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Thursday, August 15, 2002
21:43 - Well, maybe...
http://www.macnn.com/news.php?id=15928&startNumber=30

(top) link
Posters on MaCNN are responding to the Bare Feats benchmarks by noticing that the four tests that were performed were largely pure CPU-speed tests, which would not have shown an increase in the new machines with the same speed CPU anyway.

Unfortunately, the 4 tests that he did aren't going to show an increase in performance due to the newer bus/memory at all.

PS7 MP Action File: This one is probably memory/cpu intensive, and so will only show raw bandwidth between CPU and RAM, which we know hasn't changed (since the bus from the controller to the CPU hasn't gotten significantly faster compared to the bus between the controller and RAM). Since it only involves those two components, I wouldn't expect any speed gains without a CPU speed increase.

Bryce 5 Render: Same comments as the PS7 test. Since Bryce is doing the rendering and not the video card, it's pure CPU/RAM

iTunes MP3 Convert: Bottleneck is CD-ROM to CPU to HD. Of the 3 only the CPU is actually faster than the system bus.

Altivec Fractal: This is just testing gigaflops. Would you really expect this to change? At all? The CPU hasn't after all...

As someone else said, if you get a test that more evenly balances system performance (like Quartz Extreme, a high power 3D application/game, or a network app) then you'll definately see an improvement, because the controller can basically talk to TWO devices that want to access memory at a time. non-DDR machines can't do that. None of the barefeats tests seemed to put that to it's fullest either.

And:

DMA tasks will be significantly faster. I bet your Quake 3 frame rates will be 1.5 times what they were! Also, look at how OS 10.2 uses video acceleration. Those kinds of operations will be much faster than before.

So, some more testing would appear to be in order here-- like a simple Quake fps test.

Still, this means the kinds of things they did test-- which aren't trivial in their real-world significance-- won't be faster than in the older machine. But at least it might mean there's some benefit to the new boxes after all...

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© Brian Tiemann