All systems were running Mac OS X 10.4.3 with 512MB of RAM, with processor performance set to Highest in the Energy Saver preference pane. Adobe Photoshop, Cinema 4D XL, iMovie, and iTunes scores are in minutes:seconds. Scores are relative to those of a 1.25GHz Mac mini, which is assigned a score of 100. If you give just a quick glance at the Macworld Lab benchmark results for the Quad, you might wonder what the fuss is all about-on the Speedmark test suite, the new system barely managed to edge out the previous Mac performance champ, theĢ.7GHz dual-processor model, and considering that the Quad has twice as much raw processing power as its single-chip, dual-core siblings, its lead over them is surprisingly modest.īest results in bold. The Quad, like its single-processor dual-core siblings, uses 533MHz DDR2 (double data rate two), also known as PC2-4200, memory, compared with the 400MHz DDR chips in the previous models. And when they do, a faster memory system should ensure that the bus gets loaded in a hurry. But the new chips’ expanded L2 caches help to compensate: with more information already on hand in the cache, the cores don’t need to turn to the bus as often. One technical tradeoff in the system’s design: in previous Power Mac G5s, each CPU had its own frontside bus to transport data and instructions to and from memory, while in the new models, the two cores in each chip have to share a bus. Just as Mac OS X divides chores between the two CPUs in older dual-processor Power Macs and between the two processing engines in the new single-chip, dual-core G5 systems, all four engines in the Quad can share the load. (Dedicated collectors of Mac minutiae may recall, however, that onetime clone-maker DayStar Digital marketedĪ system with four PowerPC 604e chips, at speeds ranging up to 233MHz, for a few months in 1997.) With two dual-core processors, the Quad has-as its name is intended to suggest-the equivalent of four standard G5 chips, twice as many as any previous Apple system. , use similar dual-core CPUs, but those systems have only one chip apiece. Announced alongside the Quad, the 2.0GHz dual-core Power Mac G5
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