In article <3ef7eaf1$1@news.povray.org> , "Ray Gardener" 
<ray### [at] daylongraphicscom> wrote:

> I was wondering if anyone had or is planning
> to collect MacPOV benchmarks on the new PowerMac G5.
> Apparently the floating-point performance is exceptional.

The systems ship in August, and that doesn't mean the compilers used to
benchmark it are available on Macs.  To be precise, to benchmark its Power
processors (and the PowerPC 970 processor is just a stripped down Power4
with a SIMD extension), IBM always uses IBM C for AIX, and
IBM VisualAge C++ Professional for AIX, benchmarking on, well AIX as you can
for example see on the SPEC results page:
<http://www.spec.org/cpu2000/results/res2002q4/cpu2000-20021111-01822.html>

And the only other currently available compiler support it, which is gcc, is
unfortunately, substandard as far as optimisations for non-x86 targets, and
Power(PC)) processors in particular, are concerned.  The only compiler
generating code with reasonable performance for Mac OS is Metrowerks
CodeWarrior, and it usually takes Metrowerks a few month before optimisation
for a specific processor is supported.

So it will take until the end of the year to get really serious benchmark
results.  Nevertheless, POV-Ray performance does tend to be well in line
with SPEC benchmark predictions, so good performance is to be expected.

Of course, *if* Motorola should feel insulted, they *could* order Metrowerks
not to provide a PowerPC 970 optimisation options.  Also I do *not* think
they would, given the turf wars that have crippled Motorola's semiconductor
products sector in the past decade (and before), nothing is impossible.  For
example, they are still holding back source code for their old, but still
fast, optimized floating-point C library routines that shipped with the
first PowerMac development tools (in compiled form only).  So nobody has
been able to retarget that library for later generations of PowerPC
processors with longer pipelines and different instruction scheduling
requirements :-(

    Thorsten

____________________________________________________
Thorsten Froehlich
e-mail: mac### [at] povrayorg

I am a member of the POV-Ray Team.
Visit POV-Ray on the web: http://mac.povray.org

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