Found some old benchmark of a 1.8 GHz PPC 970 here:
http://news.povray.org/povray.macintosh/thread/%3C3f94a116$1@news.povray.org%3E/

POV Ray compiled with gcc3.3 as part of fink distribution (no
optimizations):
Parse Time: 6 seconds
Photon Time: 1 minute, 12 seconds
Trace Time: 43 minutes, 18 seconds
Total Time: 44 minutes, 36 seconds

POV Ray compiled with G5 optimizations in gcc3.3
(switches -mcpu=970 -mtune=970 -mpowerpc64 -mpowerpc-gpopt)
Parse Time: 5 seconds
Photon Time: 1 minute, 6 seconds
Trace Time: 46 minutes, 54 seconds
Total Time: 48 minutes, 5 seconds

POV Ray compiled with IBM's xlC V6.0 BETA compiler
(switches -qarch=ppc970 -qtune=ppc970 -qalign=natural -O3)
Parse Time: 6 seconds
Photon Time: 1 minute, 17 seconds
Trace Time: 43 minutes, 56 seconds
Total Time: 45 minutes, 19 seconds


For comparison, here's my Celeron 220 @ 1.2 GHz compiled with icc and the
fastest time I could get:

icc 11.1, -xSSSE3
  Parse Time:    0 hours  0 minutes  1 seconds (1 seconds)
  Photon Time:   0 hours  0 minutes 42 seconds (42 seconds)
  Render Time:   0 hours 29 minutes 34 seconds (1774 seconds)
  Total Time:    0 hours 30 minutes 17 seconds (1817 seconds)

Granted there are several caveats here including:
1) povray 3.5 (PPC 970 test) vs. povray 3.6 (Celeron 220 test)
2) Mac OS X 10.2 vs. Debian 6.0
3) gcc/ibm compiler vs. icc.

From my own tests, the speed difference between povray 3.5 and 3.6 is rather
negligible. However, povray is consistently, but slightly, slower (~3.7%) on Mac
OS X vs. Debian (tested on my dual-boot iBook with PPC 750 @ 700 MHz).

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