switch from x86 to ppc ?

stan_laurel · n00b Joined: 27 Jul 2002 Posts: 71 Location: Germany

Hi!
I am thinking about the effects when i would switch to from x86 to ppc. I have been using x86 PCs for years now and have no experience with MACs. But i am interested in switching and would use mainly linux instead of MacOS X.
Perhaps some of you can help me answer some questions:

When i switch, what will i lose?

1)i heard there are no ppc drivers from nvidia. Will there be some in the near future? Which 3d hardware is supported?

2) what about video playback? Can i playback all major video codecs under gentoo/ppc?

3) file sharing. will edonkey or a clone run on linux ppc ?

4) I am currently using an athlon 1.4 GHz and are thinking about an imac 1 Ghz. Will they have about the same performance? When talking about performance, i am mainly interested in compile times - since i programm a lot in c/c++.

thanks in advance,
stan

Carlos · Posted: Tue Feb 18, 2003 4:56 am Post subject: Re: switch from x86 to ppc ?

Never used PPC myself, but I'm pretty sure about these two answers.

taskara · Posted: Tue Feb 18, 2003 6:29 am Post subject:

the architecture is different.. so some things will be faster, but a majority of things you do would be faster on an athlon 1.5ghz

forget games - well most popular games anyway (unless you buy a mac version and play under mac os x) for two reasons, there are no 3d accelerated drivers for nvidia hardware on ppc, but more importantly the games themselves do not work on ppc architecture.

forget wine or winex or anything to do with it.. forget vmware and win4lin.

I was also going to change.. but I don't think it's worth it.. not for the price, not for what you get.

If you were a ppc programmer, however.. then go for it.
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stan_laurel · n00b Joined: 27 Jul 2002 Posts: 71 Location: Germany

Thanks for your answers!
I wonder why the only people who answer, are people which don't own a mac and never used one !? :wink:

Looks like one really looses many things. But i am still thinking about. Perhaps i should start with an ibook 12", that looks nice to me and is not that expensive.

apropos benchmarking:
I really looked at many benchmarks for now. The mac people seem to prefer photoshop etc benchmarks, where the mac looks rather good. However, i will probably never use photoshop. As told above i will run linux as a programming environment on it (not ppc specific). It was really hard to find a benchmark with compile times in it - but i found one!
It looked not that good for the mac, i don't know any details at the moment and don't have the time to look it up now, but i remember the pentium to finish a compiler job in 33s and the powerpc needed 52s or so. I will provide a link later (if anyone is interested)

I would like to hear more opinions from people who switched or have experience with linuxppc.

stan

Jesu · Posted: Tue Feb 18, 2003 12:59 pm Post subject:

Hi, I've recently picked up an old toilet seat iBook G3 / 366, and OS X was frankly too slow, so I've gentooing it

. I'm finding it a weird experience running linux on ppc. The stuff that works, works as well, and is as advanced, as on x86 - here I'm thinking kernel, X, KDE, etc. But every so often I keep coming across stuff that doesn't work quite right on ppc, where it would on x86. I don't have any concrete examples for you right now, it's just a feeling I get.

There's a lot of good things on linux/ppc though - the pbbuttons and things work great, and look cool, and Xeasyconf is almost worth it on its own. (Ok, maybe a slight exaggeration, but...)

I'm finding it pretty slow at compiling, though - but it's with an old, slow processor, and compared to an athlon. I've been trying out distcc & cross compiling, to enable me to do my compiles for the iBook on the athlon, and with my kernel config I'm getting rough times as follows:

Note that with distcc, it's still doing all the preprocessing on the iBook, and just the actual compiling on the athlon. So, that's pretty darn slow by my reckoning...
I think if you have a look, there's a post on here about compilation on linux/ppc compared to darwin, which wasn't too favourable - that's maybe worth taking a look at.

wrt video playback, MPlayer will play, I think, all of my DivXs, although it's not fast enough for the better quality ones. (Bizarrely, it'll play The Fellowship of the Rings ok, but not Witch Hunter Robin...) Obviously, all of the codecs distributed as source with MPlayer work, but not the x86 binary package they use for real media / quicktime / etc.

So, on the whole, I like it, mainly cos it's pretty, and I can do day to day stuff fine, and I don't want to game on it. They're pretty. Do it! Support the cause!

HTH

Jesu

Hasimir · n00b Joined: 11 Jun 2002 Posts: 8

Basically I can not recommend anybody to switch to the PPC-architecture (if it is not for Mac OS9*).
Contra:
Although the ppc-processor is faster on an equal clockspeed compared to the latest x86, fact is the raw (clock-)speed of the x86 architecture is more or less double. And compiling on an Athlon XP is much more fun than on a G4.
Some applications won't compile (e.g. transfig) or won't work (due to x86 specific code, e.g. quake3).
Pro: If you are going for a Powerbook, enjoy the long time you can work on a single battery (~ 6 hours).
A Powerbook looks much better than a Dell, Compaq or IBM or some SONYs.

* After using OSX for almost a year I have replaced it with OpenBSD, simply because I do not need it and I haven't found any advantages compared to OS9.

stan_laurel · n00b Joined: 27 Jul 2002 Posts: 71 Location: Germany

@JESU:
So it takes over an hour to build kernel & modules on your ibook with 366 Mhz? I didn't expect such a long compile time.
I remember when i had an Pentium 133 Mhz it was about the same time as you report (of course our kernel configuration may differ a lot).
Compiling doesn't seem to be the strength of ppc architecture.

i am a little shocked by your results
:wink:

greets,
stan

OSXrocks · n00b Joined: 17 Feb 2003 Posts: 24

LOL that ibook is a G3 366, a g4 is faster by default, and you have more mhz I suppose.
I don't know how fast compiling will be, but it will be a LOT faster then on that g3 366

stan_laurel · n00b Joined: 27 Jul 2002 Posts: 71 Location: Germany

@OSXrocks
Sure it will be much faster. i was just wondering that the times are comparable to my old P133, since JESUs G3 has 366 Mhz. So i expected the G3/366 to much faster than a P133.

stan

zojas · Posted: Thu Feb 20, 2003 9:27 pm Post subject:

I have a few benchmarks comparing my g3 ibook 700 against my athlon 700. my conclusion is that my g3 is a bit faster for integer (10-15%) but much slower for floating point.

if anyone has more benchmark ideas i'm open to suggestions. I haven't used compiling as a benchmark yet; the backend of gcc will be doing different work on each architecture so i'm not sure how useful that would be.

the g3 has a slower front side bus so i suspect it would get less memory bandwidth which would make it run a bit slower for compiling than the athlon. subjective feel from running gentoo on it for months matches that assumption.

but the reason i have my ibook is for its weight, lack of heat/fans, and battery life, not for its performance. for a portable i think it's plenty fast. I don't understand the people that buy the new pentium 4 laptop/egg friers out these days.

http://www.desertsol.com/~kevin/athlonvppc

tycheung · n00b Joined: 29 Dec 2002 Posts: 43

albeit - OS X 10.2 on an iMac 1 gHz should be really nice. i have an athlon Xp 2100+ nforce2 box with gentoo and an ibook PPC 750fx 800 mHz, and the only real difference in speed that i notice is that OS X's finder windows are a tad bit slower to work with than konqueror's or nautilus. otherwise, everything works solid on the iBook, and things don't stutter under a heavy load like the athlon box. The mac apps, both apple's iApps and 3rd party apps, commercial and share/freeware, tend to be a bit more polished than gentoos. So for day to day things, the mac will probably be a lot more fun to use.

on gentoo/PPC, though i haven't tried installing it so I can't say much for it.

taskara · Posted: Thu Feb 20, 2003 10:30 pm Post subject:

zojas · Posted: Thu Feb 20, 2003 10:38 pm Post subject:

I guess my point is that my 5 month old g3 has ballpark similar performance to my almost 3 year old athlon. which heavily implies that a 5 month old AMD system would completely demolish my g3 in any performance test.

taskara · Posted: Thu Feb 20, 2003 10:42 pm Post subject:

yeah for sure, I wasn't attacking your post, merely pointing out that while they may have been similar 2 yrs ago, now amd has streamed ahead, whereas apple seems to not have improved much..

man I wish apple was UP there.. I would buy one in an instant..

can anyone prove me wrong?
I am just waiting for someone to come along and say, NO the G4 1ghz kicks p4 2 ghz's ass!

but alas.. no one has

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zojas · Posted: Thu Feb 20, 2003 10:52 pm Post subject:

ya, it would be interesting for someone with a new powerbook to run the code on my benchmark page at least. I don't know if that code would exercise the altivec unit, but then again in general you can't always keep altivec busy anyway.

I hope apple switches to that new ibm chip someday as long as they can keep power usage down for laptops.

taskara · Posted: Thu Feb 20, 2003 10:54 pm Post subject:

yeah... but I'd prefer athlon 64 in a notebook! yeaaaaah..

and I think mac os X works well on "slower" mac architecture because it's of thoroughly optimised for it...

tho ghz is not only what makes a cpu fast (as we have seen with the p4 and athlon!)..
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elzbal · Posted: Fri Feb 21, 2003 12:19 am Post subject:

As a long-time Mac and Unix/Linux user, I thought I'd chime in...

There has been some discussion regarding the speed of compilation on x86 and ppc architectures. My $0.02 is as follows:

The PPC is a RISC architecture, and therefore it takes more machine-code instructions to complete certain tasks. The GCC compiler cannot just lay down a single instruction to add 2 memory locations and place the result in a third (as I recall, complex instructions such as this are available on x86, although I don't know how much such instructions are used - this is just an example). It has to issue separate instructions for loading the contents of the first into a register, doing the same for the second, issuing the add instruction, and copying the result back to memory. The benefit of RISC is that each of these instructions take less time due to less complexity in the instruction path - the PPC can complete more instructions per clock cycle than the x86 architecture. However, I can imagine it takes GCC longer to determine the instructions that need to be issued and to order them for best performance.

My $0.02 on Linux/PPC (yes, these are my opinions only and I don't expect everyone to agree):

For me, the benefit of owning a Mac is the MacOS. Let's face it... MacOS X kicks butt. You have a killer GUI and commercial software support right along your bash/tcsh shell and full Unix environment. And the accelerated interface is sweeeet. With MacOS 10.2, native support is added for XWindows (with an optional download). If I want to run Linux (and believe me, I do), I'll get an inexpensive commodity hardware box. I guess what I'm trying to say is that for me, there is not as much benefit to running Linux on PPC when you can run Linux on x86 (a much cheaper architecture for price/performance), but that I value my PPC hardware as a platform for MacOS X.

taskara · Posted: Fri Feb 21, 2003 12:27 am Post subject:

thanks for that.. I appreciate your input.

I also wanted to buy a mac for the video creation advnatage.. digital video and dvd creation etc..
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zhenlin · Veteran Joined: 09 Nov 2002 Posts: 1361

I have a 700MHz G4 iMac here... Perhaps you could direct me in the exact method used to compile the benchmarks? It would be unfair if I used hugely different flags.

taskara · Posted: Fri Feb 21, 2003 9:39 am Post subject:

well what flags do you have ? and specs of your hardware.. ie 512mb ram ? sdram or ddr ?

perhaps time the compile of openoffice ?

or mozilla ?
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zhenlin · Veteran Joined: 09 Nov 2002 Posts: 1361

Some additional benchmarks one might want to use:
PowerPC G4 700MHz LCD iMac vintage Sep 2002
in single-user mode Mac OS X/Darwin [Apple+S when booting OS X]

Jesu · Posted: Fri Feb 21, 2003 12:14 pm Post subject:

Yeah, I gotta admit - MacOS X does rock, but the more I can set up my laptop to be identical to my desktop, the less hassle things are... I ended up with an iBook because it was a cheap laptop, not because it was a mac...
I'm quite sure the gcc backend is doing a different amount of work for ppc - so you're quite right, it's not a really a valid benchmark for the theoretical performance of the ppc platform. But, if you're going to be compiling stuff a lot, and you're going to be using gcc, then it's gotta be taken into account...

Jesu

stan_laurel · n00b Joined: 27 Jul 2002 Posts: 71 Location: Germany

Maybe one could get more comparable results when cross-compiling for a third platform: sparc or something like that.

stan

zhenlin · Veteran Joined: 09 Nov 2002 Posts: 1361

You must be very mistaken. Those benchmarks are floating point benchmarks. Unfortunately I haven't figured out how to force the Mac OS X gcc to spit out Altivec floating point instructions yet.

zojas · Posted: Fri Feb 21, 2003 2:33 pm Post subject: