apple has spent many years thinking
different and for the majority of its
existence has gone
far off the beaten path in many types of
microprocessors it is used
while the rest of the industry was
developing on x86 processors
apple was developing on 68k power pc
and now its own in-house brew arm
processor called apple silicon
the apple silicon m1 max are the first
mac since 2006 to not run an x86 cpu
so although less than scientific we
thought it'd be fun to have a drag race
between
apple's latest non x86 mac and the last
non x86 mac apple made i say
less than scientific for a couple of
reasons
firstly we don't have a way to run the
same applications directly on each
system since powerpc
slash intel universal binaries are
32-bit
but you big sur will only run 64-bit
intel
and apple silicon binaries also
we couldn't find a benchmarking tool
that was compiled for power pc
and 64-bit intel to run on each machine
so we used emulators and wine to conduct
most of our tests at least it's the
perfect excuse to run os9 on apple
silicon
lastly we're comparing one of apple's
highest powered
professional towers power mac dual g5
with eight gigabytes ram
to one of their lowest powered portables
macbook air
m1 with 8 gigabytes ram and passive
cooling
we start with a boot time test the
criteria is simple
whichever system boots from a cold start
to a fully loaded os9 environment is the
winner
and even though the g5 trailed behind
with a black screen for a very long time
at the start
it came out the winner
now we fire up mac bench keep in mind
we're not running this the way
it was designed to run which is natively
on g3 era hardware
so although it works there are a couple
of hiccups in our setup
firstly the macbook air gets to a point
in the test where it stops and claims to
be out of disk space
but there's still over five gigabytes on
the virtual disk
weird secondly the power mac complains
that it doesn't have the supplementary
disk
yet proceeds to access the contents of
that disk
after dismissing the error it proceeds
through the test
but after the graphical test it will
loop around and start the test from the
beginning
but it doesn't tell you it's doing this
it will just run the test over and over
and over
indefinitely fortunately with both
systems we're able to at least get
past the point that displays the results
we're interested in
so that's a plus the macbook scored 2702
in the processor test
2916 in the floating point test
16947 in the disk test
and 4923 in the graphics test
although the macbook air did complete
the cd-rom test unlike the g5
the disc had to be ripped and mounted as
an image which renders the test
less than meaningful the powermax scored
4850 in the processor test
5429 in the floating point test
five thousand two hundred and fifty
seven in the disk test and
six thousand and fourteen in the
graphics test
so while we declare the power mac the
winner with from the raw results
macbook was running os9 inside
sheepshaver
which obviously netted an enormous
performance penalty
sheepshaver does not even natively
support apple silicon
so we were emulating powerpc with intel
instructions
then translating them to apple silicon
through rosetta 2.
also this particular power mac is
currently fitted with the factory
dual 8 gigabyte rotational drives in
striped raid 0.
although this was fast back in the day
there's still no match for apple silicon
ssds
even taking into account macbook's
performance penalty running through
emulation
now on to the rar extraction test we
compiled the linux iso
into rar using the highest possible
compression on a pc
with winrar next we proceeded to use the
unarchiver
to unpack the file on both systems the
powermac g5 using a native universal
binary
and the macbook air m1 running an intel
64 binary through rosetta 2 translation
this was really no contest the macbook
absolutely
obliterated the power mac at this task
and now for our final test halo combat
evolved
this test presented some difficulty
while the g5 happily ran the universal
binary for halo
the universal binary was a 32-bit intel
app which meant it couldn't run on big
circles we eventually resorted to the
windows version running on
code weaver's crossover but had
also issues running our retail version
on there
with proper tweaks and adjustments we
were able to eventually get the demo
version
running with proper tools set up no
matter how hard we tried though
we could not get the full version to run
performance was
interesting both systems were set to
1024x760 in windowed mode with all
settings set to high
the pre-game sequence was incredibly
choppy on the macbook
the color was pretty washed out on the
power mac but that is
most likely to do with our test lg
monitor
the macbook had points where it was
incredibly smooth but this was primarily
during times where there was very little
happening on screen
overall the macbook was borderline
playable at times due to its low
frame rate and the power mac was more
than playable the entire time
in this test the power mac comes out the
winner
so there you have it if you extract rar
files
then buy an m1 apple silicon macbook air
if you use your computer for anything
other than extracting rar files
you should buy a used power mac dual g5
instead
all right well these tests are more than
useless in the real world
but it was a lot of fun to play with
apple silicon machine
as well as the power mac g5
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