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Thursday, July 10, 2003
Ng: Reading fine print on Apple’s ‘fastest’ computer
By Wilson Ng
Wired Desktop
NUMBERS LIE. After so many years in business, I have learned to take statistics with a grain of salt. As many people say cynically, there are lies and there are statistics.
I can still remember a joke about a politician who said he had taken a poll and the results showed that 95 percent supported his bid for the Senate. What was not revealed was that it was the result of polling his 20 relatives and friends.
There are many more instances when what the figures reveal are striking in what they are trying to hide. This is especially true in the technology business. That is why I was skeptical when a week or so ago, Apple released its new G5 64 bit computer and touted it as the world’s fastest personal computer.
The 64 bit is twice the 32 bit that is almost a standard in personal computers (PC) nowadays. Because of that, they are purportedly twice as fast. But that is not always true, and neither is it revolutionary technology.
The 64 bit processors were already in most alpha servers and workstations as early as 10 years ago. And a few years ago, Intel also released its own Itanium line of 64 bit processors for the server, and pretty soon also for the desktop.
So is the G5 Mac the world’s fastest? Hardly. The Apple machine was compared to a 3 gigahertz Intel Pentium 4 system, and by virtue of its speed in various benchmarks, notably the SPEC2000 CPU benchmarks, it was declared much faster.
According to the test, the SPEC2000 performance of the Mac was more than 800, while that of the Pentium 4 was less. But if you go to www.spec.org, you can easily see many Pentium 4s whose speeds exceed 1200 and even 1400, making them potentially over 50 percent faster than the G5. So how come Intel machines did poorly in the Apple tests?
The fine print will reveal that to have a fair comparison, they loaded the Intel machine with Linux (contending that the Apple operating system is also a variant of Unix). And the benchmark, instead of running on Windows and an optimizing compiler, was compiled by an obscure open source tool. This probably impacted the performance quite a lot.
LOSING SHARE. Apple has always been renowned for its great designs and user friendliness. Sadly, though, it has been losing market share in the last few years, and currently holds less than three percent of the PC market.
It will continue to be known for its innovativeness, but most people in the industry don’t believe it will really score beyond its niche. In fact, many people in the industry are already speculating that the Mac will soon switch to the Intel processor.
Whatever happens, I hope it will regain some market share. It would be great to have some competition as this will benefit consumers.
For instance, since Netscape lost the browser wars a few years ago, Microsoft has also since slowed down on the continued development of Internet Explorer. The great burst in processor speed by Intel was also caused by competition with AMD.
(Wilson welcomes comments at Wilson@esprint.com.)
(July 10, 2003 issue)
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