G3 though...

No, that would be against the Pentium4 which had very long (22 stage?) pipelines, so that very high clock speeds could be achieved, at the expense of work that could be done per clock cycle. It was a strategy based on the idea that transistor switching speeds would increase dramatically in a short space of time... this did not happen and they have currently topped out at around ~3Ghz.

AMD and Motorola opted for shorter pipelines, which resulted in lower clock speeds but more work gets done per cycle... With the Core2 architecture Intel have adopted the same approach, and brought with them all the good stuff from the P4 (ie great branch predictors and macroop fusion, etc)... (and borrowed all the good ideas of the Athlon64 and the PIII too)...

With the irony being that Intel's next-gen chips are going back to the classic P4 methodology...

Not quite i.e. shorter pipeline and a proper 128bit SIMD units.

[Hammer]

Piru wrote:
@Hattig

assist in encode.

Oh? Got any links to documentation?

http://ati.amd.com/products/radeonhd2900/specs.html

"MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX, WMV9, VC-1, and H.264/AVC encoding and transcoding" - AMD

The new Fold@Home GPU2 client runs on the AMD’s new CAL for R6x0 GPUs.

http://www.crhc.uiuc.edu/IMPACT/ftp/talks/toronto-11-29-2007.pdf
Some NVIDIA CUDA applications i.e. H.264,RC5-72

[Hammer]

Piru wrote:
Ok, the "any modern (current generation) graphics card" referred to decoding only (which I wasn't questioning).

It's still great to see that encoding is getting HW assisted, now, too. Finally some good use for those expensive 3d cards.. ;-)

[EDIT] Hmm tried to google a bit (but failed), got any links to some nice video encoder software that ulitizes the 8800GT for encoding? [/EDIT]

http://www.elementaltechnologies.com/products.php?id=5
http://www.elementaltechnologies.com/news.php?id=9
To quote;
"Elemental Technologies Inc. (ETI), a leading provider of massively parallel video processing software, announced today that its new GPU-accelerated RapiHD™ H.264/AVC Encoder Plug-in for Adobe® Premiere® Pro offers up to 700 percent better performance than conventional CPU-only solutions. Elemental Technologies will demonstrate the RapiHD™ H.264/AVC Encoder Plug–in at the NAB show in Las Vegas this week"