NASA Benchmarks Power Mac G5

Derek Kent writes: NASA recently benchmarked Apple’s dual 2GHz Power Mac G5 at its Langley Research Center in Virginia. The main purpose of the tests was to compare the G5 to the G4 for “computational fluid dynamics applications” however they also compare it to the Pentium 4.

The test was well documented and concludes that “the G5 has about 22% better scala r floating point performance per clock cycle than the G4 systems tested and 32% better floating point performance per clock cycle than the P4 systems tested.”

Even more interesting is that NASA’s benchmarks come close to mirroring Apple/Veritest’s results for SPECfp_rate_base2000. Apple’s benchmark lists the dual 2GHz G5 as having a 194.5% performance advantage over a 3GHz Pentium 4.

NASA’s study found the Dual 2GHz Power Mac G5 to score 498 MFLOPS for their Jet3D performance. A P4 running at 2.66GHz scored 255 MFLOPS: a 195.3% performance advantage for the G5 in this test. The performance advantage can be expected to change only slightly against a 3GHz P4 as NASA expects a 20% increase in performance for the G5 would be reasonable “when G5-aware compiler tools become available.”