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 -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]